America's Struggle with Empire: A Documentary History

America’s Struggle with Empire

America’s Struggle with Empire: A Documentary History

Peter J. Kastor

A Division of SAGE Washington, D.C.

CQ Press 2300 N Street, NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20037 Phone: 202-729-1900; toll-free, 1-866-4CQ-PRESS (1-866-427-7737) Web: www.cqpress.com Copyright © 2010 by CQ Press, a division of SAGE. CQ Press is a registered trademark of Congressional Quarterly Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Composition: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd. Cover design: Paula Goldstein, Blue Bungalow Design Cover image: The Eagle of American Imperialism with wings spread from Puerto Rico to the Philippines: An American cartoon, 1904, by Joseph Keppler Jr. The Granger Collection, New York The paper used in this publication exceeds the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. Printed and bound in the United States of America 13

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kastor, Peter J. America’s struggle with empire : a documentary history / Peter J. Kastor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-87289-920-9 (alk. paper) 1. United States—Territorial expansion—Sources. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Sources. 3. Imperialism—History—Sources. I. Title. E179.5.K37 2010 973—dc22

2009032489

For Shannon Lopata

Summary Contents

Contents

ix

Preface

xiii

1. A GROWING NATION, 1776–1848

1

2. AN EMPIRE IS BORN, 1848–1900

86

3. EMPIRE AMONG EMPIRES, 1900–1945

154

4. GLOBAL POWER, 1945–1965

249

5. EMPIRE DEBATED, 1965–2000

333

6. THE CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGE

OF

CONCLUSION: THE ONGOING STRUGGLE

EMPIRE, 2001–2008

419

EMPIRE

512

WITH

Text Credits

517

Selected Bibliography

518

Index

524

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Contents

Preface 1. A GROWING NATION, 1776–1848 Documents 1.1 The Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787 1.2 The Louisiana Purchase, April 30, 1803 1.3 William C. C. Claiborne to the People of Louisiana, December 20, 1803 1.4 Congress Debates the Future of Louisiana, 1803–1804 and 1810–1811 1.5 Louisiana Erected into Two Territories and Temporary Government Established, March 26, 1804 1.6 Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana against the Political System Adopted by Congress for Them, 1804 1.7 Thomas Jefferson Contemplates an American “Empire for Liberty,” 1809, 1812, and 1821 1.8 The Transcontinental Treaty, 1819 1.9 Americans Create a History of Governing Others, 1821 1.10 John Marshall on American Indians, 1823, 1831, and 1832 1.11 The Choctaw Protest, 1826 1.12 Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message, December 8, 1829 1.13 An Act to Provide for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and for Their Removal West of the River Mississippi, 1830 1.14 John L. O’Sullivan Announces Manifest Destiny, 1845 1.15 Proclamation to the Residents of New Mexico, August 22, 1846 1.16 Laws for the Government of the Territory of New Mexico, 1846 1.17 Congress Debates a Government for the West, 1848 1.18 The Residents of New Mexico Respond to American Rule, 1846–1847 1.19 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848

2. AN EMPIRE IS BORN, 1848–1900

xiii 1 18 23 27 28 34 39 40 43 49 52 57 63

65 66 69 70 72 76 80

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Documents 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7

Benjamin Butler in New Orleans, 1862 A Cartoonist Contemplates Reconstruction, 1865 Congress Proposes a System of Reconstruction, 1865 William Tecumseh Sherman’s Indian Policy, 1868 Americans Debate Hawaii’s Future, 1885 The Dawes Act, 1887 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893 2.8 The Blount Report, 1893 2.9 Grover Cleveland Addresses Hawaii, December 18, 1893 2.10 The Morgan Report, 1894

102 105 106 110 111 113 117 122 125 127

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C ONTENTS 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17

The Queen of Hawaii Criticizes the American Empire, 1898 The Treaty of Paris, 1898 Emilio Aguinaldo, Empire, and Resistance in the Philippines, 1899 Illustrating Territorial Acquisition, 1899 Imperialism and Manifest Destiny in Harper’s Weekly, 1899 The Foraker Act, 1900 Teddy Roosevelt Explains Expansion, 1900

3. EMPIRE AMONG EMPIRES, 1900–1945 Documents 3.1 The Platt Amendment, 1901 3.2 Woodrow Wilson Comments on the American Struggle with Empire, 1902 3.3 Cuba Receives Its Independence, with Strings Attached, 1903 3.4 Connecting the Western Past to a Global History, 1904 3.5 Native Americans and Filipinos on Display, 1904 3.6 Roosevelt Corollary, 1904 3.7 Frederick Jackson Turner Contemplates Modern America, 1911 3.8 Walter Lippmann on Empire, 1915 3.9 The Jones-Shafroth Act, 1917 3.10 Herbert Hoover Assesses Conditions in Europe, 1919 3.11 Robert Lansing on Self-Determination, 1921 3.12 The Indian Citizenship Act, 1924 3.13 FDR Proposes an American Foreign Policy, 1928 3.14 Augusto Sandino Protests U.S. Policy, 1927 and 1929 3.15 The Tydings-McDuffie Act, 1934 3.16 Japan, Germany, and the Congressional Understanding of Imperialism, 1936 and 1938 3.17 The Atlantic Charter, 1941 3.18 The Allies’ Plan to Dismantle the Axis Empires, 1943–1945 3.19 Announcing the Liberation of the Axis Colonies, 1944 and 1945

131 136 139 141 142 146 152

154 172 174 179 182 188 190 196 198 201 205 211 213 214 218 223 229 235 236 243

4. GLOBAL POWER, 1945–1965

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Documents 4.1 Planning for Post-War Germany, 1944 4.2 FDR and Entanglements of Empires, 1945 4.3 The Rocky Road to Philippine Independence, 1945 4.4 Contrasting Editorial Commentary on Philippine Independence, 1946 4.5 The Visiting Bases Agreement, 1947 4.6 NSC 68, 1950 4.7 Debating Puerto Rico’s Future, 1950 and 1955 4.8 Creating the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, 1952 4.9 America, Land of Freedom, 1952 4.10 Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1954 4.11 Martin Luther King Jr., “Birth of a New Nation” Sermon, April 7, 1957 4.12 Elvis in Germany, 1958 4.13 The Ugly American, 1958 4.14 John F. Kennedy’s Message to Congress, May 25, 1961 4.15 The United States and the South Vietnam Coup of 1963 4.16 Douglas MacArthur Tells His Story, 1964

269 275 275 282 285 290 296 300 302 305 312 316 317 320 324 326

5. EMPIRE DEBATED, 1965–2000

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Documents 5.1 Selections from the Vietnam Comic Book, 1967 5.2 Custer Died for Your Sins, 1969

353 356

C ONTENTS 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15 5.16 5.17 5.18

The War Powers Resolution, 1973 The Rise of Empires a Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away…, 1977 “Evil Empire” Speech, March 8, 1983 Explaining Operation Urgent Fury, October 1983 Condemning Operation Urgent Fury, October 1983 Protesting U.S. Bases in the Philippines, 1983 Barry Goldwater Criticizes William Casey, 1984 Congress Debates Covert Operations in Nicaragua, 1984 National Security Directive 45, 1990 Congress and the U.S. Presence in the Middle East, 1990–1991 Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, 1991 Searching for a New Policy in Africa, 1992 Reasserting and Redefining the American Relationship with Haiti, 1994 The Government’s View on Indian Sovereignty, 1995 Revisiting the Debate on Puerto Rico’s Political Status, 1997 Pat Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny, 1999

