Introduction
This is the second in a series of posts outlining the
history of the US Empire of Liberty since the founding of the first British colony at
Jamestown in 1607. The first was posted on May 6th if you haven’t already read
it. A few days ago, I posted a related piece on the British Empire, which provided
the model on which the Empire of Liberty is based.
My personal experience in the anti-imperialist,
anti-racist movement beginning in the mid-1960s, with my active opposition to
the Vietnam War, and my study of history (both in college and while I taught US
History to high school students in Montgomery County, Maryland) have deepened
my understanding of anti-imperialism and white supremacy and my commitment to
the struggle against both. Although I have witnessed many setbacks in that
struggle, I continued to be buoyed by the credo of FRELIMO, the 1970s national
liberation movement in Mozambique, "A luta continua, vitória é
certa". A better world is possible and we must continue the struggle, “if
not for ourselves, then for our children and our children’s children”.
The US response to the war in Ukraine and the failure of
many progressive forces to understand the role of US imperialism in the
conflict has energized me to write this short history of US imperialism and its
foundation in the paradigm of white supremacy. In previous posts I have raised
the question as to why the horrors of this war are paraded before us as war
crimes, but not those being waged against people of color in the Global South.
The answer, of course, should be obvious, but sometimes you need to state the
obvious.
I have also been motivated by reading two books in the
last few months – Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy by
Stephen Wertheim and Cold War: An International History by Carole Fink. Both
have helped me unmask some of the myths about our history with regard to foreign
policy. And, of course, I owe a great deal to the “dean” of American
historians, Howard Zinn.
I hope you will read the analysis and if it makes sense,
disseminate it broadly. And please take the time to comment and criticize the
posts.
From the Civil War to the Great War
In the period from 1860 until 1914 the Empire of Liberty
expanded from a continental power to a hemispheric power to, by the beginning
of WWI, a world power. It did so by using and frequently despoiling the vast,
resource rich lands it had expropriated from the native populations; by taking
advantage of its easily defended national security behind two great oceans with
only two weak nations on its borders; and by exploiting the non-white/non-Anglo
labor of the newly freed slaves and millions of immigrants from Southern and
Eastern Europe.
Nota bene: While African slaves and their descendants,
and the original inhabitants of the US, have always occupied the lowest rung of
the caste system in the US, non-Anglo immigrants and their descendants occupied
various rungs between white Anglos (those descendants from English settlers,
“who came over on the Mayflower”) and later European immigrants, beginning with
the Irish. Hence the fact that these groups were identified as hyphenated
Americans, making them somewhat less than full Americans. Some historians have
argued that the incorporation of various European immigrants in the racial
category of “white” wasn’t finally completed until WWII. (More on that later.)
The not so civil, Civil War
For a subject that has been studied and debated by thousands
of historians and others from the time the last shot was fired until now, you
would think that there would be more agreement on the causes and consequences
of the war. As a Marxist, I look at economic
contradictions as the basis for political and social conflict. So, I would
argue that the war was a product of the maturation of the contradiction between
two different modes of production, slavery and capitalism. Its resolution would
require a conflict of epic proportions.
That contradiction had been in evidence from day one in
the new nation in conflicts over the slave trade, financial structures (i.e., the
National Bank), admission of new states and protective tariffs to name a few.
In each, temporary compromises were worked out, which held the nation together,
but didn’t resolve the underlying contradiction. Lincoln hit the nail on the
head when he questioned whether the US could endure “half slave and half free”.
The contradiction came to a head over the issue of
expansion and the political power that came with it. Up until the 1850s
political power had been relatively evenly divided between the rising
industrial capitalists and the southern planters. But westward expansion and
population growth in the North and mid-West, shifted more power to the
capitalists, and confronted the plantation owners with two choices: remain in
the union as junior partners with the capitalists or leave and form their own
nation. They chose the latter.
It is important to note that the northern capitalist
class did not go to war to free the slaves; they went to war to break the power
of the southern planters and preserve the unity of the nation because that was
in their overriding economic interest. An independent Confederacy could easily
be brought into the orbit of the US’s major competing capitalist power, Great
Britain, with dire consequences for the expansion of capitalist production in
the US.
So, can we conclude that slavery was not the cause of the
Civil War? Yes and no. Northern industrialists (except for a relatively small
number who supported abolition on mostly religious grounds) had no real moral
opposition to slavery. How could they? Their system of wage slavery was in many
ways as exploitative as the system of chattel slavery. The problem with slavery
was that it was the economic system of the planters and the basis of “Slave
Power”, a term used more and more as the 1850s wore on. From the perspective of
capitalists, ending slavery was incidental to resolving this contradiction.
