The American empire is now in retreat as a result of internal and external pressures. These will be examined in the next three chapters, but first it is necessary to acknowledge the role that anti-imperialism in the United States itself has played since the formation of the republic. This anti-imperialist tradition, going back nearly 250 years, provides a rich seam that modern opponents of American empire mine with increasing frequency.
It is now widely accepted that the War of Independence was fought against the British Empire but not generally against the idea of empire itself.1 Yet the citizens of the new nation were keen to avoid a situation where the republic would reproduce those features that had led Great Britain to act in a supposedly tyrannical fashion toward its former colonies. And some of them saw in the US Constitution, adopted in 1787, a dangerous trend toward a tyrannical empire that they were quick to denounce.
These citizens recognized the flaws in the Articles of Confederation but considered the new Constitution a step too far. They never called themselves anti-imperialists, but those who followed in their footsteps were often opposed to territorial expansion for a variety of reasons. They can therefore be described as anti-expansionists. As a result, they represent the first strand in American anti-imperialism—that is, those who opposed the construction and consolidation of the territorial empire.
After the First World War, anti-expansionism became less relevant, as the imperial project was no longer about the acquisition of territory. By then, however, anti-imperialism was increasingly associated with isolationism, which—like anti-expansionism—has also had a long tradition in US history. Indeed, it can trace its origins to George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796, if not before, and to the subsequent pronouncements of many of the Founding Fathers.
Not all isolationists were anti-imperialists, since isolationism can easily be used as a cover for unilateralism. And, just like anti-expansionists, not all isolationists have been consistent in either their words or deeds. Yet some were anti-imperialists, and the tradition has lived on, so that neo-isolationism is still an important strand in US politics. Indeed, in the primary season for presidential elections it is very rare indeed not to find at least one neo-isolationist and anti-imperialist candidate.
Currently in the United States the armed forces are granted a degree of respect that often puzzles visitors. However, appearances can be deceptive, and antimilitarism has a long history in America that has survived to this day. Even during the War of Independence many citizens were fearful of the implications of a large standing army, and the Federal Constitution tried to put strict limits on the republic’s military ambitions.
These limits were gradually swept away by the executive in the pursuit first of territorial expansion and later of a semiglobal empire, but the antimilitarist tradition lived on among members of Congress, the churches, and civil society. Resistance to conscription was always strong and reached a peak during the Vietnam War when antimilitarism was especially virulent.
Antimilitarism was seen as a grave threat to the semiglobal empire after Vietnam, and enormous efforts were expended in overcoming it. These efforts were largely successful, and antimilitarism almost disappeared after 9/11. However, the tradition soon revived, and it remains an important contributor to US anti-imperialism today.
Anti-expansionists, isolationists, and antimilitarists do not necessarily reject American “exceptionalism”—the doctrine on which US empire ultimately is founded. Indeed, it is fair to say that most of them see no inconsistency between their own views and an acceptance of US exceptionalism. This means, however, that their anti-imperialist credentials are inevitably suspect, since they have not rejected the core imperial tenet.
That cannot be said of the anti-exceptionalists, the fourth and final category of US anti-imperialists, who reject American exceptionalism as a myth and who deny that US history is fundamentally different from that of other nations that have practiced settler colonialism.2 Starting with those Native Americans who had to confront the reality of an expanding empire after independence, anti-exceptionalism has spread to other groups and individuals in society. Indeed, over 80 percent of young people (“millennials”) now deny that the United States is exceptional.
The American empire is now in retreat, and much of this has to do with internal forces. The four strands of anti-imperialism have played a large part in this transformation, and their importance is growing. The imperialist tradition and belief system is still strong, however, implying major conflicts over the next decade or so between the two forces. Yet the direction of travel is clear even if the ride will be bumpy. And the internal pressures are increasingly being joined by external forces, which make it inevitable that the empire will continue to retreat.
The Federal Constitution of 1787 is today considered almost a sacred text, but plenty of Americans opposed its adoption at the time. Not all of these men and women can be considered anti-imperialists, since some of their objections were either parochial, sectional, or had to do with process.3 However, for many of the opponents the great fear was a United States of America whose sheer size would require restrictions on the liberty of its citizens in a manner that undermined the lofty sentiments in the Declaration of Independence.
For these early opponents of territorial expansion, or anti-Federalists as they were known at the time, the writings of the French political philosopher Montesquieu had become an article of faith. Montesquieu had argued in the eighteenth century that a democratic republic needed to be small if it was to remain democratic, for otherwise it would be forced to adopt increasingly tyrannical measures as it became large.
The anti-Federalists were as eloquent as the Federalists they opposed and their oeuvres have been brought together in the Anti-Federalist Papers.4 Writing under pseudonyms such as Cato, Brutus, and Centinel, they campaigned long and hard against what they saw as the imperialist tendencies of an expanding federal state. Centinel, for example, wrote as early as October 1787,
[I]f the united states are to be melted down into one empire, it becomes you to consider, whether such a government, however constructed, would be eligible in so extended a territory; and whether it would be practicable, consistent with freedom? It is the opinion of the greatest writers, that a very extensive country cannot be governed on democratical principles, on any other plan, than a confederation of a number of small republics, possessing all the powers of internal government, but united in the management of their foreign and general concerns. It would not be difficult to prove, that any thing short of despotism, could not bind so great a country under one government; and that whatever plan you might, at the first setting out, establish, it would issue in a despotism.5
Not to be outdone, Cato wrote on the same theme later in the same month and pointedly referred to ancient Greek history in which the generation that had fought the War of Independence was so thoroughly steeped:
[I]n a large [republic], there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation; there are too great deposits to trust in the hands of a single subject, an ambitious person soon becomes sensible that he may be happy, great, and glorious by oppressing his fellow citizens, and that he might raise himself to grandeur, on the ruins of his country. In large republics, the public good is sacrificed to a thousand views, in a small one, the interest of the public is easily perceived, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses have a less extent, and of course are less protected. He also shows you, that the duration of the republic of Sparta was owing to its having continued with the same extent of territory after all its wars; and that the ambition of Athens and Lacedemon to command and direct the union, lost them their liberties, and gave them a monarchy.6
With the ratification of the Constitution and the inauguration of George Washington as president in 1789, the anti-Federalists were defeated. However, their cause was not dead, and they would soon be confronted with a new opportunity to oppose US imperial expansion. This was the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, which threatened to double the territory of the United States and render even more relevant Montesquieu’s warnings about the relationship between a republic’s size and its capacity for democracy.