6. THE CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGE

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EMPIRE, 2001–2008

Documents 6.1 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001 6.2 Joint Resolution Authorizing the Use of Force in Response to the 9/11 Attacks, September 18, 2001 6.3 Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq, 2003 6.4 George W. Bush Addresses the Nation at the Start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, March 19, 2003 6.5 George W. Bush Addresses the Iraqi People, April 10, 2003 6.6 Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation Number 1, May 16, 2003 6.7 Tony Blair’s Address to Congress, July 18, 2003 6.8 Dick Cheney on the American Capacity to Liberate and Govern Foreign Nations, 2003 6.9 Criticizing the Project of Nation Building in Iraq, 2003 6.10 Iraq: Next Steps, September 2003 6.11 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): Origin, Characteristics, and Institutional Authorities, April 2004 6.12 The UN Plans for Iraq’s Future, 2004 6.13 National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, November 2005 6.14 Debating the Situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2004–2008 6.15 George W. Bush Explains the Surge, January 10, 2007 6.16 Barack Obama and John McCain Debate the Proper Governance of Foreign Peoples, January and March 2007 6.17 Past and Future in Afghanistan, 2007

CONCLUSION: THE ONGOING STRUGGLE

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EMPIRE

xi 357 363 364 366 370 374 377 378 383 387 394 395 399 405 410 417

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442 447 449 455 457 458 460 465 467 469 475 480 487 493 499 504 510

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Text Credits

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Selected Bibliography

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Index

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Preface

How do you govern foreign people who speak unfamiliar languages, practice unfamiliar religions, and have unfamiliar political institutions? How do you achieve this task when the people you want to govern challenge the very government imposed upon them? Perhaps most perplexing, how do you respond to that resistance when you are committed to creating new freedoms for those very people. These questions may seem familiar. Every day the United States struggles to answer them in Iraq and Afghanistan. Governing those countries, which the United States has done to varying degrees since 2001 in Afghanistan and 2003 in Iraq, is among the greatest challenges facing the U.S. government today. And yet they are hardly new questions. To the contrary, Americans have asked them for more than two centuries. Since its creation, the United States has engaged itself in governing foreign territory and foreign people. This volume explores that process through documents, with a broad chronological and topical scope extending from the 1780s through the recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq. In selecting and explaining those documents, I have sought to explore one fundamental question: How does a democratic republic that proclaims a commitment to personal and national independence go about governing foreign territory and foreign people? My goal is not to celebrate or condemn how the U.S. government or its citizens have answered that question. Instead, I leave it for the people who populate this volume to provide that celebration and condemnation through the documents that chronicle how Americans have governed foreign territory and foreign people. Much of that documentation consists of the materials (treaties, congressional legislation, laws, and ordinances) that established the rules for governing that territory and those people. But equally important are other documents that recapture the ways Americans have debated the issue, for it is that debate that proves most revealing. Most Americans know that the United States is directly involved with daily governance in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many are also aware of the active role the United States played in governing Germany and Japan after World War II and the way the United States established puppet regimes in the developing world. Americans are divided in their reaction to these policies, with some claiming that the United States had a right and a responsibility to shape the destiny of other countries, even as others decry what they see as a policy of imperialism that betrayed the nation’s founding principles and delivered suffering overseas. American policymakers consistently concluded that the United States had a vested interest in the domestic governance of foreign countries. Meanwhile, the rise of the United States as a global superpower provided the means for federal leaders to act on that conclusion. xiii

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But Americans reached those conclusions and engaged in those debates in recent decades only because other Americans had engaged in the same arguments since the founding of the republic, often arguing about the land that now seems unquestionably “American” but that once seemed definitively foreign. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States regularly acquired foreign territory, and, more important, the people living there. The majority of the states in the Union began not as the thirteen original colonies that declared their independence in 1776 but as foreign territory acquired by the U.S. government during the nineteenth century, territory where local residents asked what sovereignty would mean for them. What to do with land and people so definitively “foreign” was no less challenging two centuries ago than it is today. At the heart of the very practical matters of governance was a very high-minded debate about empires. Indeed, it has always been the notion of empire that has driven how Americans went about governing others. Part of the reason is obvious. Empires are, by definition, structures in which one polity governs another. More important, however, is the way that Americans have situated that word at the center of federal policy and national identity. Throughout most of its history, the United States has loudly proclaimed that it would not be an empire, at least not in the traditional sense of the term. To this end, Americans have always used a series of comparisons to describe what they are not. Great Britain, Spain, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union have all been the proverbial bogeymen in this story. Those countries at various times have exemplified the evils that Americans have associated with empire. The long history of America’s struggle with empire is best understood in two moments separated by two centuries. The first came in 2003, three weeks after the United States began Operation Iraqi Freedom. On April 10, President George W. Bush issued a message to the Iraqi people. He informed the Iraqis that the United States “will respect your great religious traditions. . . . We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave. Iraq will go forward as a unified, independent and sovereign nation that has regained a respected place in the world” (Document 6.5). The second moment sounds a lot like the first. Once again, an American official spoke to people at the receiving end of U.S. policy. “Under the Auspices of the American Government, you may confidently rely upon the security of your Liberty, your property and the religion of your choice . . . in a word that your interest will be among the principal cares of the [United States]” (Document 1.3). This was not a speech by George W. Bush, the generals who led troops in Iraq, or American officials who took charge of Iraq’s civil administration. Instead, the quotation comes from a speech in December 1803, almost two centuries before Bush gave his address to the Iraqi people. The man who delivered the speech was William C. C. Claiborne. A former member of Congress from Tennessee and territorial governor of Mississippi, Claiborne arrived in New Orleans in 1803 to take charge of the territory the United States had acquired from France through the Louisiana Purchase. Claiborne felt surrounded by foreigners: French men and women (some Francophone Creoles born in the French colony of Louisiana, others

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recently arrived from France), Spaniards, enslaved African Americans, free people of color, and Indians from numerous villages. He believed he had arrived in a strange place with a near-impossible task. He expected to face resentment from some local residents, violent revolt from others, and efforts by foreign nations to upset American goals. Claiborne’s speech shows that he and George Bush not only faced similar circumstances but also proposed nearly identical solutions explained through very similar language. It is highly unlikely that Bush or any of his speechwriters had ever read Claiborne’s address, but that’s exactly the point. They didn’t have to. The principles of governing foreign people that Claiborne articulated in 1803 became so deeply engrained in American public memory and public policy that they emerged again, almost verbatim, two centuries later. How American leaders could make the same claims without knowing it became even more clear in another speech soon after Bush’s message to the Iraqi people. By July 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom was winding down. With Saddam Hussein and the Baathist regime toppled in Iraq, American policymakers were predicting a rapid transition from military operations to national reconstruction. The insurgency that soon gripped Iraq had yet to reach full force. Americans were also rushing to situate the event in their nation’s history. It was under these circumstances that British prime minister Tony Blair visited the United States. A staunch ally during the Iraq War, Blair came before a joint session of Congress on July 23, ready to issue his own pronouncement on the meaning and interpretation of military operations in Iraq. Blair proclaimed, “We promised Iraq democratic government. We will deliver it.” He spoke with a keen awareness of critics who charged that the United States was less concerned with Iraq than with preserving its power, regardless of the cost to other nations. “And then reflect on this,” Blair explained, “How hollow would the charges of American imperialism be when these failed countries are and are seen to be transformed from states of terror to nations of prosperity, from governments of dictatorship to examples of democracy, from sources of instability to beacons of calm?” To this Blair added, “There never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood, or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day” (Document 6.7). Perhaps so, but that may well be because Blair was a student of law, not history. He is also British, not American, and the notion of empire has very different meanings in Europe than it does in the United States. Most important, Blair was only the latest in a series of commentators to situate Iraq within a context drawn from the past few decades, not the course of centuries. That broader context could well have provided the “instruction” that Blair sought. That broader context is also the subject of this book. Claiborne’s 1803 speech combines with Bush’s and Blair’s 2003 addresses to form the logical bookends to a process through which Americans have repeatedly faced the challenge of governing foreign people and foreign territory. Those speeches also exemplify the sort of connections that readers may draw from this volume. Those connections reveal both continuity and change. Despite the enormous separation of time and circumstance, Americans have consistently approached the task of governing others through a

