"U.S. Imperial Foreign Policy; Its Persistence Since the 1898 Spanish American War," A Dialogue by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker on Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp. Book Review Group, Uplands Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, June 19, 2006. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net


Betty:

Betty: We chose to review Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.


Frank: Why this Warren Zimmermann book?


Betty: Because he explained why U.S. foreign policy became expansionist and imperial during the 1898 Spanish American War, and increasingly so since then.


Frank: Warren Zimmermann's book sheds light not only on why an aggressive U.S. imperialism has persisted since colonial times but also why it was a factor leading to the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks, the 2003 Iraq war, and U.S. unilateral military strikes.


Betty: Zimmermann's book also sheds light on why Muslim extremists hate us; why, by invading Iraq unilaterally, we lost world wide respect.


Frank: Author Warren Zimmerman, born 1935, died 2004, was a Yale graduate, a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, England, a U.S. diplomat for 33 years, including ambassador to war-torn Yugoslavia. He later taught International Diplomacy at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University.


Betty: Zimmermann's title, …The First Great Triumph, is from a letter Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) wrote to his sister Corinne, June 15, 1898, on his way to fight in Cuba: "[This] is a great historical expedition,…I thrill to feel that I am part of it…. If we…succeed…and we shall succeed, we have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement."1


Frank: Theodore Roosevelt, first of Zimmermann's…Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power, is presented as a rising dynamic Republican politician, enthusiastic for U.S. expansion abroad and determined to remake the U.S. from a third rate country to a world power.


Betty: Theodore Roosevelt and other expansionists helped provoke the Spanish American War, which made the U.S. for the first time a colonial power, controlling Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa. More later about Roosevelt.


Frank: The U.S. was expansionist from its beginnings. Examples: The American Revolution was fought to win independence and to acquire all the North American land we could get. We tried to take Canada several times but did not succeed.


Betty: George Washington referred to the U.S. as a "new empire," a "rising empire." He said in 1786: "there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires."2


Frank: Pres. Thomas Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Purchase from France, 1803, and then sent Lewis and Clark to explore (1803-06) the Pacific Northwest. Why? So Americans could settle and develop its resources.


Betty: Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, under Pres. James Monroe, urged the U.S. to buy Florida from Spain (1819). He also helped formulate the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which declared the Western Hemisphere to be a U.S. sphere of influence closed to European exploitation.


Frank: Pres. James K. Polk (1795-1849) wanted the U.S. northwest boundary with Canada set at "54-40 or Fight." With Britain too strong to tackle the U.S. had to settle on the 49th parallel boundary with Canada.


Betty: By urging the Mexican War (1846-48), Pres. James K. Polk added 1.2 million square miles to the U.S.


Frank: Five years later Pres. Millard Fillmore (1800-74) sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) to open trade with Japan in 1853, a case of simple gunboat diplomacy.


Betty: Pres. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War and jailed subversives without trial, both unconstitutional acts. The U.S. was imperial in its discrimination against African Americans, native Americans, Chinese, and other minorities.


Frank: By 1890, after Civil War and Reconstruction, a new generation with boundless energy built roads, canals, railroads, the telegraph, the Atlantic Cable; settled the west; created factories, industries, towns, and cities.


Betty: Immigrant labor poured in. Business boomed. Fortunes were made. U.S. "Manifest Destiny," which took us to the Pacific, seemed unstoppable.


Frank: Also, by 1890, the U.S., by then a major producer of goods and agricultural products, faced European countries who charged high tariffs to protect their industries. Enterprising U.S. farmers and manufacturers were thus pushed economically to seek markets overseas. Bankers and businessmen sought investments and raw materials in new areas abroad.


Betty: The 1890 Census, which showed a major shift in the center of U.S. population, was analyzed by Wisconsin History Professor Frederick Jackson Turner. In his famous 1893 paper, "The Frontier in American History," Prof. Turner said: the American frontier is gone, but frontier characteristics remain: rugged individualism, restless movement, upward striving for business success, profits, and dominance.


Frank: In 1896, two years before the Spanish American War, the same Prof. Turner said prophetically: [The frontier] "energies of expansion will…[continue in] demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries…."3


Betty: Prof. Turner and other expansionists rightly saw that increased overseas trade required stronger naval protection. A stronger U.S. navy needed strategic overseas refueling and refitting bases. Military power to buttress commercial expansion abroad then meant naval power. Enhanced world power then meant colonies, which we did not then have.


Frank: To Prof. Turner's insight that U.S. rugged individualism would expand overseas was added Charles Darwin's (1809-82) evolution theory (1859). U.S. expansionists embraced Darwinian evolution. They saw struggle for survival as natural, saw Anglo Saxon society as superior, saw the U.S. as the fittest nation destined for world leadership.


Betty: The second of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power was U. S. naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914). Mahan's 1890 book on the importance of sea power influenced naval strategists world-wide. He was the father of the modern U.S. Navy.


Frank: Mahan, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate (1859), served on antiquated U.S. Civil War warships. He later irritated navy brass by writing articles urging U.S. Navy improvements. Superiors tried to muzzle Mahan. One called Mahan derisively "a pen and ink sailor."


Betty: Mahan, whose model for a great navy was the British Navy, wanted more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships. He wanted better selected, brighter, well trained, highly skilled naval personnel. Instead of small ships for coastal defense he wanted large battleships for oceanic offense.


Frank: The U.S. Navy, he wrote, must be mobile, flexible, and able to pass quickly from the Atlantic to the Pacific through a central American canal. The U.S. must also have a network of strategically located refueling and refitting stations with deep ports.