President Thomas Jefferson (1801–9), in theory a strict constitutionalist, had grave doubts about the legality of the Louisiana Purchase.7 However, he had no doubts at all about the wisdom of imperial expansion and was therefore able to overcome the concerns of his conscience relatively easily. Most of the Senate supported the treaty of cession in 1803 that secured the Louisiana Purchase for the United States, but a significant minority opposed it. They included Roger Griswold from Connecticut, who said, “It is not consistent with the spirit of a republican government that its territory should be exceedingly large, for as you extend your limits you increase the difficulties arising from a want of that similarity of customs, habits, and manners so essential for its support.”8
The opposition in the Senate failed in part because they so clearly represented the sectional interests of New England. Nevertheless, in predicting that territorial expansion on this scale could lead to civil war they made some telling points. These have been summarized by Kevin Gannon as follows, using in many cases the senators’ own words:
A consolidated republic would persevere over time; but rapid and reckless expansion would only endanger the nation. The Louisiana Purchase was the epitome of recklessness. “Now, by adding an unmeasured world beyond that river [the Mississippi], we rush like a comet into infinite space,” worried Fisher Ames. “In our wild career, we may jostle some other world out of its orbit, but we shall, in every event, quench the light of our own.” The “security of our government” would be threatened by such rapid expansion, argued William Plumer. “An extension of the body politic will enfeeble the circulation of its powers & energies in the extreme parts.”9
The Louisiana Purchase was a major setback for the anti-expansionists, but they were far from defeated, as they showed in the War of 1812. Ostensibly fought as a war of self-defense against the British, the War of 1812 was as much—if not more so—about the conquest of Canada and, in the minds of the southern states, Florida as well. Anti-expansionists in Congress were therefore alerted to the danger, and when President James Madison (1809–17) asked for authority to declare war, they were prepared.
Congress approved the war, but not by a large margin. It was 79–49 in the House of Representatives and 19–13 in the Senate. The opposition included almost all Federalists, whose stronghold was New England, where mercantile trade was concentrated, but no less than 25 percent of Madison’s own party (Democratic-Republicans) abstained and some voted against. Nor could the Federalists be dismissed this time as defending purely sectional interests. As Congressman Morris Miller of New York told the governing party, “Let it not be said that we refuse you the means of defense. For that we have always been & we still are ready to pen the treasure of the nation. We will give you millions for defense; but not a cent for the conquest of Canada & not the ninety-ninth part of a cent for the extermination of its inhabitants.”10
The War of 1812 appeared at first to have popular support, which convinced President Madison that he could fight it with a volunteer army. However, the War Department could only secure ten thousand one-year volunteers instead of the fifty thousand authorized by Congress. Madison’s attempts to introduce conscription were then defeated by Congress, forcing the president to draft militia from the individual states.
The anti-expansionists also had some of the press on their side. The leading antiwar newspaper was the Federal Republican and Commercial Gazette, founded in Baltimore by Alexander Contee Hanson, although he had to move the paper to Georgetown, DC, after nearly being beaten to death by a mob in July 1812 for his opposition to the war.
Public opinion would become even more important in the next battle fought by the anti-expansionists: the proposed annexation of Texas. Although the former Mexican state had declared independence in 1836, its citizens had made clear their preference for annexation by the United States. The matter was then debated in Congress, where the petitions of more than 100,000 people—most of them against annexation—were laid on the table. The former president John Quincy Adams, now in the House of Representatives, would lead the charge against annexation, speaking all morning, every morning, from June 16 to July 7, 1838.
Adams carried the day and the proposal to annex Texas was dropped. However, it was only a temporary victory for the anti-expansionists, as the war against Mexico a few years later put annexation (not only of Texas this time) firmly back on the agenda. This time a jingoistic press, driven by talk of “Manifest Destiny,” had a massive influence on public opinion and opposition to expansion was at first largely confined to a small number of brave individuals. They did, however, occupy the high moral ground, and their words have echoed down the years since the war itself.
Abraham Lincoln, first elected to the House of Representatives in late 1846 when opposition to the war was on the rise, is the best known of the anti-expansionists with his “spot” resolutions. Yet Lincoln did not vote against material support for the US troops. It was left to some of his colleagues to capture the increasingly radical mood among the anti-expansionists. Robert Toombs of Georgia, for example, urged Americans to “put a check upon this lust of dominion. We had territory enough, Heaven knew,”11 while Thomas Corwin of Ohio went further telling the Senate “If I were a Mexican, I would tell you, ‘Have you not room in your own country to bury your dead men? If you come into mine we will greet you with bloody hands, and welcome you to hospitable graves.’ ”12
Nor were all sections of the press silenced by the jingoism of Manifest Destiny. The Liberator, edited by the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, expressed its “hope that, if blood has had to flow, that it has been that of the Americans.”13 And correspondents of the Religious Recorder declaimed that “War is unmoral and depraved . . . the army is an unnatural and corrupt organization. . . . Every gazette brings us new lessons on the vanity, vice, and misery of war. . . . if one lives through a battle it is to assist in throwing his companions into a hole—and be—forgot.”14
The Mexican-American War was followed by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853, completing the acquisition of territory that would become known as the Lower Forty-Eight. Yet expansionist tendencies did not end, and would be renewed with vigor as soon as the Civil War was over. This time, however, the target was territory that was either offshore or not contiguous with the continental United States.
The first acquisition was Alaska, purchased from Russia in 1867. It passed without much opposition in the Senate but faced a stiffer test in the House of Representatives that had to vote on the money. Indeed, the purchase became known as Seward’s Folly after Secretary of State William Seward, who had pushed for it. The anti-expansionists in the House of Representatives were led by Cadwalader Washburn, who argued,
First, that at the time the treaty for Alaska was negotiated, not a soul in the whole United States asked for it; second, that it was secretly negotiated, and in a manner to prevent the representatives of the people from being heard; third, that by existing treaties we possess every right that is of any value to us, without the responsibility and never-ending expense of governing a nation of savages; fourth, that the country ceded is absolutely without value; fifth, that it is the right and duty of the House to inquire into the treaty, and to vote or not vote the money, according to its best judgment.15
Seward presented Congress with a fait accompli, and the purchase went ahead with the support of Senator Charles Sumner. However, Sumner was able to establish his anti-expansionist credentials soon afterward by helping to block the purchase of the Danish West Indies from Denmark and by swaying the Senate against the annexation of Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic). His speeches against Dominican annexation made him justifiably famous.16
Sumner was not alone among anti-expansionists in struggling to achieve consistency. Indeed, the widespread acceptance among the nineteenth-century public of US exceptionalism, the Monroe Doctrine, and Manifest Destiny made it almost inevitable that inconsistencies would occur even among the most determined of anti-expansionists.17 At the same time, anti-expansionists needed to justify themselves in different ways, since the antebellum arguments based on the threat to democracy from a large republic no longer had as much salience.