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set of principles that remain rooted in the ideals of the earliest years of the republic. At the same time, the moments of disagreement or the moments when policy underwent dramatic change help to reveal both when and why Americans have rethought their notions of nation and empire. Seeing connections through documents explains both the content and structure of this volume. Because governing foreign territory and foreign people is very much a policymaking concern, many of the documents in this volume emerge from that realm. The writings of presidents and cabinet members, debates in Congress, and federal legislation tell the story of how senior officials struggled with empire. Yet equally important is chronicling how people experienced and interpreted life in the very places the United States sought to govern. That means including the words of local officials as they sought to obey and in some cases instruct their superiors. It also means recapturing the diverse responses of local residents who suddenly found themselves at the receiving end of federal rule. Some welcomed the United States, others expressed serious reservations, and still others engaged in organized, sometimes violent resistance. Finally, this volume moves outside the policymaking arena to consider the way that governing others emerges through culture. The result is a series of documents that, at first glance, seems entirely removed from governance but that, on closer examination, tells us a great deal about how Americans have conceived of empire. School textbooks tell us how Americans learn about citizenship itself through a study of the imperial past. Popular nonfiction tells us how Americans debate these issues in a public arena. Comics and cartoons tell us where empire resides within American popular culture. Although this volume explores these broad cultural themes, it is important to bear in mind that the focus remains on the policymaking structure and political culture. It is equally important to remember that this volume studies how Americans have situated the challenge of empire within their own national experience. Some of the most interesting research on empires and imperialism has focused on the lived experience of average people around the world who found themselves governed by foreign countries. Although this book often discusses those experiences, it does not claim to chronicle them in detail. Instead, the essays and documents in this book explain how the federal system as we know it came into being, how that system extended its power on a global scale, and how policymakers within that system operated in a political, institutional, and cultural context. This discussion of the American struggle with empire is organized into six distinct chronological periods: • Chapter 1 examines the period from 1776 to 1848. In the wake of the American Revolution, a struggle unleashed in large part by a critique of empire, the United States acquired its first foreign territories. In response to these circumstances, Americans developed ideological and institutional foundations for governing others, many of which remain in place to this day. The successes that many Americans associated with those ideas and institutions also eased many of their initial fears, helping to fuel a culture of expansionism that exploded in the Mexican War of 1846–1848, concluding with the acquisition of a vast new domain.

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• Chapter 2 chronicles the period from 1848 to 1900, decades in which the United States secured its hold on the territory it had acquired in the fifty years after independence and began to develop ambitions beyond the Americas. It was during these years that Americans came closest to abandoning their old fears about empire. Envying the international stature and practical benefits that European empires derived from their colonial possessions, Americans eventually extended their reach into the Atlantic and the Pacific. Adapting old notions and practices of governing others to this new imperial status proved a difficult fit. • Chapter 3 examines the first half of the twentieth century, momentous decades in which the United States became a modern, industrialized nation; endured a devastating depression; and fought in two world wars. At the end of this period, the United States emerged as a global superpower. Along the way, however, Americans returned to the notion that, although they might govern others, they were not an empire, especially in comparison to the empires they saw in Europe and Asia. • Chapter 4 situates the discussion of empire at the height of American global power in the two decades immediately after World War II. During this period the federal government had both the means and the motivation to extend an American vision of governance on a global scale. Even as the United States took charge of governing postwar Germany, Austria, and Japan while also acquiring client states (both public and covert) in the developing world, Americans nonetheless continued to condemn empire— dismantling old European empires and decrying the Soviet communist system. Although federal policies emerged from the particulars of World War II and the cold war, they also marked the fulfillment of previous experiences. • Chapter 5 explains how, after almost two centuries of debate, the inherent tensions that Americans associated with governing foreign peoples exploded during the final decades of the twentieth century. The United States experienced the greatest domestic opposition to its policies overseas in its history. This critique began at the height of opposition to the Vietnam War, but this section is not limited to Vietnam. To the contrary: the Vietnam War became so divisive because it coincided with a broader-reaching critique that claimed the United States had always been engaged in an imperial and (more important) a colonial project. • Chapter 6 concludes this volume by examining the new role the United States has assumed in the world in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Although military and civil policies in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest the tremendous continuities at work in American policy and culture, the very power of American claims—that empire and freedom are antithetical—have posed new challenges to American policy both at home and abroad. Each chapter begins with an interpretive essay designed to establish a context for the documents that follow. Because this volume focuses on matters of politics and policymaking, the essays also frame each chapter through the personal experiences and comments of six presidents who embodied the ways Americans struggled with empire during the respective periods. Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush could not be more different in their

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political ideas and historical circumstances, but all of them tackled the challenge of empire. In their similarities and differences, these presidents help explain how the struggle with empire has defined the United States. The book concludes with a discussion of the American challenge with empire now facing the current president of the United States, Barack Obama. On June 4, 2009, Obama gave a major speech at the University of Cairo, during which he explained that “America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire. The United States has been one of the greatest sources of progress that the world has ever known. We were born out of revolution against an empire. We were founded upon the ideal that all are created equal, and we have shed blood and struggled for centuries to give meaning to those words—within our borders, and around the world.”* According to the White House, the official title of Obama’s speech was “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning.” Perhaps so, but in those comments, Obama invoked an American understanding of empire as old as the republic itself. Obama’s words would have made perfect sense to Jefferson, Roosevelt, Wilson, Kennedy, Reagan, and Bush. These presidents all understood the American struggle with empire in similar ways. That outlook emerged not simply from the policies they pursued but also from the broader culture that had produced those presidents and the nation they governed.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book began in 2005 during a conversation I had over coffee with Doug Goldenberg-Hart, an acquisitions editor at CQ Press. At the time, I had recently completed a volume for CQ Press on the Louisiana Purchase, and I told Doug how struck I was by the similarities in the ways Americans described territorial expansion in the nineteenth century and the ways Americans argued about policy in Iraq and Afghanistan two centuries later. It seemed there was something important to this story, and Doug agreed with me that Americans could learn something by taking a long view about how the United States had governed foreign people and foreign territory. Since then, Doug has been a supportive, thoughtful, and enormously helpful partner in developing this book. The entire team at CQ Press has been equally helpful. Once Doug got the project moving, David Arthur worked tirelessly to develop the manuscript, answering innumerable questions from me and offering wonderful suggestions for how to make the manuscript better. Mary Marik was a superb copy editor, polishing the manuscript and identifying the smallest errors that are the inevitable result of document transcription. Throughout this process, production editor Joan Gossett was always operating behind the scenes, coordinating the numerous arrangements that go into producing any book. From my perspective, the process always appeared seamless because Joan was doing all the hard work.

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Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning” (remarks at Cairo University, Cairo, Egypt, June 4, 2009), www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-atCairo-University-6-04-09/.

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At Washington University, I am grateful to the staff in the History Department and the American Culture Studies Program. I also want to thank my research assistant, Danielle DuRousseau, a talented undergraduate who is now on her way to becoming an equally accomplished law school student. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to my wife, Shannon Lopata, and my son, Sam Kastor. I met Shannon soon before I began this project, and she has endured America’s Struggle with Empire in her own personal way. Her patience with this project is only one of the innumerable debts that I owe her. As a result, this book is dedicated to her.

