America Hasn’t Always Been An Empire

Scott Greer argues that America “has always” been an empire.

This would have come as a surprise to most 19th century Americans who saw the American Revolution as a grand experiment in republican government and as a rejection of the British Empire.

This country was built by Anglos whose identity was based on casting off an empire and by refugees from European empires like the Huguenots and Rhineland Germans who fled Louis XIV’s wars and religious persecution, the Irish who were starved out of their island or Germans who came for political, economic and religious reasons after the Napoleonic Wars and the failed Revolutions of 1848. The American founding stock was disproportionately drawn from Europeans who were escaping from empires.

The Early American Republic defined itself against its autocratic imperial neighbors: the British Empire to the north which became the Dominion of Canada in 1867, the French Empire to its west before Louisiana was sold by Napoleon and the Spanish Empire to its south and west. Imperialism has always been part of Canada’s identity or Mexico’s identity. The Europeans who admired their own empires were the ones who stayed behind in the Old World. The American ideal has always been liberty or self government, not conquering other nations, lording over them and holding them in thrall like the British Raj.

Anti-imperialism is in America’s DNA which is why we have always presented ourselves as liberators in even our most absurd wars like the Iraq War. The Monroe Doctrine wasn’t a license for the United States to take imperial possession of weaker Latin American republics and exploit them like European colonies. It was an anti-imperialist policy that declared the Americas were no longer open to European recolonization. The United States had quietly supported the independence of Latin American countries from the Spanish Empire. President James Monroe recognized the independence of Gran Colombia. Simón Bolívar was a patriot who was inspired by the American Revolution, spent time in the United States and some Americans even volunteered to join him and fight in Venezuela’s War of Independence.

Thoughout the 19th century, Americans admired European patriots and freedom fighters like John Mitchel of Ireland, Guiseppe Garibaldi and Guiseppe Mazzini of Italy, Lajos Kossuth of Hungary, Joachim Lelewel of Poland and František Palacký of Bohemia. Kossuth was celebrated in the United States as the George Washington of Hungary and spoke before a joint session of Congress. The Hungarian War of Independence was crushed by the Holy Alliance. We overwhelmingly sympathized with the plucky Greeks when they revolted against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence. When American troops arrived in France during World War I, Colonel Charles E. Stanton uttered the famous phrase, “Lafayette, we are here!” during a ceremony at the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette in Paris. Lafayette and Casimir Pulaski had fought for American independence during the American Revolution.

Isn’t the United States an empire? Yes and no.

We’re an empire that is unusually uncomfortable with the idea of being an empire. We also didn’t start out of this way and turned toward imperialism only after the Spanish-American War. We have never been a traditional European empire in the direction that Trump is leading us in Venezuela.

In the 20th century, the United States under the influence of liberal internationalism, which itself grew out of America’s anti-imperialist heritage, promoted the principle of self determination in Europe after World War I and throughout the world after World War II. We created a liberal world order of nation-states which is represented in the United Nations out of the ruins of the European empires. We are committed by treaty to defending the sovereignty of small states like Iceland, Estonia and Montenegro. We fought the Spanish Empire, the German Empire, the Austrian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Mussolini’s Italian Empire, the Japanese Empire and the Cold War against the Soviet Empire. We liquidated the British Empire, Dutch Empire and French Empire. Americans have always cheered on rebels against empires.

Americans are not an imperial people. There is no American equivalent of Britain’s White Man’s Burden or France’s mission civilisatrace. We granted independence to Cuba and the Philippines. We conquered Mexico, but only kept the sparsely populated Southwest which we settled with our own people and which was majority White until a few decades ago. We conquered North America from Indian tribes, but we also created semi-sovereign, autonomous Indian reservations for them. The idea of dispossessing the Indians entirely struck us as un-American. We gave them casinos. Indians were also classified as independent tribes under the Constitution and didn’t gain American citizenship until the 1920s.