Betty: Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce (1827–1917), under whom Mahan once served, established at Newport, R.I., the world's first Naval War College. Mahan eagerly accepted a teaching post there in 1885. He steeped himself in historical studies. At the Naval War College he became acting head and later president.


Frank: Needing a lecturer on the naval history of the War of 1812, Mahan found that Theodore Roosevelt had published in 1882, at age 24, an authoritative book titled The Naval War of 1812. Roosevelt, in his 1887 Naval War College lectures, used the word "war" 62 times. Mahan and Roosevelt bonded. Thereafter, they reinforced each other. Mahan was Roosevelt's strategic advisor. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. President implemented Mahan's ideas.


Betty: Mahan's editor wisely suggested an introductory chapter that tied Mahan's historical themes to then current U.S. Navy shortcomings. Mahan's The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783, published in 1890, along with his later books, won rave reviews by Roosevelt and others, and became required reading in navy departments worldwide.


Frank: Three quotes about Mahan: "The Influence of Sea Power…was Mahan's greatest achievement and probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written."4 …"The Influence of Sea Power was a work of breathtaking range: a history of diplomatic and military strategy, a survey of land as well as sea combat."5 …"[Mahan's book] shaped the imperial policies of Germany and Japan…."6


Betty: Mahan's aggressive naval strategy coincided with the insatiable drive for increased U.S. trade abroad.


Frank: Ohio Governor William McKinley said, before his presidency: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products."7


Betty: Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927), a year before the Spanish American War, said: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."8


Frank: Expansionist Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, third of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power, said: "In the interests of our commerce…we should build the [Central American] canal, and for the protection of that canal…we should control [Hawaii]…, Samoa, [and] Cuba…. The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth…."9


Betty: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), son of two patrician Boston families, heir to a shipping fortune, was a Harvard graduate, a Harvard history professor. Roosevelt was his student.


Frank: Henry Cabot Lodge was a U.S. congressman, U.S. senator, and a long-time powerful member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.


Betty: Eight years older and more jingoistic than Roosevelt, Lodge guided Roosevelt's political career right up to the White House.


Frank: During William McKinley's presidency (1897-1901), Lodge, supreme political tactician; Roosevelt, diehard political expansionist; and Mahan, promoter of aggressive naval power—were determined to advance U.S. to world power status. They sparked the Spanish American War. Seeking a pretext for war, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War: "In strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."10


Betty: Five years before the Spanish American War (1893), U.S. owners of Hawaiian sugar plantations, fearing the Hawaiian queen's (Queen Liliuokalani, 1838-1917) liberal reforms and, expecting U.S. annexation, got the U.S. Navy to help dethrone the queen.


Frank: But newly elected anti-expansionist Pres. Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) vetoed annexation. Howard Kinzer's book, Overthrow, published April 2006, tells of this first U.S. effort to destabilize a territory, Hawaii, so that we could annex it.


Betty: Kinzer's new book, Overthrow (2006), in fact describes Hawaii as the first of 14 instances in 110 years when the U.S. militarily or otherwise forced foreign regime change to make them comply with U.S. interests. 11


Frank: Spain in 1898 was weakened by years of guerrilla-led uprisings in Cuba under Jose Martí (1853-95) and in the Philippines under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964). Americans were sympathetic with oppressed Cubans and were angry at Spain's brutality and the resulting deaths. That anger was fanned by sensational U.S. press accounts of Spanish atrocities.


Betty: Pres. McKinley, having seen suffering as a Civil War officer, hoped to avoid war. But a riot in Havana on January 12, 1898, threatened Americans living there. Pres. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba as a show of force.


Frank: On Feb. 15, 1898, an explosion sank the Maine in Havana Bay, killing 268 U.S. sailors.


Betty: A U.S. Navy investigation in March reported that a mine explosion outside the hull sank the Maine. The U.S. jingo press headlined, without proof, that Spanish agents deliberately sunk the Maine.


Frank: Bowing to public pressure, Pres. McKinley asked Congress to declare war on Spain. On April 22, 1898, the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuban ports. Spain on April 24, 1898, and the U.S. the next day declared war. Much later, in 1976, a re-sifting of the evidence showed that the Maine explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion of coal dust—an accident.


Betty: Deliberate or accidental, the Maine explosion was a pretext. The real U.S. motives for the war were: to acquire more territory for more trade, more territory for refueling bases, to assure the U.S. greater status in the world, to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—for the first time--to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans.


Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippine Islands was an afterthought. With the Navy Secretary away, Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt, on Mahan's advice, sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared. Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. The next day, May 1, in a 7-hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.


Betty: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. troops and volunteers, including Roosevelt's Rough Riders, reached Cuba. Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, in a 4-hour sea battle the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet. A month later (Aug. 4, 1898) we took Puerto Rico.


Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead; of these 332 died in battle, the rest from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, 10% in battle, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.12 & 13


Betty: After the war, in the Treaty of Paris (Dec. 10, 1898), Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We acquired Midway Island earlier when we bought Alaska (1867).


Frank: Opponents, uneasy about expansion abroad, argued against the U.S. becoming a colonial power. They opposed our taking distant lands with brown and yellow people they thought incapable of assimilation. Acquiring new colonies, other opponents said, went against U.S. isolationism, against the Monroe Doctrine, and against U.S. principles of self-government.


Betty: By two votes Senator Henry Cabot Lodge barely won Senate approval of the Treaty of Paris, Feb. 6, 1900.


END of Part 1 of 2 Parts. Concluded in Part 2 of 2 Parts. Send comments, corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net