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A Growing Nation, 1776–1848

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n April 1809, Thomas Jefferson imagined his nation’s future in ambitious terms. Barely a month before, Jefferson had been president of the United States. The office had consumed even Jefferson’s boundless energies. The daily responsibilities of serving as the nation’s chief executive prevented him from indulging An 1803 painting by Boqueto de Woieseri celebrated President Jefferson’s Louisiana in the sort of far- Purchase. The title of the work, Under My Wings, Everything Prospers, captures the reaching visions that American notion of a benevolent empire. had characterized so Source: The Granger Collection, New York much of Jefferson’s previous thought and writings. As he retired from public office, Jefferson had time to reflect and offer advice to James Madison, his confidante and chosen successor. On April 27, Jefferson wrote to the new president. “We should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation; and I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and selfgovernment.” This statement, so characteristically eloquent and powerful from the man who had written the Declaration of Independence, came in the midst of a lengthy discussion of territorial acquisitions that Jefferson imagined for the future. Jefferson predicted the United States would soon own Cuba and part of Canada, all of it achieved by manipulating the community of European leaders.1 Madison responded in kind. He offered warm greetings from the White House that Jefferson had so recently departed, discussed recent developments in domestic politics and international affairs, thanked Jefferson for his advice, and then promptly ignored everything Jefferson suggested.2 This sort of give-and-take was typical of the two men. They had been political allies and close friends since the 1780s. From 1801 to 1809, when Madison served as 1

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secretary of state to President Jefferson, they had collaborated on a daily basis. Throughout those years, they usually shared the same outlook on domestic politics and foreign policy. But Madison knew better than to take Jefferson’s advice at face value. He knew that Jefferson had a habit of expressing grand ambitions that flew in the face of practical reality. In public office—as governor of Virginia, secretary of state, vice president, and finally as president—Jefferson could be a model of pragmatism. But out of office, Jefferson allowed himself far greater latitude, something the more practical-minded Madison treated with a combination of amusement and occasional frustration. Madison had assumed office facing enormous challenges, many of which Jefferson himself had been unable to solve. Madison had no intention of pursuing a policy of grand territorial ambitions. His reasons were simple. He believed that the United States could never become the “empire for liberty” that Jefferson described if it became an empire too quickly. Instead, Madison worried that Americans could lose their liberty in the pursuit of empire. Nor was Madison alone in these concerns. To the contrary, the correspondence between Jefferson and Madison in the spring of 1809 came at the conclusion of decades during which Americans had worried about how to avoid the pitfalls of empire. Few people had shown greater leadership on the issue than Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, but their role had been just that: leadership in a broader movement. From 1776 to 1848, Americans shared a general consensus that the imperial structures of western Europe were fundamentally corrupt and completely incompatible with American notions of liberty. At the same time, though, the United States was acquiring new territories and populations in North America that would force the young republic to assume many imperial tasks. In response to these circumstances, the United States rejected time-honored approaches to empire, extending unprecedented political opportunities to new territories. The federal government rapidly formulated a policy premised on incorporating preexisting populations through aggressive political socialization, rapid institutional development, and a constitutional structure based on creating new states on terms equal to those in existing states. Meanwhile, the federal government also imposed unprecedented restrictions on nonwhites (Native Americans, slaves, and free people of color). The people living in those territories responded accordingly. White residents concluded that the United States had replaced the political repression and economic stagnation of European empires with democratic politics and commercial growth. Nonwhites found themselves facing new challenges, not only from the government but from their white neighbors. Throughout much of this period, some Americans expressed a profound ambivalence toward territorial expansion. Federal policymakers often doubted the government possessed the resources to assert its sovereignty over Native Americans, African Americans, or white residents on the frontiers of North America. Only in the 1830s did they reconcile expansion with their visions of union. By the time the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846, Americans were prepared to acquire both territory and

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populations that reached “from sea to shining sea.” But reaching that destination had been a long trip, and not an easy one to make.

A REVOLUTION AGAINST EMPIRE Today, most people learn that Americans declared independence in 1776 for reasons best expressed by a series of slogans: no taxation without representation, give me liberty or give me death, death to the king. All of these clichés do, in fact, accurately reflect some of the reasons why residents of the British colonies in North America took the momentous step of forming their own country. But the American Revolution was also about empire. More specifically, the Declaration of Independence reflected the belief among many colonists that the British imperial system (and by extension all empires) was corrupt. After years spent trying to reform that system, Americans eventually concluded that imperialism itself along a traditional European model was incompatible with their definition of freedom. In 1776, empires were based upon a fairly simple model. Since the sixteenth century, European powers had established colonies in the Americas in order to advance their commercial and strategic objectives. Put simply, the function of these colonies was to enrich, defend, and reinforce their imperial homelands. Britain, France, and Spain had emerged as the primary players in the contest for North America by the middle of the eighteenth century. Each of them had pursued varying objectives in the Americas. For example, the Spanish saw themselves as allies with the Catholic leadership in Rome and sought the wholesale conversion of native peoples. Likewise, religious dissenters in England believed that settlement in North America would enable them to pursue religious freedom. But to imperial leaders in Madrid, Paris, and London, all of these concerns remained secondary to the primary objective of creating vast colonial operations that would serve the commercial interests of the various imperial centers. Politics emerged accordingly. Power emanated from the imperial centers and became progressively weaker toward the periphery. For example, England wielded political superiority over New England (now the northeastern United States), Spain dictated policies to New Spain (now Mexico), and residents of France saw themselves as vastly superior to the French who were living in New France (now Canada). This power was never absolute. Instead, European empires worked on gradations of political inequality. Officials in London, Paris, and Madrid selectively delegated powers to viceroys and governors in colonial centers like Mexico City, Quebec, and Philadelphia. Those representatives of the crown in turn enabled local elites to wield highly circumscribed powers. The farther one lived from the centers of imperial power, the more limited were the political opportunities. By the mid-eighteenth century, the imperial structure in North America was beginning to crack. In 1763, following a series of military defeats in the Seven Years War, the French had abandoned their territorial possessions in North America, ceding Canada to Great Britain and Louisiana to Spain. Meanwhile, colonial residents across the continent were expressing greater discontent with the old imperial order. French-speaking residents of Canada protested

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British efforts to create an Anglo-Saxon majority and to replace Catholicism with the Church of England. When the first Spanish governor of Louisiana attempted to consolidate his own authority in 1768, angry members of the local elite led a revolt that so terrified the governor that he fled to the Caribbean. Meanwhile, in the British colonies south of Canada, local residents protested new taxes and enhanced political power for imperial officials.3 These movements had diverse roots, but they all were the result of similar circumstances, and they all unleashed similar responses. In British, French, and Spanish North America, local residents claimed that they should enjoy the same rights and opportunities as their fellow countrymen, particularly those living in the imperial centers. European officials indicated that whatever rights colonial residents might possess as individuals, they by definition lived in places of reduced political power. Imperial officials concluded that the only way to prevent colonial resistance from exploding into open revolt was through a show of force. In Louisiana, the Spanish sent a new governor who promptly executed the ringleaders of the Revolt of 1768. In the British colonies, Parliament relented on certain colonial demands, but members also sought to reimpose their authority, most dramatically displayed in the Boston massacre. Finally, in Canada the British imposed the Quebec Act, which allowed Canadian Catholics to worship as they pleased and enjoy the rights of British citizenship, but they nonetheless excluded the French-speaking ethnic majority from any substantive role in government. In the end, it was the British colonists who rejected their subservience. Throughout the 1770s, they claimed that their equality as individual British citizens was incompatible with their inequality as residents of a British colony. The Declaration of Independence sought to solve the problem once and for all. By replacing British imperial rule with selfgovernment, the United States would cease to be an empire founded on inequality. Instead, each state and each citizen of those states would enjoy legal equality.4 This quest for equality—among both citizens and polities—became a driving concern among the leadership of the newly independent United States. The principle was codified in the Articles of Confederation, which guaranteed that each state would have an equal vote at the Continental Congress. It was also a common refrain in the constitutions that every state produced after independence. Finally, the Constitutional Convention spent much of its time trying to avoid the dangers of empire. In The Federalist, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay often referred to the United States as an empire, but they always claimed it was different from all others. Hamilton called it “an empire in many respects the most interesting in the world.” Interesting indeed, for the United States struggled mightily to deny it was an empire.

