Part 2 of 2 Parts: U.S. Imperial Foreign Policy; Its Persistence Since the 1898 Spanish American War.

Part 2 of 2 Parts: "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.


Frank: As in Iraq in 2003, the U.S. rushed into the Spanish American War without a post war plan. To counter inevitable criticism, indecision, and mistakes, we needed backing from the world's most powerful country, Britain.


Betty: To get British backing, Pres. McKinley chose a rare diplomat, John Hay (1838-1905) as ambassador to Britain (1897-98), fourth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power.


Frank: John Hay, after graduating from Brown University, Providence, R.I., joined his uncle's law firm in Springfield, IL. Next door was lawyer-politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865). Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign manager John Nicolay (1832-1901) had been John Hay's classmate. President Lincoln took John Nicolay and John Hay to Washington, D.C., as his two secretaries. There, John Hay, in 1861 at age 23, found himself living in the White House.


Betty: John Hay read Pres. Lincoln's mail and drafted replies, including Lincoln's famous sympathy letter to Mrs. Bixby on the death of her two sons in the Civil War. He briefed Lincoln on press items, greeted visitors, weeded out job-seekers, and played with Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad. He swapped funny stories with Lincoln and was at the assassinated Lincoln's deathbed. John Hay's Lincoln connection, political skills, literary talent, wit, charm, and easy manner led him to high office.


Frank: Appointed foreign service officer (1865-70), John Hay served in Paris, Vienna, Madrid. He then was New York Tribune editorial writer (1870-74), met and married Clara Stone (Feb. 4, 1874), and moved to her hometown, Cleveland, OH, where investment opportunities made John Hay wealthy.


Betty: Ohio political connections led to John Hay's appointment as assistant secretary of state (1879-81) under Ohio-born Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-93).


Frank: Besides a best selling novel, Hay wrote with John Nicolay the historically important Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 volumes (New York: Century, 1890).


Betty: Pres. McKinley, a good judge of talent, knew that John Hay as U.S. ambassador to Britain (1897-98) could help win Britain's support for the Spanish American War and the territories acquired.


Frank: John Hay did smooth past U.S.-British angers over the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and two serious Civil War differences. The first involved the British ship Trent, in which the U.S. was in the wrong. On Nov. 8, 1861, a U.S. warship captain illegally stopped the Trent and forcibly removed and imprisoned four Confederates seeking arms and aid abroad.


Betty: Britain's reaction to this illegal U.S. search and seizure was to send 5,000 troops to Canada, in case a U.S.-British war erupted.


Frank: Pres. Lincoln eased the crisis, told his cabinet: one war at a time, gentlemen, disavowed the illegal seizure, released the Confederates (Dec. 1861), thus avoiding a U.S.-British war right in the middle of the U.S. Civil War.


Betty: A second irritant was over the Alabama Claims in which Britain was in the wrong. Without a navy, Confederate agents secretly bought, with British connivance, British made ships, and outfitted them with guns as Confederate war raiders. These raiders (the first was named Alabama) cost many Union lives and much treasure. A Geneva international court made Britain pay the U.S. in 1871-72 a $15.5 million indemnity.


Frank: As U.S. ambassador in London and then as U.S. secretary of state, John Hay got British backing for U.S. rule of Spain's territories. He also negotiated an "Open Door" policy (March 20, 1899) allowing U.S. trade in China without paying a high tariff.


Betty: Hay also ended an 1850 treaty (Clayton-Bulwer Treaty) for joint U.S.-British control of any future central American canal. Instead, the 1901 Hay-Pauncefote Treaty gave the U.S. exclusive control of the proposed canal.


Frank: Incidentally, in 1977, the U.S. returned the Panama Canal to Panama. In the U.S. senate debate over return California's Senator S.I. Hayakawa said facetiously to opponents of return: "We stole [the Panama Canal] fair and square."


Betty: The Anglo-American alliance John Hay forged, which still exists, tipped the balance toward our late but crucial entrance into World Wars I and II. The alliance, which helped us win the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War, still exists in the current (2003+) Iraq War. U.S. patriots say the U.S.-British alliance helped keep the free world free.


Frank: Author Warren Zimmermann described John Hay this way: "As a Secretary of State [he] knew both the world and his own country. He presided over a period of [U.S.] expansion with modesty, civility, and a self-deprecating humor…."15


Betty: At first, the U.S. Army administered Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. But Pres. McKinley wanted to replace Army rule with civilian administrators. He sought a Secretary of War who would supervise civil administrators good at nation building, good at leading colonial people toward self rule.


Frank: John Hay recommended Elihu Root (1845-1937), fifth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Elihu Root proved ideal at nation-building and at finding legal solutions to difficult international problems.


