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Article Excerpt
The United States was born in anticolonial rebellion, but in 1910, its former president exhorted the people of Sudan to submit to British rule forevermore. Theodore Roosevelt, addressing an American Presbyterian mission in Khartoum, declared the Sudanese to "owe a peculiar duty to the Government under which you live--a peculiar duty in the direction of doing your full worth to make the present conditions perpetual" (1910, 3). If independence was an inherent, if eventual, right of peoples the world over, that right was not self-evident to Roosevelt. Twelve years of British rule had, he later explained, achieved "astonishing progress from the most hideous misery to well-being and prosperity"--emphasis on hideous misery. The Mahdis had ruled Sudan cruelly. They slaughtered. They enslaved. On the rest, they imposed their intolerant brand of Islam. Finally, the British expelled the Mahdis, an event that Roosevelt could only cheer. "Independence and self-government in the hands of the Sudanese proved to be much what independence and self-government would have been in a wolf pack," Roosevelt concluded (1910, 164). Imperialism so helped the native Sudanese, and the native Sudanese evinced such paltry capacity to help themselves, that Roosevelt wanted the arrangement to go on forever. What was then called the right to self-government and later the right to self-determination--signifying a teleological belief that imperial subjects deserved at least eventual independence--was not a first-order principle in Roosevelt's thought. (1)
Yet Roosevelt had seemed to honor America's anticolonial heritage a year and a half before. Like British rule in Sudan, American rule in the Philippines was doing the natives unequivocal good, Roosevelt boasted in his last annual message to Congress. That good, however, consisted primarily of preparation for independence. Filipinos were taking "real steps in the direction of self-government." The audience could infer that Roosevelt imputed moral significance to obtaining the consent of imperial subjects in their own governance. Indeed, Roosevelt forecast that Filipinos would be ready for independence "within a generation" (1926, 538-59). It was Roosevelt's first public suggestion of a time horizon and, for him, a short one.
What were Roosevelt's true convictions about self-government? How did theory and practice collide when Roosevelt administered the Philippines during his two terms as president? Like most leaders, Roosevelt had to reconcile the ideas that inspired him and many others with the demands of practical politics. Unlike most leaders, America's twenty-sixth president was intellectually serious. His beliefs, ever fervent, might have produced vexing and hazardous conflicts with political realities. While president of the American Historical Association, he preached that "the greatest historian should also be a great moralist" (quoted in Marks 1979, 92). But just beneath Roosevelt's boisterousness was a deep reserve of caution and a respect for the incrementalism that politics required. He aimed to be and regarded himself as, in his words, "a thoroughly practical man of high ideals who did his best to reduce those ideals to actual practice" (1913, 97). Applying Roosevelt's own standard, this essay first analyzes Roosevelt's philosophy of self-government and then reinterprets his Philippines policy in light of that philosophy. Roosevelt emerges as a reluctant anti-imperialist--an imperialist by desire but an antiimperialist in governance.
In Roosevelt's philosophy of self-government, concern for the consent of the governed, that subject peoples rule themselves, carried no moral weight as long as imperial rule seemed to benefit them more. Roosevelt's animating impulse, from his first public statements, was to extend "civilization" to backward lands. Either civilized settlers should fill and rule empty spaces or imperial powers should uplift native peoples, by instilling a national character that would preserve order and pursue justice. In spreading outward, civilization would also strengthen from within as the imperialists gained in martial vigor and learned to do duties unto others. Such a program needed not to entail the transformation of barbarous lands into self-governing polities. Independence hopefully would result; once uplifted (race permitting), native peoples deserved to govern themselves. In this sense, Roosevelt genuinely desired self-government. But the spread of civilization had intrinsic and fundamental value, exceeding its worth as a possible means to independence.
These convictions stayed consistent throughout Roosevelt's public life. They received clearest expression in his utterances on British rule in Africa in 1910. There, Roosevelt set two preconditions for self-government. Subject peoples had to acquire a virtuous moral character--honest, disinterested, and self-controlled. And they had to prove their fitness to their imperial master, namely by waiting patiently for independence to be conferred. Roosevelt's doctrine prescribed an imperial rule likely to last generations and able to go on forever.
All that was the theory. Practice proved another matter. For although Roosevelt's philosophy was rather ordinary in a transatlantic context, it was extraordinary among Americans. At first wishing to retain the Philippines for several generations at a minimum, President Roosevelt ended up preparing the islands for independence. He created in 1907 a Philippine assembly that shared decision making between American appointees and elected Filipinos, and he left office favoring the relinquishment of the islands within a single generation.
To explain Roosevelt's shift, historians have cited external, strategic motivations, principally a fear of Japanese attack. But deeper than the external concern was a domestic one. Roosevelt came to believe that the United States could not sustain long-term imperialism because of its ideals of self-government and its party system. Future presidents would set the Philippines free or fail to govern for Filipinos' benefit. Already, most Democrats and many Republicans demanded that America immediately promise eventual independence, and Congress refused to lower tariffs on Filipino goods despite Roosevelt's pleadings. Roosevelt did fear a Japanese attack, precisely because he feared America would refuse to fortify the Philippines.