The outbreak of the Spanish-American War in April 1898 gave them the cause they needed. The possibility that the United States would acquire a swath of overseas territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific provided the perfect opportunity for anti-expansionists of all stripes to unite in protest and within months an Anti-Imperialist League (AIL) had been formed with branches all over the country.18 The membership was broadly based and had the support of many newspapers, while women also figured prominently in AIL activities.19 It also included leading figures from the US establishment, one of whom (Carl Schurz) defined his position as follows:
BOX 9.1
JANE ADDAMS (1860–1935)
Jane Addams was the daughter of a Civil War veteran and Illinois state senator who was a friend of Abraham Lincoln. After being educated at Rockford Female Seminary, she developed a passion for social reform. Addams established a home in Chicago (Hull House) “to provide a center for a higher civic and social life; to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises and to investigate and improve the conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago.” She also supported the international peace movement throughout her life, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1931.
The Nobel Committee made reference in its citation to Addams’s numerous struggles for international peace, which included opposition to US entry into the First World War (for which she was expelled from the Daughters of the American Revolution). However, the committee made no mention of her earlier campaign against US imperialism after the Spanish-American War.
Addams joined the Anti-Imperialist League soon after its formation in 1898 and was one of its leading members. In a speech on April 30, 1899, to the Chicago Liberty Meeting, where she was the only woman among eight plenary speakers, she emphasized the threat to democracy from imperialism: “There is a growing conviction among workingmen of all countries that, whatever may be accomplished by a national war . . . , there is one inevitable result—an increased standing army. . . . The men in these armies spend their muscular force in drilling, their mental force in thoughts of warfare. The mere hours of idleness conduce mental and moral deterioration.”
Like many US anti-imperialists, Jane Addams struggled to find an approach that was consistent with her other beliefs. Her passion for social reform, for example, led her to nominate Theodore Roosevelt for the presidency in 1912 as the candidate of the Progressive Party despite the fact that he had been, and remained, a committed imperialist. The search for international peace, however, was her main interest throughout her life. She saw US territorial expansion through this lens and opposed it as a threat to democracy and the American way of life.
I believe that this Republic . . . can endure so long as it remains true to the principles upon which it was founded, but that it will morally decay if it abandons them. I believe that this democracy, the government of, by, and for the people, is not fitted for a colonial policy, which means conquest by force . . . and arbitrary rule over subject populations. I believe that, if it attempts such a policy on a large scale, its inevitable degeneracy will hurt the progress of civilization more than it can possibly further that progress by planting its flag upon foreign soil on which its fundamental principles of government cannot live.20
The AIL failed to block the Treaty of Paris at the end of 1898, which transferred Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to the United States, nor were they able to block the annexation of Hawaii in the same year.21 This did not mark the end of the anti-expansionist campaign. However, the movement increasingly focused only on the Philippines, where the threat of unrestricted entry to the United States by ten million nonwhite people brought out the less principled side of American anti-imperialism.22
The AIL backed the presidential candidacy of William Jennings Bryan in 1900 “on a platform that contained a thoroughly satisfactory anti-imperialist plank dictated by Bryan himself.”23 Bryan’s defeat to William McKinley was therefore a big setback for anti-expansionists. However, the tide soon turned against formal colonial rule and US imperialism began to take a different form. When the national AIL ended in the 1920s, US imperial ambitions were set on global leadership rather than the acquisition of territory. Anti-imperialism therefore had to take a different form.
Anti-expansionism did not entirely die with the shift from a territorial to a semiglobal empire. In order to secure the latter, the US expanded its military bases around the world (to nearly eight hundred as of today), creating an “empire of bases.” The bases are operated under different rules, but all imply some diminution of the sovereignty of the countries where they are located. US opposition to this network of foreign bases, captured in books such as Bases of Empire and Base Nation, has been vocal and enjoys some popular support.24
If the Declaration of Independence became the sacred text of anti-expansionists, the isolationists drew their inspiration from George Washington’s Farewell Address in 1796: “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. . . . It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. . . . Harmony, liberal intercourse with all nations, are recommended by policy, humanity, and interest. But even our commercial policy should hold an equal and impartial hand; neither seeking nor granting exclusive favors or preferences.”25
Washington never used the phrase “avoid entangling alliances,” but others were quick to interpret his speech as meaning just that. Indeed, even before Washington’s address the anti-Federalist Elbridge Gerry had feared that sending diplomatic agents abroad could lead to the “inconveniences of being entangled with European politics, of being the puppets of European Statesmen, of being gradually divested of our virtuous republican principles, of being a divided, influenced and dissipated people.”26 Thomas Jefferson then used his inaugural address in 1801 to assert “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none.”27
The avoidance of entangling alliances has been a constant theme among isolationists. Yet its meaning was, and is, highly ambiguous. For Washington, Jefferson, and the other Founding Fathers it did not rule out unilateralism and empire building across the continent. For them, and many of those that followed in their footsteps, there was no contradiction between isolationism and imperialism.
However, among some anti-imperialists in the United States, isolationism—especially in recent years—has been an important theme. If we define it as “the voluntary abstention by a state from taking part in security-related politics in an area of the international system over which it is capable of exerting control,”28 it becomes easier to understand its relevance. For isolationism in this sense is quintessentially a response to the building of a semiglobal empire rather than a response to territorial expansion across the continent after the War of Independence.
After an initial flurry of interest in the late eighteenth century, therefore, isolationism ceased to be of much relevance until American global leadership became a real possibility. And the first real test was provided by the First World War (1914–18) when the possibility of US entry worried both those concerned about entangling alliances and also those fearful of the introduction of conscription.
In 1916, the same year that Woodrow Wilson based his presidential campaign on the slogan “He kept us out of the war,” one million people signed a petition in favor of an arms embargo against all belligerents in the conflict.29 Wilson’s appeal in April 1917 to a joint session of Congress for a declaration of war was, therefore, something of a shock. No fewer than six senators and fifty representatives voted against, with many others abstaining.