Betty: McKinley in the White House phoned Elihu Root in New York City. McKinley said to Root: I want you to be Secretary of War. Root replied: Mr. President, I don't know anything about war or the Army. I have no experience with government. McKinley said: You're a smart lawyer and you will be the first person in U.S. history charged with running colonies. I want a pragmatic problem solver, a lawyer like you.


Frank: Elihu Root served Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt as Secretary of War (1899-1904). He then succeeded John Hay as Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt (1905-09). He was also a one-term U.S. senator. Root was our then leading international lawyer.


Betty: Born in Clinton, New York, home of Hamilton College, Elihu Root graduated from Hamilton College (1864) and from New York University Law School (1867). In his twenties Root was a highly regarded corporation lawyer, by his thirties his law practice had made him rich, and in his forties one of most sought–after trial lawyers in the country.16


Frank: William Howard Taft (1857-1930), before he became U.S. president, was our first civil administrator to the Philippines. Here is how Elihu Root instructed William Howard Taft: "…the government… you are establishing is [not] designed for our satisfaction…but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands, and the measures [you] adopt… should…conform to their customs, their habits,…their prejudices." 17 & 18


Betty: While Elihu Root served U.S. interests, he also helped make Cuba conditionally independent (May 20, 1902). In Puerto Rico he preserved Spanish civil law, used locally generated revenues locally, and obtained large U.S. grants for schools. After Filipino nationalists fought the U.S. takeover bitterly for three years (with atrocities on both sides), Root and Taft began land reform, built roads and schools, helped the Philippines attain the highest literacy rate in Asia and install the first elected legislature in Asia.


Frank: Elihu Root founded two still active fact finding think tanks: the Council on Foreign Relations and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He inspired the Central American Court of Justice. His efforts led to the International Court of Justice in the Hague (since 1945).


Betty: Elihu Root served on many international committees and courts. He won the Nobel Peace Prize (1912) for his tireless effort to establish compulsory international arbitration.19 &20 Root died in 1937 at age 92.


Frank: Theodore Roosevelt also won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier in 1905 for helping end the Russo-Japanese War. Young, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt gave us a powerful navy and he stiffened a wavering Pres. McKinley. Roosevelt died of heart failure in 1919 at age 61.


Betty: Alfred Thayer Mahan, the once maligned "pen and ink" sailor, was vindicated as the grand naval strategist. He was later showered with honorary degrees in England and the U.S. Mahan died in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, when air power began to supplement sea power.


Frank: John Hay, bright, witty, noted writer, political administrator, died at age 67 in 1905, having forged a lasting U.S.-British alliance.


Betty: Henry Cabot Lodge, supreme Republican expansionist senator, died in 1924. John Hay's diplomacy and Elihu Root's governance were essential to post Spanish American War stability and eventual self rule.


Frank: The U.S. was as ruthless as any European power in grabbing colonies but it did better as a colonial administrator. Cuba became independent in 1902 as stated, although under conditions that assured U.S. bests interests. Philippine independence was delayed until 1946, after World War II. Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state (Aug. 21, 1959). Most Puerto Ricans are still divided over possible U.S. statehood. They want to remain a commonwealth because as such they pay no U.S. income tax.


Betty: The U.S. profited, but it also built roads, schools, improved health, and advanced the economies of its former colonies. 21 The bee fertilized the flowers it robbed. Frank, restate Zimmermann's main themes.


Frank: To recap: When post-Civil War U.S. internal expansion reached the Pacific, that expansionist thrust shifted overseas toward wider world trade. To lead in world trade meant we had to reach for world power. To be a world power required naval power and strategic bases. Spain, weak, oppressive, with key bases, was ripe for plucking. We had the motive, drive, navy, and the crucial five Americans in key positions who made the U.S. a world power.


Betty: Two dates underscore U.S. transition from a third rate country to world power status. First: In 1891 Capt. Mahan estimated that the U.S. Navy was too weak to defeat the navy of Chile. A dozen years later, in mid-1907, amid vast publicity, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, about to leave office, sent the Great White Fleet, 16 first class U.S. warships, around the world, with stops at major world ports.


Frank: This Great White Fleet arrived at Hampton Roads, Va., Feb. 1909, greeted by Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, U.S. dignitaries, navy bands, and resounding cheers. In his last act as president Roosevelt showed the world that the U.S. was a first class nation with a first class navy and had arrived on the world stage.22


Betty: Zimmermann believed that U.S. imperialism lasted nearly 100 years, 1898 to the end of the Cold War, 1991. He wrote that since 1991 we have been in transition to a new age, as yet unformed and undefined.