If opposition to slavery was actually the cause of
northern capital, then the Civil War might well have started in 1857, when the
Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, ruled that the framers believed Black
people were “beings of an inferior order” and “so far inferior that they had no
rights which the white man was bound to respect and that the Negro might justly
and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” Or in 1859, when John
Brown’s raid, supported by many Black abolitionists, was brutally suppressed by
marines under the command of Robert E Lee. But it was only the election of a
northern Republican (the Republican party being the party of capital) without a
single Electoral College vote from a state where slavery was legal, that led to
the secession of 11 states to form the Confederacy.
So why did the Civil War end slavery? Quite simply,
because the slaves themselves, with support of free Blacks, made it the central
issue of the war. Whenever Union forces drew near, large numbers of slaves
walked away from slavery, at great personal risk. Initially Union forces
treated them as contraband, enemy property, to be returned when the war was
over. More importantly those who stayed on the plantations often served as
spies for the Union and eventually some 180,000 free Blacks and escaped slaves
served in the Union army at a critical time, when white draftees were deserting
the Union army in significant numbers.
Increasingly, the northern capitalists saw Blacks as an
important resource in the war. Thus, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of
1863 was both a wartime measure to weaken the Confederate home front (it only
applied to areas still under Confederate control) and a confirmation of what
was already happening on the ground. Even then, proclaiming the end of slavery
as a war aim was rejected, supposedly for fear that it would stiffen
Confederate resistance.
Reconstruction, the failed (sabotaged) project in
democracy
The fact that Northern industrialists did not see the war
as a “crusade” to free Black slaves explains a lot about what happened after
the war, during the period of Reconstruction. Northern capital had two goals in
Reconstruction: first, to ensure that the planter class would be permanently
subservient to the interests of northern capital and second, to revitalize the
south as a source of raw materials (primarily cotton) for northern industry.
By ending slavery (the 13th Amendment) the
competing system of economic exploitation was also ended and the South was
brought into the capitalist domain. What didn’t happen, despite a few successful
experiments, was the transfer of land from the defeated planters to the
freedmen. Such a democratic reform, which would have given the freedmen the
ability to defend their new political rights (14th and 15th
Amendments), was rejected for two reasons; it ran counter to the capitalist
tenet that property rights trump human rights and it would allow the freedmen
to opt out of producing the cotton needed for northern industry in favor of
subsistence farming, something that was happening where there were a few small
experiments with land distribution during the war.
Compare the freeing of Black slaves
in the “democratic” US in 1865 to the freeing of the serfs under the Czarist
regime in Russia beginning in 1861. In the US the freedmen didn’t get the “40
acres and a mule” and were forced into sharecropping for survival; in Russia peasants
were given the opportunity to own the land they had worked and many became
successful farmers. The difference has nothing to do with "democracy" but rather racism and white supremacy.
During the 12-year period of Reconstruction, the planters
established a new system of relations of production, which could be described
as slavery without slaves – sharecropping. It should be noted that landless
whites could also be incorporated into this system, albeit with slightly better
terms than the freedmen. The planters knew that granting privileges to their
white sharecroppers was a powerful tool to keep their laborers apart.
The maintenance of this system necessitated the
invigoration of white supremacy directed at policing the freedman and any
whites who were allied with them. It took two forms, the criminalization of
“being poor while black” along with the creation of convict leasing to provide
laborers for the planters, and the rise of a terrorist organization, the KKK,
which functioned to prevent organized resistance to the system of control by
the planters. Both the “legal” criminal injustice system and the extra-legal
terrorism were dominated by the old planter class. This insured that the
planters could return to total local economic and political control. The only
occasional impediment to the complete return of the planter class to power was
the presence of the Union army, which was removed by the Compromise of 1877, codifying
the Southern planters as junior partners in the Empire of Liberty.
The Civil War and Westward Expansion
In the midst of the titanic struggle between Northern
capital and Southern slavery, the expansion of the Empire of Liberty continued
unabated. In 1862 Congress passed the Homestead Act which provided 160 acres of
land, virtually free to white settlers. The next year saw the beginning of the
Transcontinental Railroad, which was completed in 1869.
Brutal, one-sided wars to clear that land of the native
inhabitants continued, even as the Union forces struggled to reunite the
country. The bloodiest massacre of natives by the military in US history took
place at Bear River in Idaho in 1863. It left roughly 350 members of the
Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation dead, including 90 women and children.