The senators who voted against, together with a few others who joined them later, would become known as the “irreconcilables” in their opposition to the League of Nations when it came up for debate in 1920. Not all senators who voted against the League were anti-imperialists, since many of them simply wanted a League that put no restrictions on US actions abroad. However, the irreconcilables were different. Their isolationist stance was by and large an anti-imperialist one reflecting their fears that the United States would be obliged to police the world or, as Senator Hiram Johnson put it, “pledging our country in various directions, which will require us to keep troops possibly in Togo Land, the Samerian [sic], and even in the Dardanelles.”30
The irreconcilables, or Peace Progressives as they have been called, joined forces with the unilateralists in the Senate to defeat the League of Nations Covenant, but they soon parted company with their imperialist colleagues as the United States staked a claim to global leadership and extended its empire in the Americas. In 1928, for example, Senator John Blaine—an irreconcilable and anti-imperialist—protested in a speech summarized by Robert Johnson that President Calvin Coolidge (1923–29) had warped the Monroe Doctrine, a “doctrine of inherent fairness and justice that the strong must not ride down the weak,” into a dictum that “exalted greed,” which in turn weakened American moral power. Americans, as the “monsters of imperialism,” could no longer denounce French atrocities in North Africa, British policies in India and other colonies, or even Japanese excesses in East Asia (because of “our indefensible extraterritorial policy” in China).31
Despite the best efforts of the irreconcilables, America was not isolationist in the interwar period and established itself as primus inter pares among the world’s global leaders.32 Yet the isolationists could point to some successes in their efforts to avoid entangling alliances. The United States stayed out of the World Court as a result of clever maneuvering by the anti-imperialist group of senators.33 At the same time, isolationists secured the passage of the three Neutrality Acts passed between 1935 and 1937 that were “the very epitome of American isolationism, embracing every conceivable device to protect the country from the dangers to which it had been exposed in 1914–1917.”34
The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 led President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933–45) to campaign against the Neutrality Acts. He succeeded and the arms embargo was lifted by the end of the year. Yet far from marking the end of isolationism, this was the catalyst for the launch of a mass movement known as the America First Committee that was designed to keep the United States out of the war. Although it is best known for its elite members and supporters, including future presidents John F. Kennedy (1961–63) and Gerald R. Ford (1974–77), it enjoyed a large membership of 800,000 in 450 chapters.35
The America First Committee could not survive Pearl Harbor in December 1941, since isolationism now appeared unpatriotic. The committee was therefore dissolved soon afterward. Isolationism then appeared to have ended following US entry into the Second World War, and many commentators inside and outside America were ready to write it off. However, it was merely slumbering and it reemerged again soon after the Second World War.
The empire that the United States built after the war was based in large part on US-controlled organizations. Thus, it was natural that isolationists came to focus on those very same institutions. Only seven senators voted against the United Nations Participation Act in December 1945, but sixteen supported a subsequent amendment by Robert Taft that would have banned the use of atomic weapons. Given that none of them had spoken out against dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, this was a significant change.
The announcement of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 increased the fears of isolationists from both the left and the right that the United States was embarked on an imperial project unlike anything that had gone before. However, the left was soon emasculated by the rise of the Cold War and played little part in the anti-imperialist struggle until the Vietnam War. Its demise was captured by the humiliation of Henry Wallace in the presidential election of 1948, when he won the support of only 2.4 percent of the vote as the candidate of the Progressive Party.36
It therefore fell to the right to carry the isolationist and anti-imperialist torch for a while. A chance to demonstrate their credentials came with the Senate debate in 1949 on NATO, an organization that would clearly involve the United States in entangling alliances with Europe. They failed, but thirteen senators led by Robert Taft voted against the treaty.37 Outside Congress, their views were echoed by the businessman Sterling Morton, who said, “Should our country cross this Rubicon [joining NATO], we will . . . have taken the decisive step toward a complete change in our national way of life . . . and shall have embarked upon a path which can lead only to eventual bankruptcy, eventual dictatorship, and the end of that system of life known as ‘the American Way.’ ”38
The Cold War presented isolationists, or neo-isolationists, as they would now be called, with both opportunities and obstacles. On the one hand, increasing US involvement in overt and covert conflicts allowed them to warn about the dangers of military overreach and imperial hubris. At the same time, the patriotic fervor associated with the conflict against the Soviet Union rendered them liable to the charge at best of being naive and at worst of undermining the state at a moment of existential crisis.
For those on the left neo-isolationism was particularly dangerous, as they ran the risk of being branded as fellow travelers (i.e., sympathetic to communism and the USSR). Even those on the right were reluctant to use the “i” word, which meant that they were increasingly defined by their political opponents who lost no opportunity to pour scorn on them. As the Vietnam War drew toward its end, for example, the historian Walter Laqueur wrote, “Neo-isolationism as a mood, an expression of boredom or revulsion with world politics, is psychologically understandable. But the neo-isolationist creed breaks down once its spokesmen attempt to provide a more or less coherent and ideologically respectable justification. There is no reason to assume that neo-isolationism will make for a more peaceful world or that it will solve any problems at all. If neo-isolationism has a claim to moral superiority, it is roughly speaking that of Pontius Pilate.”39
It was not until the end of the Cold War that neo-isolationists could find an effective voice. As US elites debated the choice of foreign policy strategy for a world in which the Soviet Union no longer existed, neo-isolationism was able to portray itself as a respectable option—and the only anti-imperialist one—among other “grand strategies.” 40
To do so, neo-isolationists had to define their creed rather than allow others to do it for them. One of the first after the Cold War was Eric Nordlinger, whose influential book Isolationism Reconfigured was first published a year after he died: “The strategic vision of historical and contemporary isolationism is one of quiet strength and national autonomy. Its advocates have confidently opted for a strong, self-denying strategy, a purposefully considered choice not to go abroad politically and militarily. . . . In fact, going abroad for these reasons can be depicted as weakness, conceptualized as a loss of autonomy. For we have indeed been much constrained by others, opponents, allies, and clients alike, in bearing sizable costs and risks—from expensive military forces, through support for ethically unpalatable regimes, unto intermittent interventions and wars.” 41
Isolationists had therefore found their voice again, but that did not mean they were popular. Indeed, as late as 2002 only 30 percent were willing to answer in the affirmative when asked if the United States “should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along the best they can on their own.” Yet in one poll in 2013—only a decade later—52 percent agreed with the question, putting neo-isolationists in a majority for the first time since the question was originally asked in 1964.42
This change in social attitudes toward isolationism, and therefore toward US imperialism, has had many causes and is therefore a complex phenomenon. Perhaps that is why neo-isolationism is no longer a view mainly associated with the right and the elderly in US politics. Today it affects the left and the young just as much. Indeed, neo-isolationism today cannot be dismissed as exclusively a right-wing phenomenon in the way that it was for many years (Box 9.2).