America's abstention from further imperial occupation cannot be explained by American material resources or global norms and practices. Theodore Roosevelt presided over the rise of America to great power status at the turn of the twentieth century. America's ascent coincided with the acceleration of imperial expansion over much of the surface of the earth. Europeans scrambled for Africa and vied for Asia, grabbing territories with unprecedented velocity and overwhelming ferocity. The ranks of the great imperial powers swelled with the advent of their first non-European member, Japan. Some native leaders even invited the imperialists in, preferring an outsider's order to self-made combustion. (2) Amid this intensification of imperialism, America's new president was an imperialist through and through. He saw sentimentalism in the pith-helmeted British. When traditionalist American conservatives looked askance at Roosevelt's unintended elevation to the White House following the assassination of William McKinley, they did so with reason.
Despite nursing imperialist convictions, Roosevelt sensed that he could not hold the Philippines without preparing to give them up. More broadly, he never attempted long-term occupation abroad (see Hill 1927, 210). The United States even shrunk in size during his presidency, losing slightly more land than it acquired. (3) As imperial opportunity crested in the early twentieth century, America did not behave like a forthright imperial power. Roosevelt's devotion to imperialist ideals and his reluctant honoring of anti-imperialist practices therefore speak to a larger story: the American imperial turn that failed to happen. A two-decade occupation of Haiti began in 1915, but it was an exception that illuminates the rule. With the disappointment of Roosevelt's aspirations, imperial occupation remained a great aberration in American foreign relations.
The Spread of Civilization: Roosevelt's Philosophy of Self-Government
Historians have rightly detected differences between Roosevelt's thought on imperialism and his actions as president. Their narratives, however, have simplistically privileged one dimension over the other: Roosevelt was either an intellectually committed imperialist who must have taken imperialistic actions or an anti- or mildly imperialistic actor whose philosophical regard for imperialism must have been low. Richard Collin, for instance, largely attempts to infer Roosevelt's beliefs from his presidential actions. The upshot: "imperialism is a nineteenth-century European buzzword," unbefitting Roosevelt and America (1985, 103). Such a verdict does follow from Roosevelt's presidential conduct. Yet the policies Roosevelt adopted--in the face of competing priorities, conflicting principles, and limited power he did not necessarily prefer for more ideal conditions. Roosevelt's pre- and post-presidential expressions show that he consistently championed imperialism for extending world civilization to new areas.
Most studies of Roosevelt's imperialist thought focus on race and Social Darwinism (Burton 1965; Dyer 1980). David Burton's 1968 study arguably remains the best. In Burton's telling, Roosevelt had a "hesitant and temporary commitment to empire ... typical of his America" (1968, 4-5) that peaked with the Spanish-American War of 1898. To the contrary, Roosevelt's commitment to empire did not waver. That his presidency seems to indicate otherwise may indicate not flagging commitment by Roosevelt but the atypicality of Roosevelt's commitment among Americans. Moreover, in narrating the African tour, Burton omits that Roosevelt pressed the native Sudanese to make British imperial rule "perpetual" and presents Roosevelt as moderate toward Egypt. Burton's Roosevelt, while advocating strong-fisted British rule in the short run, encouraged "nationalistic ambitions" among delighted Egyptians (1968, 183). In truth, Roosevelt condemned any movement toward Egyptian independence, inspiring nationalists' ire.
The following essay seeks to provide a more complex and precise account of Roosevelt's thought on self-government and imperialism before relating his thought to his actions in the Philippines. In particular, it clarifies the moral weight that Roosevelt assigned to obtaining the consent of imperial subjects in their governance and the circumstances under which Roosevelt believed self-rule and independence should be granted. If such considerations have remained murky in most historical narratives, it is partly because Roosevelt as president obscured his prioritization of the extension of imperialism above the attainment of self-government. Roosevelt longed to see civilization spread to uncivilized areas. The benefits that imperial rule could deliver--including moral enlightenment, law and order, liberalism, and economic prosperity--were paramount. Whether a self-governing polity would emerge was secondary. Roosevelt applied these sensibilities consistently, both to imperialism in general and to America's role in the Philippines.
For Law, Order, and Righteousness: Roosevelt's Early Thought
Later interpreters would cast Roosevelt as an adroit analyst and manager of the alignments of powerful states (Beale 1956; Kissinger 1994; Osgood 1953). Yet one of Roosevelt's earliest works adopted the framework of cooperative empires, not rivalrous nation-states. Roosevelt's The Winning of the West, written in the 1880s, began, "During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects and its importance" (1995, 1:1). One important effect was the creation of a special nation, the United States, but another was transnational and common to imperial expansions over "uncivilized" peoples. At one point, Roosevelt stated outright his four-volume narrative's lesson: "Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization, and in the interests of mankind." Roosevelt deemed wars with "savages" to be "the most ultimately righteous of all wars," despite their violence. "The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him," Roosevelt wrote. "American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, New Zealander and Maori--in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundation for the future...
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