Americans never saw the expansion of the Republic as imperialism. Thomas Jefferson’s “Empire of Liberty” that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific was a federation of republics, not a prescription for colonialism. American institutions were extended across North America by White settlers who replicated themselves and their communities. The District of Maine is not an imperial possession of Massachusetts. It is the equal of Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. Kentucky is not a possession of Virginia. Tennessee is not a province of North Carolina. American expansion in North America was nothing like, say, the Belgian Congo or the conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate and its incorporation into the Colony of Nigeria.

America’s appetite for imperialism was traditionally checked by racial considerations. The “All of Mexico” movement, for example, which would have established an American Empire in which Americans lorded over Mexicans as second class citizens was defeated. Sen. John C. Calhoun put it best:

“[We] have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race the free white race.  To incorporate Mexico, would be the very first instance of the kind of incorporating an Indian race; for more than half of the Mexicans are Indians, and the other is composed chiefly of mixed tribes.  I protest against such a union as that!  Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.  The great misfortunes of Spanish America are to be traced to the fatal error of placing these colored races on an equality with the white race …

Are we to associate with ourselves as equals, companions, and fellow-citizens, the Indians and mixed race of Mexico?  [Mr. President], I would consider such a thing fatal to our institutions….

We make a great mistake, sir, when we suppose that all people are capable of self-government.  We are anxious to force free government on all; and I see that it has been urged in a very respectable quarter, that it is the mission of this country to spread civil and religious liberty over all the world, and especially over this continent.  It is a great mistake.  None but people advanced to a very high state of moral and intellectual improvement are capable, in a civilized state, of maintaining free government …”

The American ideal is self government, not empire.

This is why Americans have always agonized over who should be counted as citizens. We decided not to reduce Mexico to an American colony for racial reasons. We made the same decision when the U.S. Senate rejected Ulysses S. Grant’s treaty with the Dominican Republic. We made the same decision with regards to Cuba in the Platt Amendment after the Spanish-American War. Incorporating Mexico, Cuba or the Dominican Republic into the United States would have contaminated the shire.

America could have always acted like a traditional European empire, but instead our ancestors chose parochial Hobbit-like isolation in the Western hemisphere. President George Washington set the tone by warning Americans to avoid “entangling alliances” with the Great Powers of Europe. President John Quincy Adams urged Americans not to go abroad in search of “monsters to destroy.” This is why we dodged the Napoleonic Wars, the Wars of Independence in Latin America, conflict with the Holy Alliance, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War and all the innumerable wars of the 19th century. We steered clear of the Scramble for Africa. We didn’t colonize the Caribbean or Latin America. As much as we sympathized with the causes of the Hungarians, Greeks, Poles or the Irish, we maintained our neutrality.

The Spanish-American War was the turning point when Americans gradually began to come around to Scott Greer’s way of thinking and even then we got involved because sympathy was running so hot with the Cuban rebels, not the Spanish imperialists. There was a spirited debate about imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. Many great Americans like Mark Twain were bitterly opposed to imperialism and didn’t want to acquire Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico like Theodore Roosevelt. Many others didn’t want to get involved in World War I or World War II. They wanted to put America First.

If Scott Greer wanted to celebrate American imperialism as a success story, there are countless examples he could point to which would illustrate his glorious cause. There are Smedley Buttler’s Banana Wars in Central America. There is World War I and World War II. There is the Philippine-American War. There are the occupations of Haiti. There is the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan, the War in Ukraine. Americans have died in imperial wars all over Eurasia like British soldiers in the Hindu Kush or General Gordon in Khartoum. We have Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Hamburger Hill.

There is nothing glorious about American imperialism. The critics were right. Hawaii was a stepping stone to the Philippines, Guam and the Western Pacific which were stepping stones into China and conflict with Japan in East Asia. Incorporating Hawaii and Puerto Rico into the United States compromised our racial integrity and weakened our national identity. Every imperial war and occupation has brought with it waves of refugees whether from Vietnam, Korea, the Balkans, Iraq or Afghanistan. Destabilizing countries in Latin America and the Caribbean has created migration from Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela.

The American Empire destroyed the Shire and replaced it with a miniature version of the United Nations where every gas station in the most rural parts of the South or Midwest is owned by an Indian or Pakistani who can barely speak English. There is nothing about this worth celebrating.