AN EMPIRE

IN THE

WEST

Despite efforts to avoid the pitfalls of empire, the United States quickly began acquiring its own colonies. This challenge first emerged in the Transappalachian West of the 1770s and 1780s. Faced with the task of governing both territory and people who lived beyond the existing states of the Union, political leaders and anonymous settlers established both precedents and formal institutions that have informed American policy and identity ever since.

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Throughout the eighteenth century, much of the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River was governed by Native Americans. While the British claimed the territory as their own, real power still lay in the hands of the Native American population. Meanwhile, the largest European presence was French, consisting of a few settlements and trading outposts along the mid- and upper-Mississippi valleys (a region generally known as the Illinois Country), as well as the large Francophone settlements of the lower Mississippi Valley. When the French abandoned their North American possessions after the Seven Years War, the British acquired the Illinois Country east of the Mississippi River, and the Spanish acquired the colony of Louisiana to the west. The first Anglo-American settlers arrived in the Transappalachian West in the 1760s. For many of them, the one precondition for personal and economic independence, political participation and liberty, and rough equality alongside other settlers was the acquisition of land. Throughout the 1770s, a series of volunteer forces fought Native Americans and British colonial officials in the Transappalachian West. In 1783, the Treaty of Paris (the formal document that ended the Revolutionary War) confirmed that the United States would consist of all British claims south of Canada. That territory included much of the Transappalachian West, and it was in the region northwest of the Ohio River that Americans first faced the challenge of governing foreign people and foreign territory.5 In 1783, the Transappalachian West remained beyond the control of the states and the Continental Congress for two reasons. First and foremost, Native Americans remained the dominant power. Second, numerous states had their own claims to the region. When those claims overlapped, the United States lacked an effective means to settle the dispute. State leaders saw enormous benefits to these western land claims because they were convinced that the largest states would enjoy the greatest power and that the sale of western land would generate revenue for the cash-starved state governments. But in practical terms, all of the states found that they lacked the means to govern the western hinterland. Native American power brought home that daily reality. So, too, did the situation in western North Carolina, where irate western settlers, convinced that the state government was unresponsive to western concerns, attempted to form a breakaway state that they named Franklin.6 In 1780, Thomas Jefferson first invoked the notion of an “empire of liberty” when he discussed the new opportunities he saw in a Transappalachian West under the control of white settlers.7 Throughout the 1780s, however, it became abundantly clear that no state was capable of controlling the West. It was also clear that the United States, governed by the Continental Congress and operating under the Articles of Confederation, lacked the means to resolve territorial disputes or govern the West in its own right. Eventually, the resolution to the crisis emerged from the state with the biggest stake in the conflict. Virginia had the greatest western claims, consisting of the Kentucky District south of the Ohio River and much of the territory northwest of the Ohio. By 1784, a growing cohort within the state government had reached the seemingly ridiculous conclusion that Virginia would derive the greatest benefit by surrendering its western territories. The cession would free the state government from the enormous expense of managing the land as part of the public domain. With settlers and land companies all vying for ownership of western land, the national government would also free Virginia from settling the endless disputes over land title. The leading figure in orchestrating this movement was none other than

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Thomas Jefferson, and his plan for dissolving Virginia’s empire in the West emerged directly from his experience during the American Revolution. Jefferson had crafted some of the most eloquent condemnations of centralized imperial authority that extended its despotic rule onto its colonial peripheries. Meanwhile, as governor of Virginia from 1779 to 1781, he knew firsthand how difficult it was to govern western settlers and also coordinate military efforts in the West during the Revolutionary War. By the time Virginia ceded its territory northwest of the Ohio River in 1784, Jefferson was once again serving in the Continental Congress, as a representative from the Commonwealth of Virginia, and he eagerly joined a congressional committee assigned to develop a plan for the territory. As had been the case with the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson immediately assumed leadership in writing a “Plan on Government in Western Territories.” In certain ways, this document was typical of imperial administration. The report divided the land into a series of administrative units and confirmed final authority in a centralized power, in this case the Continental Congress. But it was in planning for the region’s future that Jefferson imposed his own revolutionary stamp onto the West. Jefferson made clear from the start that “whenever any of the sd states shall have, of free inhabitants as many as shall then be in any one the least numerous of the thirteen original states, such state shall be admitted by it’s delegates into the Congress of the United States, on an equal footing with the said original states.” The new states carved from the West would enjoy full representation in Congress, self-determination in crafting their own laws, and their citizens would elect their own leaders.8 The impact of this simple statement was profound. The 1784 Report on Western Government became the foundation of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (Document 1.1), which in turn established the foundations for creating new states that the United States applied with few changes through the creation of the last new state, Hawaii, in 1959. At the core of Jefferson’s plan was the radical notion that new states enter the Union on equal terms instead of as subordinate colonies on a European model. Indeed, Jefferson’s very word choice reflected his aversion to the traditional notion of empire. At no time did he refer to the region as a “colony,” preferring instead to use “territory.” This may seem like a minor, semantic difference, but it was a matter of no small concern at the time. State and national officials certainly did not think it was insignificant, for they argued about whether to call the place a colony. In the end they rejected the term, for it evoked the unequal political relationships that Americans first rejected in 1776. In immediate terms, the Northwest Territory spawned five states: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Beyond its geographic boundaries, the Northwest Ordinance suggested the means through which the United States could expand without suffering the pitfalls of empire. But the Northwest Ordinance was only possible because the United States had a government that could take charge in the West. The Northwest Ordinance was among the last major pieces of legislation drafted by the Continental Congress. Meeting at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance on July 13, 1787. Meanwhile, meeting in adjoining chambers of Independence Hall, the Constitutional Convention was hard at work crafting a new system of government for the United States. In his own copious notes of the convention,

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Madison recorded on July 13 how his colleagues were debating the proper collection and distribution of federal funds.9 When members of the convention signed their names to the new federal Constitution on September 17, 1787, they had completed a document that worked together with the Northwest Ordinance to redefine the North American West and, in turn, the notion of empire. The Constitution provided all the mechanisms that state governments lacked when it came to governing the West. The fiscal structure that convention delegates had debated on July 13 would provide the means to pay for territorial government. Article II of the Constitution created an executive branch with the capacity to select the civil officials who would populate the temporary government of western territories. By providing both the authority and the political economy to support a permanent standing army, the Constitution also created the means for the United States to wrest control of the Northwest from the Native Americans who presented stiff resistance to white authority. In the Northwest Territory, the federal government assumed responsibility for creating a workable civil government that would provide for the long-term integration of the region. The man who had to frame this government was Thomas Jefferson. As the nation’s first secretary of state, he assumed responsibility for all territorial affairs, a responsibility bequeathed to his successors until the creation of the Interior Department in 1849. Jefferson was also delighted to see Kentucky enter the Union in 1792, the first new state carved from the West. Four years later, western North Carolina, home to the Franklin separatist movement, entered the Union under congressional authority as the new state of Tennessee. In 1795, two years after Jefferson left the administration, his successor, Edmund Randolph, helped orchestrate negotiations through which Spain ceded territory in the Southwest constituting most of what is now Alabama and Mississippi. Quickly designated the Mississippi Territory, Congress imposed rules similar to those of the Northwest Territory. Throughout the 1790s, the federal government set about governing the West, always aware of the dangers of empire. Western residents found that in citing the old, Revolutionary War fears of empire they had ample ammunition to place their own demands on the federal leadership. In the years that followed, the federal government set about the process of governing others and incorporating new territory. The Northwest Ordinance went from an isolated response to the particular challenges of the 1780s into a template that Americans applied on an increasingly grand scale. This policy followed a few simple principles. First, federal leaders hoped to eliminate the forms of inequality they associated with traditional empires by extending equality both to individuals and to the places in which they lived. Second, federal leaders concluded that this magnanimous system required boundaries of the sort that no European empire had imposed, with race serving as the primary determinant for who could or could not be an American. In the Northwest Territory, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, Americans took the same approach. First and foremost, Americans were committed to the notion that these states should enter the Union on an equal footing. Second, Americans claimed that only by making these polities equal would they able to guarantee that all of the citizens who lived within them could be equal. Third, Americans followed this path for reasons beyond a simple abhorrence for the inequality they associated with European empires. American