The new mood was captured in the 2016 presidential election, where the Democratic and Republican Party each fielded a strong candidate in the primaries that were widely perceived as neo-isolationists. Bernie Sanders (Democrat) and Donald Trump (Republican) may have differed on almost everything else, but they both agreed that the imperial burden carried by the US government and its people had become too great for the country to bear alone. However, while Sanders was a neo-isolationist and therefore an anti-imperialist, Trump—it turned out—was not.43 This became abundantly clear after the Trump administration was formed and he took office as the forty-fifth president.
It might be assumed that the growing popularity of neo-isolationism in the United States had much to do with the rise of the antiglobalization movement. Neo-isolationism, however, is primarily a doctrine of national security, while antiglobalization is about economic policy. Thus, it is possible for the same person to take a different view toward both. Indeed, until recently Americans remained positive about US involvement in the global economy, including participation in free trade agreements, even as they expressed growing skepticism about the projection of US military power overseas.
Today, however, the mood has changed. The antiglobalization movement in the United States, which first came to public notice in the violent protests against the WTO in Seattle in 1999, has become much more mainstream. Only 20 percent of Americans now believe that trade with other countries leads to an increase in jobs, and an even smaller percentage believe that it increases wages.44 Indeed, the leading candidates in the 2016 primary elections all felt obliged—with different degrees of sincerity—to distance themselves from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the flagship trade agreement signed by the administration of President Barack Obama (2009–17).45
The foundations of the US semiglobal empire rested on open foreign markets for US goods and services, freedom of movement for US capital, and the projection of US power around the world in support of these goals. As the Obama presidency came to an end, it had become abundantly clear that the imperial project was losing support among precisely the people who were supposed to benefit from it. Neo-isolationism and antiglobalization had become symptoms of an empire in retreat.
BOX 9.2
PATRICK BUCHANAN (1938–)
Patrick Buchanan is a conservative who is opposed to free trade agreements and is not afraid to call himself a neo-isolationist. Buchanan worked as a speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon (1969–74), where he coined the phrase “the silent majority.” Later he became communications director under President Ronald Reagan (1981–89). On leaving the White House, he was free to develop his own ideas in print and wrote an article in 1990 entitled “America First—and Second, and Third” in which he argued for neo-isolationism but was not yet brave enough to use the word (he called it “disengagement”).
Buchanan challenged George H. W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 1992 and lost, although his level of support in the early primaries was respectable. He ran again in 1996 on an explicitly neo-isolationist and antiglobalization program. He performed well as the “antiestablishment” figure in the first Republican primary contests but ultimately was defeated by the “establishment” candidate Robert Dole. His third attempt at the presidency in 2000, however, was a complete failure.
In 1999 he published a book entitled A Republic, Not an Empire in which he spelled out his neo-isolationist views: “Present U.S. foreign policy, which commits America to go to war for scores of nations in regions where we have never fought before, is unsustainable. As we pile commitment upon commitment in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, and the Persian Gulf, American power continues to contract—a sure formula for foreign policy disaster.”
The book was controversial on many counts, but especially for espousing the view that the United States should not have entered the Second World War. However, it was the end of the Cold War more than anything else that strengthened Buchanan’s neo-isolationist convictions, and in 2013 he wrote, “The roots of the new isolationism are not difficult to discern. There is, first, the end of the Cold War, the liberation of the captive nations of Europe, the dissolution of our great adversary, the Soviet Empire, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. The Cold War, our war, was over. Time to come home.”
The former colonists knew what the British had been able to do with a standing army and most of them were in no mood to replicate the experience. The Founding Fathers were united by rhetoric in their opposition to the republic controlling a large military force, Jefferson as always exceeding all of them with the exuberance of his flowery language: “I am for relying, for internal defence, on our militia solely, till actual invasion, and for such naval force only as may protect our coasts and harbors from such depredations as we have experienced; and not for a standing army in time of peace, which may overawe the public sentiment; nor for a navy, which, by its own expenses and the eternal wars in which it will implicate us, will grind us with public burthens, & sink us under them.” 46 The demands of high office, however, soon imposed splits in this rhetorical unity. The result was a compromise, with the 1787 Constitution giving the executive the right to raise an army, but placing it under civilian control with appropriations authorized by Congress and limited to two years at a time.
These restrictions were not enough for some of the new republic’s leaders. In 1798 Benjamin Rush wanted the War Department to carry the caption “An office for butchering the human species.” 47 When Secretary of War Henry Knox in 1790 asked the Senate for a sixfold increase in the size of the army, William Maclay predicted, “Give Knox his army, and he will soon have a war on his hands.” And when warned about alleged Spanish intrigues among the Southwest Indians, he noted, “New phantoms for the day must be created.” 48
Antimilitarism was so strong that the United States entered the War of 1812 with a small army and navy that was woefully unprepared for the fight with Great Britain. Not surprisingly, therefore, those calling for greater professionalism in the US armed forces gained the upper hand. The United States Military Academy at West Point, first established by President Jefferson in 1802, was overhauled under Colonel Sylvanus Thayer and trained an elite officer corps including future generals Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.