By 1890 the Census Bureau declared the frontier was
closed, by which they meant there was no discernable line were white settlement
ended. In late December of that same year, General Nelson Miles sent a telegram
to his superiors which read:
"The difficult Indian
problem cannot be solved permanently at this end of the line. It requires the
fulfillment of Congress of the treaty obligations that the Indians were
entreated and coerced into signing. They signed away a valuable portion of their
reservation, and it is now occupied by white people, for which they have
received nothing."
"They understood that ample
provision would be made for their support; instead, their supplies have been
reduced, and much of the time they have been living on half and two-thirds
rations.
"The dissatisfaction is
wide spread, especially among the Sioux, while the Cheyenne have been on the
verge of starvation, and were forced to commit depredations to sustain life.
These facts are beyond question, and the evidence is positive and sustained by
thousands of witnesses."
A few days later, on December 29, 1890 a solution was
found to the "difficult Indian problem" in the Wounded Knee Massacre, the last of the major “military” encounters
of the Indian Wars, which left an estimated 300 dead, almost the entire encampment of
the Lakota.
The Empire of Liberty now stretched unbroken from coast
to coast.
The Civil War and the rise of the Robber Barons
The Civil War had another critical effect on the future
of the Empire of Liberty. It set off a period of intense growth of industry
which propelled the US to a position of economic power on a par with that of
the European nations of Great Britain, France and Germany by 1914.
The war and westward expansion spurred production in
basic manufacturing and also provided the impetus for building railroads,
perhaps the most significant force in the growing economy. During the war
Northern businessmen even skirted prohibitions against trading with the
Confederates in order to buy cotton for their mills. The boom continued after
the war, creating vast wealth which was concentrated in the hands of a few, who
became known as the Robber Barons. Historians have traced the rise of these
great fortunes and found that most got their start in the mobilization for the
war.
The story of the industrialization of the US is taught in
classrooms across the country, although in many the Robber Barons are referred
to as the Captains of Industry and the fact that growth was accomplished on
land stolen from the native peoples and on the backs of Black sharecroppers and
the new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe is often glossed over. From
the tenements of New York and Chicago, to the cotton fields of Georgia and Mississippi,
to the small farmers eking out an existence on the plains of the Dakotas, to
the Chinese immigrants building the Transcontinental Railroad, working people created
a powerful economy, while reaping very few, if any, of the benefits.
But there were problems in the growing Empire. These
arose from the very nature of the system. From the ascendancy of capitalism in
the early 1800s, periodic economic crises occurred approximately every 10
years. Described by economists as crises of overproduction or under consumption
(two sides of the same coin), they were based on the constant need of
capitalism to expand. Thomas Piketty has formulated a possible explanation for
this in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, when he concluded that the
rate of profit historically exceeds the rate of growth, thus causing a problem
of too much capital (money) chasing after too little opportunity for growth.
The US had experienced a couple of relatively severe
depressions before the Civil War (1839-43 and 1857-58), but these had limited
effects in an economy still mostly based in self-sufficient farming. However,
following the Civil War, there were two major depressions, from 1873-79 (known
as the Long Depression) and 1893-97 (known as the Great Depression until 1929).
These depressions led to significant unrest, with the advent of militant labor
struggles and the development of rural protest movements, such as the Farmers’
Alliances and the Populist Party.
While working people suffered the consequences of these
depressions, capitalists benefitted in some ways from the crises (sound
familiar?). Old industries and firms, which are no longer profitable, closed
down enabling the resources (capital and labor) to move into more productive
processes. The remaining corporations often acquired the assets of the failed
business at bargain basement prices and emerged bigger and stronger, on the
road to creating monopolies, aka Trusts. But as the crises kept getting more
extreme and as the unrest grew, by the late 1890s, American capitalists began
looking for new areas which could provide space for further expansion. It was
time for new frontiers.
Note that this process was also occurring in Western
Europe, with severe depressions roughly paralleling those in the US. And for
them, there was a second aspect to their crises – the need to find more sources
for the raw materials for their industries. The answer for them, and for the
US, was expansion beyond their borders. Capitalism devolved in Imperialism, the
conquest and subjugation of peoples beyond their national borders, first among
the major European powers, then in the US. While this opened up new areas to
exploit, it created a new contradiction – competition between imperial powers –
which led directly to the Great War, WWI.
1898 – White Supremacy and the Further Expansion of The
Empire of Liberty
The motivation for imperialism in the second half of the
19th century was clearly economic, but it was justified by white
supremacy. This was most clearly seen in the actions of Great Britain (see my
earlier post), but also played a major role in US expansion. The Europeans claimed
to be bringing the benefits of civilization to Black and Brown people, ignoring
the fact that advanced civilizations existed in Asia, Africa and the Americas,
while Europe was still in what was known as the Dark Ages. What they were
really bringing was an economic system, capitalism, and the military force to
guarantee its acceptance. If the native populations resisted, they were
murdered, as is depicted in the 2021 film, Exterminate All the Brutes.