Frank: Regarding a new age, notice the title of Johns Hopkins foreign policy Professor Michael Mandelbaum's new 2006 book: The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century.


Betty: If a world policeman is inevitable, wrote author Mandelbaum, then European leaders prefer it to be the U.S. Why? Because U.S. world hegemony is and has been more helpful than harmful, relatively benign, and preferable to dominance by Russia, Germany, France, or any other country.


Frank: Advocates of U.S. imperialism say that by leading a willing winning coalition of democracies the U.S. kept the free world free in defeating imperial Germany in World War I, Hitler Nazism in World War II, USSR Communism in the Cold War (1945-1991), and in defeating Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War.


Betty: two changes have made recent U.S. foreign policy more aggressively imperialistic. One change is skyrocketing political campaign costs. Big money by big corporations force U.S. presidents and Congress to favor their corporate business over humane concerns at home and abroad.


Frank: You mean corporate power from the military-industrial complex which Pres. Eisenhower warned against 50 years ago?


Betty: Yes. Corporate lobbyists and their "gifts" influence policy at home and abroad, a policy determined to control oil.


Frank: A second change, since foreign policy favors the rich, is that the growing U.S. divide between rich and poor strengthens aggressive imperialism. The rising rich-poor divide has been accelerated by longtime deliberate under funding by conservatives of federal socio-economic programs for the poorest Americans.


Betty: Tax breaks for the rich while reducing programs for the poor was initially the George W. Bush administration's main objective. Then came the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks. That catastrophe transformed President Bush, gave him a messianic mission.


Frank: He saw his future fame as David slaying terrorist Goliaths. Controlling Congress and the courts, backed by the religious right, his administration authorized unilateral military strikes, overrode checks and balances, invaded Iraq, and imposing democracy in Iraq as a middle east model.


Betty: Mounting disenchantment (mid-2006) with the costly ongoing Iraq War, deaths, torture, and loss of U.S. prestige abroad have reduced the president's approval rating to the low 30s. Did Warren Zimmermann, who died in 2004, say anything specifically about Iraq?


Frank: Yes. He said, prophetically, June 14, 2002, nine months before the U.S. invaded Iraq: "…there is more…danger to us by a military invasion of Iraq than if we dealt with [Saddam Hussein] in some other way…. [An invasion of Iraq will]…generate more terrorism in the Middle East…. [E]ven if we win…[and]…install the government of our choice, we will have to run [Iraq] for a long time because of…unsettled ethnic problems there. So Iraq becomes…an American protectorate…that will…generate among young [Muslims] everywhere greater anti-Americanism and terrorism."23


Betty: We chose Warren Zimmermann's book to understand why the U.S. is in crisis. We close with historian Howard Zinn question asked in April 2006: why were so many Americans so easily and so long misled by the current Administration? Historians Zinn's answer: we are unable to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. "We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."


Frank: Zinn also explained that we teach politicized U.S. history. We teach that Pres. Polk went to war against Mexico because Mexicans shed American blood on American soil. Truth: we fought Mexico because Pres. Polk and the slave owning aristocracy wanted half of Mexico as U.S. slave states. We teach that Pres. McKinley invaded Cuba and the Philippines to free them from Spanish brutality. Truth: We invaded Cuba and the Philippines to benefit U.S. business and to gain strategic military locations.24


Betty: Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz reported a 2004 survey of 415 historians: 81% voted the George W. Bush administration a failure, 12% voted him the worst U.S. president, and 3/4 of negative voters said he was as bad as or worse than our two worst presidents, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan. If that survey were done today, Wilentz added, a higher proportion of historians would vote Bush our worst president.25


Frank: Betty, how do we get out of our present crisis?


Betty: We elect wiser leaders who will renew coalition with world leaders, use international agencies and arbitration, end the Iraq war fairly, and build a world community.


Frank: We also need to elect wiser leadership to regain freedom at home, to restore good will abroad. Thank you, audience—and now Jan Landis, for questions.

Used for Background
"Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies," New York Times, December 2, 1914, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0927.html
Avram, Wes., Ed. Anxious About Empire; Theological Essays on the New Global Realities. Grand Rapids, MI, 2004. (13 religious leaders criticize the morality of Pres. George W. Bush's Sept. 2002 post 9-11-2001 "Bush Doctrine" of unilateral preemptive strikes against alleged terrorists anywhere at any time. Book in Pleasant Hill Community Church Library).
Braun, Theodore A. Perspectives on Cuba and Its People. N.Y.: Friendship Press, National Council of Churches, 1999.
Byrd, Robert C. Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Morris, Richard B., Ed. Encyclopedia of American History. N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1953.

End of part 2 of 2 Parts. End of Manscript. Correctiions, comments to: bfparker@frontiernet.net