Yet antimilitarism survived, leading to the establishment of the first of many peace societies in 1812 in New York and their merger into the American Peace Society in 1828. It also played a prominent role in the Mexican-American War (1846–48) despite the jingoism of the popular press. Henry David Thoreau, author of Resistance to Civil Government, received lasting fame with his refusal to pay tax in opposition to the war.49 John Hale from New Hampshire caused a sensation in the Senate when he was the only member to oppose a resolution of thanks to Generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott.50 And his colleague, Thomas Corwin, denounced the war in the following words: “I trust we shall abandon the idea, the heathen, barbarian notion, that our true national glory is to be won, or retained, by military prowess or skill, in the art of destroying life.”51
Antimilitarists failed to stop either the War of 1812 or the Mexican-American War. However, they did enjoy much greater success in their opposition to conscription. When Secretary of War James Monroe presented a bill in 1814 to authorize the federal government to draft eighty thousand men, it was mauled in the Senate and defeated in the House of Representatives, where Daniel Webster made one of his most famous speeches: “[W]here is it written in the Constitution. . . . That you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it?”52
Two decades later, when Secretary of War Joel Poinsett tried to introduce conscription, the proposal was also defeated in Congress. The House of Representatives even went so far as to adopt a resolution drafted by Daniel Webster that claimed that the administration’s conscription project “has been so scorched by public rebuke and reprobation, that no man raises his hand or opens his mouth in its favor.”53
Conscription was used by both sides in the Civil War, but it was only militarily important to the South and was not seen as setting a precedent for future wars.54 However, any hopes President Wilson may have had for relying on a volunteer army in the First World War were soon dashed when his administration’s plans for an army of one million men produced only seventy-three thousand volunteers.55
Conscription soon followed but was deeply unpopular on both the left and right of American politics. The left, represented by the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”), were particularly active in opposition to the draft. Indeed, Eugene Debs—the leader of the Socialist Party—was jailed in 1918 for a speech he made in opposition to the draft and had to fight his fifth and final presidential election in 1920 from jail.56
No sooner was the war ended than a stream of pamphlets, articles, and books began to be published alleging profiteering by American munitions companies. The accusations may have been unfair in some cases, but the perception took hold among many members of the US public that their government had been in league with arms manufacturers to push the country into war. And the stories became more lurid with the passage of time, including titles such as Merchants of Death in 1934 and War Is a Racket the following year.57
The Roosevelt administration felt compelled to respond and gave its support for what it hoped would be a limited investigation. However, the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Investigations of the Munitions Committee was given to Gerald Nye, an antimilitarist from North Dakota, who oversaw a devastating critique of the arms industry. The committee, for example, found that “almost without exception, the American munitions companies investigated have at times resorted to such unusual approaches, questionable favors and commissions, and methods of ‘doing the needful’ as to constitute, in effect, a form of bribery of foreign government officials or of their close friends in order to secure business. . . . The Committee finds such practices on the part of any munitions company, domestic or foreign, to be highly unethical, a discredit to American business, and an unavoidable reflection upon those American governmental agencies which have unwittingly aided in the transactions so contaminated.”58
Antiwar sentiment quickly subsided after Pearl Harbor, when antimilitarist Americans were confronted with a choice between antifascism and anti-imperialism. And this time, unlike in the First World War, there would be little opposition to the reintroduction of conscription. Furthermore, the Cold War made it relatively easy for President Harry S. Truman (1945–53) to extend the draft after the Second World War had ended. As a result, it was in place when the Korean War started in June 1950.
Public support for the war was initially high. Even Henry Wallace supported it, arguing in favor of the use of atomic weapons if necessary.59 However, support soon declined. By January 1951, two-thirds of Americans wanted the United States to pull out of Korea altogether, and by the end of the following year a majority had concluded that the war was not worth fighting.60 Indeed, opposition to the war is often cited as one of the reasons for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s victory in the 1952 presidential election, when he promised “to bring the Korean War to an early and honorable end.”
President Eisenhower (1953–61) did end the war, but he did not end conscription. Only a handful of young men had been convicted of “delinquency” in the war years,61 but the continuation of the draft after the war and the inequitable way in which it operated caused deep resentment. As a result, staying on at college became a popular route to deferment, although it was not always successful, as one witty rhyme made clear:
“Today in college
To gain more knowledge
More and more I strive.
A student deferment
Is my preferment
’Til I reach thirty-five.
Has me nervous
They grant but one degree.
Despite my plea
For a Ph.D.
They offer me a P.F.C.” 62
President Kennedy was no more successful than Eisenhower in ending the draft, so that it was still in operation as the United States committed ground troops to Vietnam under President Lyndon Johnson (1963–69) starting in 1965. Conscription was not the only reason for the public displays of antimilitarism in the United States during the Vietnam War, but it was certainly a major factor and it was used by the antiwar organization Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to mobilize unprecedented numbers of Americans.
Starting with a demonstration at the Washington Monument in April 1965 with twenty-five thousand participants,63 the antiwar movement was attracting crowds in excess of one million by the end of the decade.64 Nor could this level of participation be explained purely by self-preservation, since many of those involved were not eligible to be drafted anyway.65 Even the soldiers themselves were involved in these displays of antimilitarism through desertion, demonstrations by veterans, and “fragging.” 66 And one soldier, Keith Franklin, left a letter on the battlefield to be opened only in the event of his death:
Dear Mom and Dad: If you are reading this letter, you will never see me again, the reason being that if you are reading this I have died. The question is whether or not my death has been in vain. The answer is yes. The war that has taken my life and many thousands before me is immoral, unlawful and an atrocity unlike any misfit of good judgement known to man. I had no choice as to my fate. It was predetermined by the war-mongering hypocrites in Washington. As I lie dead, please grant my last request. Help me inform the American people, the silent majority who have not yet voiced their opinions.67
The last US combat troops left Vietnam in August 1972 and President Richard M. Nixon (1969–74) ended conscription the following year. This was seen as a victory for antimilitarism, made all the sweeter by the recommendations of the Church Committee in 1976 to end the illegal operations of the intelligence agencies. However, the antimilitarist movement could not rest on its laurels for long and was soon back in action.
BOX 9.3
J. WILLIAM FULBRIGHT (1905–95)
J. William Fulbright was born in 1905 in Missouri. At the tender age of thirty-four he became president of the University of Arkansas, and he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1942. He was then elected to the Senate in 1944, where he served as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee from 1959 until he lost his seat in 1974.
Nothing in the first part of Fulbright’s long life suggested that he would be anything other than a loyal supporter of the semiglobal empire. A committed southerner who backed segregation, he was a strong believer in US-dominated institutions such as the United Nations and NATO, backed the Marshall Plan, and gave his name to the “soft power” instrument of scholarships known as the Fulbright Exchange Program. He even supported the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 that paved the way for US entry into the Vietnam War. Yet he ended his life as a staunch antimilitarist and opponent of American empire.
The first indication of his future role came in 1954 when he was the only senator to vote against appropriations for Joseph McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He then made clear to President John F. Kennedy (1961–63) his opposition to the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 and publicly denounced the 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic as orchestrated by the administration of President Lyndon Johnson (1963–69).
It was Fulbright’s opposition to the Vietnam War, however, that would establish his anti-imperialist credentials. Speaking to the American Bar Association in 1967 he said, “We are well on our way to becoming a traditional great power, an imperial nation if you will—engaged in the exercise of power for its own sake, exercising it to the limit of our capacity and beyond, filling every vacuum and extending the American ‘presence’ to the farthest reaches of the earth. And, as with the great empires of the past, as the power grows, it is becoming an end itself . . . governed, it would seem, by its own mystique, power without philosophy or purpose.”
The televised hearings of the Foreign Relations Committee under his chairmanship did much to undermine support for the Vietnam War among the American public. The same could be said for some of his books, published with provocative titles, such as Arrogance of Power, The Pentagon Propaganda Machine, and The Crippled Giant.
