Americans learn a folksy, even dorky version of American history; I remember the Puritans in their funny clothes, Plymouth Rock, drawings of the Pilgrims breaking corn with the Indians, George Washington sitting on a boat in some river. Those are a child’s memories, but the takeaway was a romantic notion of struggle and discovery. From a distance, this history looks far different. The German political sociologist Claus Offe argues that taming a land covered in wilderness meant for the settlers a return to a premodern state; to survive, the early Americans had to reenact, in double time, the phases of European civilization: first as hunters and gatherers, then as farmers, and, finally, as industrialists. Thus, from the nation’s first colonial settlement, the American people enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity for rebirth, which came with a nearly ritualistic form of amnesia. Becoming an American demanded that they forget their history—it made them forever innocent.
The Americans could replicate this process over and over through westward expansion, the ultimate free-for-all for white people. From abroad, bitter-sounding observers noted something odd about this obsession with freedom; D. H. Lawrence warned that the shout of freedom “is a rattling of chains, always was.” But for Americans, going west—in essence, as the writer and Protestant clergyman Josiah Strong said in 1885, “creating of more and higher wants”—was the very meaning of true civilization. What that meant was that the Americans’ sense of freedom was always tied not only to the acquisition of new lands but to the subjugation of new peoples, what an epigraph in a Herman Melville story calls “the empire of necessity.”
With the closing of the western frontier, Americans turned outward. Most of this early phase of imperial history is portrayed in schools as an unfortunate turn of events. At the turn of the century, revolts in sugar-rich Cuba against the Spanish gave the Americans an excuse to intervene, thereby acquiring their first economic satellite, for which they would often tolerate the brutality of local rulers. During this Spanish-American War period, the Americans also established a foothold in Asia, in the Philippines. This distant imperial endeavor inspired a rabid debate at home; intellectuals at the time worried what kind of country their nation was becoming. The philosopher William James argued that all humans suffer from a blindness toward those who are different from them; it would forever be impossible for man, he warned, to fully sympathize with the “Other.” But the Americans, as they had from the beginning, had reason to believe in their own unique abilities to bring civilization to the uncivilized. As Christians they possessed a messianic faith in the purpose of their Promised Land to guide the rest of the world to heaven.
Of course, it wasn’t only religious fervor that led the Americans to seek resources in foreign lands. In his influential 1959 book The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, William Appleman Williams argued—for which he was excoriated by Kennedy acolytes such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. for being pro-Communist—that the United States, from the beginning, needed to expand its borders to keep the economy growing. Unless the nation tapped into new markets in which to acquire natural resources, as well as to sell American goods, American factories would close, jobs would be lost, people would riot, and civil unrest would ensue. Peace and prosperity, the twin promises of American life, would wither without expansion. Williams was one of the first figures urging Americans to look more honestly at their foreign policy, and to accept what it was becoming—a different kind of empire, one that asserted itself first through economic means, not necessarily full-scale physical appropriation of territory (although often that, too). The book was popular at the time of its publishing, even receiving endorsements from newspapers such as The New York Times. The historian Greg Grandin believes such prescient warnings disappeared into the fervor of America’s post–Cold War self-congratulation; surely, there was no longer any reason to worry about empire now that the United States had proven its own political system’s superiority over the rest.
But back then, even an alleged critic of American empire like Williams had been gentle in his assessment of American ideals, writing that, for example, the Americans had been “sincere” in their intentions to transform Cuba into a mini-America. They believed they could “ultimately create a Cuba that would be responsibly self-governed, economically prosperous, and socially stable and happy,” he writes. “All, of course, in the image of America.” His usage of the word “sincere” was the sort of thing that Americans, eager for affirmation, likely took the wrong way.
The idea of good intentions would obscure the racism that enabled expansion. In a more sophisticated formulation of my college-girl realization that black and white identities were defined in relation to each other, Grandin explains that the ideal of a “rational man who stood at the center of an enlightened world,” that is, the white man, was conceived against “its fantasized opposite: a slave, bonded as much to his appetites as he was to his master.” Presidents McKinley, Taft, and Roosevelt alternately referred to their new foreign subjects as little brown men, savages, and bandits, and our supposed idealist crusader Woodrow Wilson argued that while the European subjects of former empires didn’t require American tutelage, brown subjects in the Middle East certainly did. Once racist ideology seeped into the rationale for American diplomacy, it would be difficult to ever snuff it out. Among the highest levels of government, racism hid behind innocuous words of charity and imperialist actions that no one dared call by their name.