The US, with its vast land mass to conquer and exploit,
had not participated in this expansion up until 1890. Well, for the most part. In
1823, the US declared The Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the Europe and the
Americas were fundamentally different, and should therefore be two different
spheres of influence. The United States, for its part, would not interfere in
the political affairs of Europe, or with existing European colonies in the
Western Hemisphere, and stated that “the American continents, are henceforth
not to be considered as subjects for colonization by any European powers.” The
Doctrine further stated that any attempt by a European power to exert its
influence in the Western Hemisphere would, from then on, be seen by the United
States as a threat to its security.
Fortunately for the US, the world’s greatest sea power,
Great Britain, saw this division of separate spheres of influence and a policy
of non-intervention in the foreign affairs of Europe as in their national interest
and supported it with their navy. In a sense the two great Anglo powers were
already dividing up the world. (More on that later)
As the US expanded, it’s capitalists began investing in
its southern neighbors, particularly in the Caribbean and Central America, and by
1890 these considerable investments began to be threatened by nationalist and
revolutionary movements. From 1890 until 1914 the US intervened militarily at
least 26 times to protect American interests south of the border. In 1904,
President Theodore Roosevelt issued a “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which
warned Latin Americans that “chronic wrongdoing” would require the US to
intervene in their internal affairs. He followed that pronouncement up with
what became known as “Gunboat Diplomacy”.
The actions could not be justified as protecting
democracy, since, in most cases, they were to defend dictators like Mexico’s
Porfirio Diaz, whose regime had encouraged US business to invest in Mexico, to
the point that by 1910 Americans controlled 43% of all Mexican property. In
most of Central America and the Caribbean, agricultural products were raised
for export to the US, and US companies controlled the economies and prevented internal
economic development.
But the big advance in the expansion of the Empire of
Liberty took place in 1898. It was not a coincidence that the Spanish-American War
occurred the same year that a violent coup overthrew the elected, multi-racial
government in Wilmington, NC, an event that marked the final triumph of white
supremacy over the fragile coalition of Blacks and whites in defense of
Reconstruction, and resulted in the consolidation of the rule of Jim Crow. Two
years earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled, in Plessy v Ferguson, that segregation
was not a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment.
Thus, in 1898 we can clearly see the intersection of
white supremacy and US imperialism. In that year the US went to war with Spain,
allegedly over the sinking of the battleship Maine in Havana’s harbor. Prior to
the incident, many political leaders in the US, concerned by the effects of the
“Great Depression” and the unrest among workers and farmers, were looking for
foreign conflicts to deflect the rebellious energy. Teddy Roosevelt wrote to a
friend in 1897 that he “should welcome almost any war, for I think the country
needs one”. A war with Spain would fit the bill nicely; Spain was a weak power
with several valuable colonies in strategic areas in the Caribbean, Cuba and
Puerto Rico, and in the Pacific, the Philippines. The US could claim to be
freeing the people of these colonies and at the same time of offering to bring
the “benefits” of Western Civilization to them, whether they wanted them or
not.
While the US government and the Captains of Industry were
claiming that they were freeing the colonies from the Spanish, they eagerly put
down national liberation struggles in Cuba and the Philippines. Writing about
the Cuban rebels, Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill) noted that
should the rebels win, there was a danger of the establishment of another “black
republic”. And once it had wrested control of the Philippines from Spain,
American Marines used the same tactics against Filipino freedom fighters that
were later used in Vietnam, resulting in the death of over 200,000 Filipinos.
The Spanish-American War resulted in the US expanding
from a hemispheric power to a world power. It became clear that the US was now
an imperial nation, with economic interests, not only in the Caribbean and Central
America, but in the Pacific and East Asia. The war and its aftermath also led to the formation of the
first anti-imperialist organization, The US Anti-Imperialist League, founded by
Mark Twain!
The Spanish-American War also demonstrated that the US needed
a two-ocean navy, not to protect its borders, but to project its power and that
it needed a canal through Central America that could reduce the time it took
ships to get from one ocean to the other. Facing tough talks with the Columbian
government for a treaty to be able to build the canal, Teddy Roosevelt supported
(or perhaps instigated) a breakaway province of Columbia, which became Panama, and
negotiated a sweetheart deal for the US to build and control the Panama Canal.
The canal was completed in April of 1914. Three months
later Europe plunged into World War I.
Stay tuned for part 3 of the Empire of Liberty, focusing
on how the US transformed from a World Power to the World Power.