The reason was the cycle of civil wars that broke out in Central America at the end of the 1970s and which were seen as a direct threat to the semiglobal empire by US administrations. President Jimmy Carter (1977–81) had focused on supporting the military in El Salvador against a guerrilla insurgency, but President Ronald Reagan (1981–89) widened the battlefront to include support for the military in Guatemala as well and to undermine the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
These actions led to the formation of a Central America Peace and Solidarity Movement in the United States that mobilized a mass movement against the proxy wars being fought by the administration. In the case of El Salvador, the lead was taken by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), and their efforts secured a limitation on the amount of military support the administration could give.68
In the case of Nicaragua, the Reagan administration supported the contras, based in Honduras, in their efforts to topple the Sandinistas. Their gruesome human rights record, however, led to a wave of protests and the passage of three amendments through the Senate prohibiting the use of US funds to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. And when the Reagan administration was condemned in the International Court of Justice for mining Nicaragua’s main port, eighty thousand Americans signed a Pledge of Resistance committing themselves to civil disobedience if the United States invaded.69
The antimilitarist movement took other forms as well. A new organization, Veterans for Peace, was formed in 1985 and called for the closure of the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, where many Central American military officers were trained.70 A sanctuary movement was set up to help thousands of refugees from Central America enter the United States illegally. Witness for Peace, founded in 1983, sent US citizens to war zones in Nicaragua who reported on human rights abuses by the contras.
The mobilization against US proxy wars in Central America always had public opinion on its side. In a sense, antimilitarism was pushing on an open door in the 1980s. It was much harder when the public favored military intervention abroad. It was also difficult to shore up public support for antimilitarism once US troops had been committed, as happened after the start of the first Gulf War in 1991.
Antimilitarism therefore looked like a lost cause after 9/11 as the American public overwhelmingly seemed in favor of armed intervention wherever al-Qaeda was located. And yet the opposite turned out to be the case. Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) was formed three days after the terrorist attacks, while United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) was created a year later. Both organizations, formed by broad coalitions, held major demonstrations against the second Gulf War not only before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 but also afterward.71
As the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq turned into quagmires, the American people became more disillusioned than ever with military interventions abroad. Large majorities opposed US troops being sent to Libya, Syria, and Ukraine—all countries where US security interests were heavily engaged after 2010. Even previous military interventions were reevaluated, with a mere 12 percent in 2014 taking pride in US participation against Serbia in the Bosnian War of the 1990s.72
A majority of Americans still regard it as “very important” that the United States “maintain superior military power worldwide,” but the proportion of the population doing so has dropped sharply (from 68 percent in 2002 to 52 in 2014). Furthermore, this objective is now ranked sixth (out of ten) among foreign policy objectives in the eyes of the public (the most important is considered to be “protecting the jobs of American workers”). Antimilitarism has therefore been gaining ground, as is demonstrated by the large majorities that now think the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were “not worthwhile.”73
The belief that America is “exceptional” and therefore destined to play a hegemonic role in world affairs is deeply rooted in American society and goes back to the days of the first colonizers. Until very recently no serious presidential candidate would survive for long if they denied US exceptionalism and presidents often feel compelled to demonstrate their credentials by emphasizing their belief in it.
Even President Obama, whose “exceptionalist” credentials were at first challenged by his political opponents, was not afraid to use the word on numerous occasions. In 2013, for example, he stated in relation to Syria, “[W]hen, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death, and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.”74 And the following year, at the US Military Academy, he proclaimed: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”75
If the notion of exceptionalism is the foundation of American empire, then those who deny that the United States is exceptional are anti-imperialists. The first anti-exceptionalists were, not surprisingly, to be found among the Native Americans who resisted the expansion of the United States after the War of Independence. For the leaders of these nations, the incursions of the Americans—as they were now called—were no different to those of the Spanish, French, or British who had preceded them.
Among the leaders was Handsome Lake, a member of the Seneca tribe, whose apocalyptic vision around 1799 would eventually be recorded. In “How America was Discovered,” Handsome Lake challenges the foundation myth that provides the basis of US exceptionalism. The story relates how the devil welcomes a young man to his home:
“Listen to me, young man, and you will be rich. . . . Across the ocean there is a great country of which you have never heard. The people there are virtuous; they have no evil habits or appetites but are honest and single-minded. A great reward is yours if you enter into my plans and carry them out. Here are five things. Carry them over to the people across the ocean and never shall you want for wealth, position or power. Take these cards, this money, this fiddle, this whiskey and this blood corruption and give them all to the people across the water. . . .” The young man thought this a good bargain and promised to do as the man had commanded him. Soon a great flock of ships came over the ocean and white men came swarming into the country bringing with them cards, money, fiddles, whiskey and blood corruption. . . . Now the man who had appeared in the gold palace was the devil and when afterward he saw what his words had done, he said that he had made a great mistake and even he lamented that his evil had been so enormous.76
Not all Native Americans were anti-exceptionalists and some, such as the Cherokee Elias Boudinot, argued that only through assimilation with the Indians could the white population achieve their vision of the “city upon the hill.”77 Boudinot, however, was murdered in 1839 and it became increasingly difficult to argue that there was a place for Native Americans in US society. They had no automatic right of citizenship until 1924 and official discourse openly referred to their eventual disappearance.
Native Americans, however, did not disappear, and their numbers started to increase in the twentieth century. From a low point of 266,732 in 1900, the figure had reached 377,273 in 1950. In 1960, however, for the first time the Census Bureau allowed respondents to choose their ethnic category, and the number jumped to 551,636. Since then the Native American population has grown exponentially and in 2010 reached 5,220,579 (1.7 percent of the total population). Furthermore, the jump between 2000 and 2010 (26.7 percent) was the fastest increase of all categories in the census.78
The growth in numbers is impressive, and it has gone hand in hand with an increase in political organization. The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) was formed in 1944, the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) in 1961, and the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1968. AIM was heavily involved in the seventy-one–day occupation of the town of Wounded Knee in 1973, an incident that received extensive national coverage thanks in part to the extraordinary success of the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee published three years earlier.79
Ideological disputes over what direction Native Americans should take have weakened the movement’s political impact and have led to organizational splits. These should not, however, obscure the pioneering role that American Indians have played in promoting anti-exceptionalism in the United States. And disputes over insensitive references to Native Americans in sport and education demonstrate that a growing proportion of Americans of all ethnicities are no longer comfortable with the conventional, and exceptionalist, interpretations of an imperial past.80
The first anti-exceptionalists were found among the Native Americans, but they were soon joined by many African Americans. The experience of slavery was utterly inconsistent with the rhetoric of exceptionalism, and the British had tried to exploit this in the War of Independence through Lord Dunmore’s proclamation offering those slaves held by rebels their freedom if they fought on the other side.81
The same tactic was used, this time with more success, by the British in the War of 1812. Admiral Sir George Cockburn recruited a Corps of Colonial Marines from “people of colour” and wrote to his superiors in London that large numbers of escaped slaves could be recruited. He asserted that their participation on the British side was motivated by their desire “to obtain settlements in the British colonies in North America where they will be most useful subjects from their hatred to the citizens of the United States.”82
As more and more blacks won their freedom, African Americans became heavily involved in the campaign to end slavery. The abolitionists—white as well as black—never used the word “anti-exceptionalism,” but their emphasis on the injustice and unfairness of the “peculiar institution” laid bare the contrast between the myth of exceptionalism and the reality of life for the vast majority of African Americans.