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policymakers were well aware of how much stock white settlers placed in the notion of equality. They knew that anything short of individual and jurisdictional equality would generate resentment in the West that could well explode in a full-blown separatist movement.10 Policymakers reached these conclusions because white settlers said as much, and they said so loudly. For example, when the leadership of the Northwest Territory recommended against statehood in 1802, local elites responded that “the people” were “fully competent to govern themselves . . . [and were] the only proper judges of their own interests and their own concerns.”11 If white settlers were committed to their own equality as citizens, they were equally committed to the notion that the United States needed clear and restrictive boundaries on who could be a citizen. This was a process that proceeded along parallel but nonetheless distinct trajectories in the eastern and western portions of the nation. In the 1790s, the federal government enacted naturalization laws that applied primarily to Europeans arriving in the port cities of the eastern seaboard. These laws embodied the notions of freedom and equality that had inspired the Revolution. Immigrants would undergo a formal period of naturalization, during which they were supposed to acculturate themselves to their new home and, most important, learn the political principles of American citizenship. To many Americans, that meant learning about the constitutional structure of the United States, embracing republican government, and rejecting both empire and monarchy. This was very much like territorial rule, for it was a probationary period rather than a period of permanent inequality. At the end of this process, immigrants would become fully integrated citizens. Like the new states that the federal government hoped to create in the West, these citizens would be on an equal footing with their native-born countrymen.12 Not only did territorial government and federal naturalization reflect the same principles of equality, but in both the East and the West the federal and state governments were creating tremendous inequality along racial lines. Yet, in the context of that era, this was hardly an ironic or tragic betrayal of American principles. To the contrary, equality and inequality emerged from the same roots, and in both cases they reflected the same rejection of imperial precedent. The state and federal governments made clear that nonwhites were beyond the pale of citizenship. In the West, this division was most apparent in federal policy vis-à-vis Native Americans. Throughout the 1790s, the federal government sought to crush the resistance movements of Native Americans throughout the West. Unlike the political principles of the Northwest Ordinance, through which western territories entered the Union on equal terms, Native Americans who accepted federal sovereignty would not enter the Union as equals. Denied citizenship by law and practice, they would become a permanently subservient people.13 Federal policy toward Native Americans stood in marked distinction to the law and practice of European empires. Although Europeans were committed to racial supremacy in the Americas, they approached that task in a way that mirrored the political structure of empires. After all, empires were founded on the principle of inequality between both people and places. In practical terms, that meant levels of inequality in American colonies. Equally important, both France and Spain saw a vital role for Native Americans. Unable to convince

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residents of their own countries to migrate to the Americas in large numbers, France and Spain relied on Native American labor, Native American trade, and military power to preserve their colonies and generate commercial profits for the home countries.14 In sharp contrast, the thousands of British migrants guaranteed that the British government had no need for Native American allies. Meanwhile, British settlers who arrived in the Americas in pursuit of land ownership coveted Native American territory. After American Independence invalidated older European notions of inequality between citizens, whites made clear that the equality of the United States would not apply to Native Americans. The same principles applied to African Americans. The assumption that African Americans, whether enslaved or free, lived outside the guarantees of citizenship was particularly clear in the Southeast, home to the largest number of African Americans in the United States. When Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal” he did so without any of the sense of irony or sadness that informs a modern reading of that passage. In Jefferson’s Virginia, all men were created equal, because the men relegated to unequal status were overwhelmingly African American and enslaved, and therefore beyond Jefferson’s consideration. In Jefferson’s Virginia, where the most degrading forms of labor—reserved in Europe for white peasants—went to African American slaves, all white men truly did appear equal. Men like Jefferson could believe in equality because they owned slaves, not despite it.15 This does not mean Jefferson, or other Americans for that matter, were oblivious to the tensions between American claims to freedom and equality and the reality of African American enslavement. In the 1770s and 1780s, northern states eliminated slavery. Jefferson himself exerted both energy and political capital to help make certain the Northwest Ordinance included a prohibition against slavery in any of the new states created from that territory. Recent research has confirmed that for more than thirty years Jefferson maintained a relationship with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings.16 Yet Jefferson remained a committed racial supremacist, especially when it came to political rights. Jefferson demonstrated his commitment to these principles in no uncertain terms. As a private citizen, his personal fortune and the freedom to pursue a political career depended on the profits he received from the slave labor on various plantations he owned. As a public figure, Jefferson helped extend these general principles into the West. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson took personal charge of preserving the course of western policy when he became president of the United States. Two years later, Congress created the state of Ohio. The residents of the new state in turn went to the polls, electing a governor and state legislature. A single Ohio congressman and two senators soon traveled to Washington to join their colleagues from the other states. To Jefferson, it was an important moment in the history of governance. Rather than reduce the national domain to colonial subservience, the United States had extended freedom, citizenship, and equality into the West. Meanwhile, the federal government had successfully extinguished the most threatening Native American resistance movements in the Northwest and the Mississippi Territory. Although slavery remained in place in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, the prohibitions against enslavement in the Northwest meant that only a small African American population moved to the territory.

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The situation in 1803 marked a high point of calm in the governance of western territory and western peoples. Before the year was out, the United States found itself governing a vast new domain, and this time resolving the old tensions of empire were far less simple.

BEYOND

THE

MISSISSIPPI

On July 4, 1803, Thomas Jefferson celebrated the twenty-seventh anniversary of Independence by informing his fellow citizens that they had just acquired a vast new western terrain. Quickly dubbed the Louisiana Purchase (Document 1.2), this agreement extended the United States beyond the Mississippi, doubled the size of the Republic, and dominated both domestic and foreign policy making for two decades. With the acquisition of territory and population, the United States suddenly looked much more like an empire. So it was hardly surprising that, in the years that followed, Americans sought to prevent the pitfalls of empire and would even attempt to redefine empire once and for all. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, American policymakers had hoped to secure the loyalty and contentment of western settlers. They did so politically by guaranteeing equality, but they also did so by bolstering western trade. First and foremost in this policy was an effort to guarantee American access down the length of the Mississippi. When Spain imposed new restrictions on American trade, western settlers became furious. They protested loudly in local meetings, in the new state legislatures of Kentucky and Tennessee, and through their representatives in Congress. And their complaining worked. Resolving what many Americans called the Mississippi Crisis was the first order of business in the Jefferson administration. Meanwhile, France had its own imperial crisis, but of a very different sort. In 1791, a racial revolt exploded on the Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti). Slaves, who constituted more than 80 percent of the population, demanded their freedom in keeping with the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, which had been passed in the National Assembly of revolutionary France. This declaration proclaimed universal equality and the elimination of slavery within the empire. Free people of color demanded their own political incorporation within the French Empire, but initially rejected any alliance with slaves. The white minority opposed change in any form. Eventually, slaves and free people of color found common cause. By 1801, a free man of color and former slave named Toussaint-Louverture had emerged as the de facto ruler of Saint-Domingue, and his demand on the French government was simple: allow local self-rule. He did not seek independence for Saint-Domingue. Instead, he demanded imperial reform, with free people of color assuming a leadership role in the colony. In many ways, he sought exactly the sort of imperial reform that Americans had demanded a generation earlier. But by 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte ruled France, and he was committed to creating a French empire of renewed power under his direct authority. Saint-Domingue produced close to 40 percent of the world’s sugar, and Bonaparte relied on slave labor to fuel this economic engine. Besides, like American policymakers, Bonaparte was entirely unwilling to surrender any authority to nonwhites.17

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In 1802, Bonaparte dispatched a massive army to Saint-Domingue under the command of his brother-in-law. Less than a year later, the army had disintegrated, the victim of tropical disease and the effective tactics of the black revolutionaries. Bonaparte concluded he could no longer control Saint-Domingue. Without Saint-Domingue, Bonaparte had no need for Louisiana, which he had acquired from Spain in 1800 primarily to provide raw materials and strategic support for the Caribbean. And so, in April 1803, Napoleon sold the vast, ill-defined territory of Louisiana to American negotiators, who had arrived in France seeking the more modest goals of acquiring New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The American public responded with jubilation. The peaceful resolution of the Mississippi Crisis was first on their minds, but they also believed (not entirely without cause) that the purchase indicated that European powers took the United States seriously as a negotiating partner. Meanwhile, western settlers were overjoyed at the prospect of a vast new western domain. In Washington, however, the response was measured. Within the administration, it was clear that governing Louisiana would represent an unprecedented test of federal institutions. Members of the House of Representatives and Senate immediately recognized that the acquisition of such a large territory might be the undoing of the American effort to avoid the pitfalls of empire. The land itself was of some concern. Every historical precedent indicated that republics collapsed when they became too large. Of greater concern, however, was the population. The vast majority of Louisiana’s white residents, the people whom the United States would incorporate as citizens, seemed definitively foreign. Most came from the French world, whether that meant Louisiana, Canada, the Caribbean, or France itself. Many American policymakers worried that generations of European imperial rule had left these people politically stunted and incapable of self-government. Indeed, William C. C. Claiborne, the governor of the Mississippi Territory and a commissioner appointed by Jefferson to deal with the acquisition of Louisiana, issued a public statement to Louisiana residents in December 1803 that encouraged them to ensure that their descendants would be able to “appreciate the intrinsic worth of the Government transmitted to them” (Document 1.3).Unlike immigrants, who underwent a naturalization process and whose numbers were diluted by the native-born population in the eastern cities where most immigrants arrived, the Louisianans were the controlling population west of the Mississippi. In addition to their fear that white residents were incapable of self-government, the federal leadership also perceived even greater danger from the nonwhite population. In the lower Mississippi Valley, a slight majority of the overall population was African American, consisting not only of a vast slave population but also the largest, most prosperous, most politically active community of free people of color anywhere in North America. Meanwhile, in the mid- and upper-Mississippi valleys, Native Americans remained the dominant commercial and political force. In response to the challenges brought on by the Louisiana Purchase, Americans transformed their government even as they held fast to long-valued principles. In the debates over what sort of government to construct in the Louisiana Purchase territories (Document 1.4), Congress focused its attention less on territory and more on its

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residents. Some believed the territorial system would be unworkable beyond the Mississippi. As Timothy Pickering told his Senate colleagues, the Louisianans were “incapable of performing the duties or enjoying the blessings of a free government. They are too ignorant to elect suitable men.”18 John Smilie, a member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, stated that “neither the conquest nor the purchase can incorporate them [the residents of a new territory] into the Union. They must remain in the condition of colonies, and be governed according[ly].”19 In the end, it was only with considerable trepidation that Congress adapted the territorial system to Louisiana. Indeed, Congress had to turn the system on its head. Instead of the territorial system enabling American government to expand and govern native-born citizens who already knew how to govern themselves, in Louisiana the territorial system would provide a form of mass naturalization. As one member of Congress explained things in 1804, territorial rule would enable the Louisianans to serve “an apprenticeship to liberty” through which they would be transformed from foreigners into Americans.20 The Governance Act of 1804 (Document 1.5) extended basic forms of representative government to Louisiana, but with more severe restrictions than Congress had ever imposed on the Northwest Territory or the Mississippi Territory. By adapting territorial rule to Louisiana, members of Congress reaffirmed their commitment to equality and their rejection of empire. And they did so for reasons that were no less pragmatic than they were idealistic. When white residents of Louisiana complained about the Governance Plan of 1804 (Document 1.6), Congress immediately raised the old specter of resistance and disunion in the West. A congressional committee investigating the situation concluded that “[o]nly two modes present themselves whereby a dependent province may be held in obedience to its sovereign State—force and affection.”21 The answer was obvious. Force against white citizens was considered morally abhorrent and practically ineffective. If Great Britain, the most powerful empire on earth, had been unable to contain dissent through force, then what chance was there for the United States? Thus, in Louisiana, the federal government set out to co-opt white residents with guarantees of political opportunity. Even as Americans sought to preserve their commitment to self-government and racial supremacy, they recognized that the federal structure itself had to change. In the years following the Louisiana Purchase, the administration of Thomas Jefferson committed itself to a vastly enlarged federal government. In the 1790s, Jefferson himself had resigned as secretary of state in large part because he believed his opponents within the administration of George Washington had dangerously expanded federal powers. A decade later, faced with the challenge of extending the territorial system beyond the Mississippi, Jefferson appointed a large cohort of civil officials and expanded the United States Army in order to defend the nation’s borders against the threats he perceived from Native Americans, slaves, and foreign powers.22 The man chiefly responsible for implementing those goals was Secretary of State James Madison, who had to supervise territorial officials as well the foreign emissaries struggling to negotiate permanent boundaries to the enlarged United States.

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Throughout the rest of Jefferson’s administration, Madison remained committed to the principles that got the United States into the Louisiana negotiations in the first place. He tried, without success, to secure a Spanish cession of the Gulf Coast. Meanwhile, he focused on establishing federal rule along the western banks of the Mississippi River. But Madison was no aggressive expansionist. He believed the United States was barely holding its own in Louisiana and could hardly afford more territory. Meanwhile, Madison attempted to contain existing settlements, fearful that a speculative bonanza into the West would lead to regional chaos, racial conflict, and international war. Madison carried that outlook into his own presidency. Madison successfully exploited both the collapse of the Spanish Empire and the War of 1812 with Great Britain to secure the annexation of the Gulf Coast and the Florida Peninsula. But these additions were entirely consistent with Madison’s long-running goal of securing federal control east of the Mississippi River in a manner that would not exceed the administrative capacities of the federal government. Meanwhile, Jefferson’s 1809 retirement allowed him to entertain his own flights of fancy. Throughout his administration, Jefferson had occasionally toyed with the notion that the United States could and should extend across the continent (Document 1.7). But Jefferson’s comments on the subject were few and far between. As president, Jefferson more often agreed with Madison that the United States should focus on governing what it had. To acquire additional territory would force the United States to become an empire of the old sort, governing by force rather than affection. In 1809, however, Jefferson could write to Madison of an “empire for liberty” that included U.S. control of Cuba. Others within the nation’s policy-making leadership occasionally toyed with plans to acquire Cuba in the years that followed, but the schemes always collapsed, in large part because Americans were unwilling to acquire territory that could not easily be incorporated as a state. They feared such territory would become a colony and in turn convert the United States into an empire. By the time James Madison retired in 1817, the strategy in Louisiana seemed to have worked. The promises of equality in legal, political, and economic terms proved very attractive to white residents. Francophone Louisianans remained an ethnic minority within the United States and often complained about snobbery and distrust they perceived from Anglo-American newcomers who arrived from the East. Nonetheless, most of them found citizenship in the United States infinitely better than membership in any of the European empires. They also delighted in federal policies that promised both the preservation of slavery and the extinction of Native American power, goals they had long sought from the old European governments. In 1812, Louisiana entered the Union, the first state west of the Mississippi. As white Louisianans assumed leadership of the state government and dispatched members of their own community to the Louisiana congressional delegation in Washington, they delighted in the end of their colonial history. When those same white Louisianans joined with AngloAmericans at the Battle of New Orleans in 1815, federal leaders felt confirmed in the wisdom of the plan. Jefferson’s empire for liberty had replaced force with affection, and the United States was stronger as a result.