This contrast did not end with the Thirteenth Amendment. Nearly twenty-five years after the end of slavery, Frederick Douglass reminded his audience of the unexceptional nature of American history when he declared, “I deny and utterly scout the idea, that there is now, properly speaking, any such thing as a negro problem before the American people. It is not the negro, educated or illiterate, intelligent or ignorant, who is on trial, or whose qualities are giving trouble to the nation. . . . The real question, the all-commanding question, is whether American justice, American liberty, American civilization, American law, and American Christianity can be made to include and protect, alike and forever, all American citizens.”83
Douglass died three years before the start of the Spanish-American War. African Americans mostly opposed this venture into formal colonialism and it might have been natural for them to join the Anti-Imperialist League (AIL) in large numbers. However, AIL was a very white organization and, in addition, some of its members were racists who had only joined because they did not want nonwhite Filipinos to become US citizens.
As a result, African Americans joined other organizations such as the Colored National Anti-Imperialist League or the even more explicitly named National Negro Anti-Expansion, Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Trust and Anti-Lynching League. W. E. B. Du Bois, who would later cofound the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), made the connection between overseas expansion and Jim Crow laws when he asked, “Where in the world may we go and be safe from lying and brute force?”84 Kelly Miller, a mathematics and sociology professor at Howard University, emphasized the parallels between discrimination at home and abroad when he wrote, “Acquiescence on the part of the negro in the political rape upon the Filipino would give ground of justification to the assaults upon his rights at home. The Filipino is at least his equal in capacity for self-government. The negro would show himself unworthy of the rights which he claims should he deny the same to a struggling people under another sky.”85
The anti-exceptionalist discourse in African American struggles continued throughout the twentieth century and beyond. When the Civil Rights Congress (founded in 1946) charged the US government with genocide against African Americans at the United Nations, it was explicitly rejecting American exceptionalism.86 And when Muhammad Ali refused to serve in the US Army during the Vietnam War, he spoke for many when he said,
Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here.87
African American protests against the Vietnam War were closely allied with the civil rights movement in the 1960s. All civil rights leaders were opposed to the war, but the war made it possible to link the protest movement to the domestic struggle for human rights through the language of anti-exceptionalism. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government,”88 while Malcolm X (Box 9.4) linked the black liberation struggle to that of national liberation movements around the world. And Stokely Carmichael argued against conscription on the grounds that it involved “white people sending black people to make war on yellow people in order to defend the land they stole from red people.”89
Anti-exceptionalism among African Americans did not end with desegregation and massive expansion of the black middle class, but it continued to cause controversy among those Americans who believed in the exceptionalist myth. When Jeremiah Wright (pastor to Barack Obama before he became president) gave a sermon in 2003 on God and government, he used anti-exceptionalist language that would not have seemed particularly shocking to his African American audience, but the revelation in 2008 that the future US president had regularly attended the church where the words were uttered made huge waves in the mainstream media.90
The belief in American exceptionalism among the white population was until recently so deep-rooted that previous generations of anti-imperialists would have objected to being labeled anti-exceptionalists. Perhaps a few staunch abolitionists such as John Brown, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Lloyd Garrison might have been willing to wear the label, but Jane Addams (Box 9.1), Patrick Buchanan (Box 9.2), and William Fulbright (Box 9.3) all embraced American exceptionalism despite their anti-imperialism and, indeed, used it as the standard by which to judge US behavior in foreign affairs.
This has now changed. In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey that surprised many, only 15 percent of “millennials” (those born in the early 1980s and later) claimed that the United States was “the greatest country in the world.” For the nation as a whole the figure was higher, but was still at only 28 percent. Indeed, not a single category of those polled voted in a majority in answer to the question.91 Since exceptionalists have always believed that America is the greatest country in the world, the survey indicated by how much support for exceptionalism has fallen in recent years.
BOX 9.4
MALCOLM X (1925–65)
There was nothing in the early life of Malcolm Little to suggest anything remarkable. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1925, he dropped out of high school, engaged in petty crime, and was sentenced to jail in 1946. There, however, he was radicalized, joined Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, and changed his name to Malcolm X.
He worked for the Nation of Islam on leaving prison in 1952 and was very successful in building up its membership. His oratorical powers brought him a large following inside the United States and recognition outside. He came to the attention of a number of foreign leaders, mainly from Africa, who helped him to make the connection between their national liberation movements and what he saw as the anticolonial struggles of African Americans themselves.
This made him an anti-exceptionalist, but he was suspicious at first of the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. and its emphasis on nonviolence. It was not until he broke with the Nation of Islam in 1964 and founded the Organization of Afro-American Unity that he became—with some qualifications—reconciled to the movement’s goals.
Malcolm X was murdered in 1965 and was buried as Al Hajj Malik al-Shabazz. At the time of his death he was still a divisive figure in the black community and reviled by white society. Martin Luther King Jr., on the other hand, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and his assassination in 1968 united the nation in grief.
The passage of time has dramatically softened the perception of Malcolm X. Helped by his autobiography (published shortly after his death) and by Spike Lee’s 1992 biopic, the public was able to see that Malcolm X by the end of his life sought to heal the wounds in American society rather than deepen them.
Today he has become a respected figure, with schools, roads, and hospitals named after him. It is a classic story of redemption, but the transformation in his perception can also be seen as a metaphor for rejection of the exceptionalist myth by so many Americans.
The cornerstone on which US imperialism has been constructed—American exceptionalism—is therefore crumbling and the edifice is being challenged from within the empire. That is why it is possible to say with some confidence that the US empire is in retreat. Why this is so, and how it has come about, is the subject of the next three chapters.