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MANIFEST DESTINY In retirement Thomas Jefferson was convinced that his own vision of an empire for liberty had proven successful. In the decades since 1776, the United States had acquired both territory and population without descending into the twin evils of despotism or anarchy that he considered the only options for empires of the European sort. If his own plans for the acquisition of Cuba or other territories had come to nothing, the creation of new states in the West suggested how the United States could expand and acquire territory, all the while preserving the principles of equality, liberty, and representative government. It was from his own experiences creating an empire for liberty that Jefferson understood the crisis that soon exploded in Missouri. In 1819, members of the legislature of the Missouri Territory made a formal appeal for statehood. They did so with confidence, for six states had already entered the Union through the territorial system (Ohio in 1803, Louisiana in 1812, Indiana in 1816, Mississippi in 1817, Illinois in 1818, and Alabama in 1819). The Transcontinental Treaty between the United States and Spain had solidified boundaries in the Southwest and obtained the Florida Peninsula (Document 1.8). In the case of Missouri, however, members of Congress opposed to the expansion of slavery proposed that a condition for statehood be a provision in the state constitution providing for gradual emancipation. What followed was a furious debate in Congress and in the nation at large that soon became known as the Missouri Crisis. Congress only resolved the matter through a compromise that allowed Missouri to enter as a slave state along with the free state of Maine, preserving the rough balance in the number of free and slave states. Meanwhile, Congress established the Mason-Dixon Line as a boundary separating the slaveholding South from the free North.23 Americans now know the Missouri Crisis as an argument about slavery, and rightly so. It marked the opening salvo of a rhetorical war that concluded with the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. To Thomas Jefferson, however, this was also an argument about empire. Commenting on the matter to John Adams in December 1819, Jefferson concluded, “the Missouri question . . . is a breaker on which we lose the Missouri country by revolt, and what more, God only knows.”24 Jefferson believed that, by imposing restrictions from Washington, Congress was behaving as empires always did, dictating the future to its colonial peripheries and denying both jurisdictional equality and the right of local citizens to frame their own political futures. Worse still, Jefferson believed Missourians would respond as mistreated colonials always had: they would revolt, and that revolt could well spread to other western territories.25 Of course, Jefferson could afford to feel this way. He had long accommodated himself to the notion that the expansion of freedom for whites came along with the expansion of slavery for African Americans. In the end, the freedom that concerned Jefferson in the Missouri Crisis was the freedom of whites—especially those in the West—to assume control of their own political communities. Indeed, Americans were crafting a historical narrative that lauded the expansion of political unity and representative government in the face of Native American resistance and European hegemony (Document 1.9).

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By the time Jefferson died in 1826, slavery had briefly subsided as a commanding issue of national politics. But slavery itself—an institution of subjugation and political exclusion—was growing by leaps and bounds. Not only was the plantation system thriving in the Southeast, but the creation of new states and territories in the Southwest fueled the creation of new plantation districts, sustained in large part by a vigorous internal slave trade that connected East and West. As had always been the case, the expansion of freedom and opportunity for white settlers in the Southwest depended on the expansion of enslavement. In the same way, the expansion of settlement and of political rights for white settlers also depended on confiscating land and crushing political autonomy for Native Americans. This was a task Jefferson had pursued aggressively, first as secretary of state and then as president. So, too, did his successors. But no president approached the task with more single-minded intensity or effectiveness than Andrew Jackson. A product of the empire for liberty, Jackson entered the political scene from the new western state of Tennessee. A national hero for leading the defense of New Orleans in 1815, Jackson first gained national attention in a series of victorious campaigns against the Native Americans of the Deep South and the Gulf Coast. By the time Jackson ascended to the presidency in 1828, he understood the implications of Jefferson’s empire for liberty. Unlike Jefferson, however, who always claimed to admire and sympathize with Native Americans, Jackson had no such illusions. He saw an undeniable conflict between white settlers and Native Americans in the West. With both groups coveting the same land, Jackson concluded only one side could win. To this end, Jackson initiated the formal policy of Removal (Documents 1.11, 1.12, and 1.13). The federal government would forcibly relocate Native Americans east of the Mississippi to territories further west. As white settlers continued to flood the Transmississippi West, Jackson then extended this policy to a more general system of clearing Native Americans from the territory that white settlers wanted. Jackson had the means to do so, for after two generations of periodic warfare with Native Americans, the United States had both a civil and military structure that could coerce Native Americans—by either threat or force—to bend to the will of the federal leadership. Removal was hardly a break from earlier policy. To the contrary, it was a logical extension. Meanwhile, as with slavery, Removal demonstrated that avoiding the pitfalls of empire by creating new opportunities for whites had always required new forms of inequality and suffering for nonwhites (Document 1.10). American attitudes toward expansion changed during the 1820s and 1830s, even if the fears about empire did not. The territorial system, the creation of new states, the preservation of slavery in the South, and the policy of Removal all preserved the notion that the United States would avoid the pitfalls of empire by preserving equality for white citizens and for the territory they inhabited. White residents born in the old colony of Louisiana continued to proclaim the benefits of this system because it enabled them to enjoy U.S. citizenship, bringing with it political rights they had never known as European colonial subjects. These beliefs exploded in Texas, a place that had always defined the term “peripheral.” The Spanish first constituted the region as a strategic periphery to the more vital colony of

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Mexico. When the empire of Mexico secured its independence in 1821, the Mexican leadership treated Texas the same way. Eagerly welcoming Anglo-American settlers to a place where few Mexicans wanted to live, the Mexican government came to regret the decision. Anglo-Americans took immediate offense when the Mexican government imposed restrictions on slavery and on local self-government. Concluding that Mexican imperialism was incompatible with their American notions of liberty, Anglo-American settlers launched an insurrection that concluded with the creation of an independent Republic of Texas in 1836. Texas soon requested annexation by the United States. The issue immediately unleashed a heated political debate, much of it emerging from the broader dispute over the expansion of slavery. But lost in the rancor was the fact that this was the sort of expansion Thomas Jefferson had long imagined. Rather than receive territory through warfare or through the dictates of distant imperial governments, in this case local residents had formed their own revolution and had requested membership in the United States. They would need to undergo no “apprenticeship to liberty” because they had already shown they were capable of self-government. In 1845, Texas entered the Union, bypassing territorial government altogether in no small part because the Texans had already shown their rejection of empire and had proven that they could govern themselves along an American model. The very success of this system enabled Americans—and especially American policymakers—to make their peace with expansion. In the 1770s and 1780s, Americans had concluded that territorial acquisition would lead either to disunion or to despotism. By the 1830s, few Americans still shared those fears. That was particularly true for a new generation of American leaders, men like Andrew Jackson who were themselves products of the empire for liberty in the West. By the 1840s, the most aggressive expansionists claimed that acquiring new territory was not only viable but necessary. Borrowing from Jefferson’s claims more than a half century

Santa Fe, circa 1847, as it appeared when it was ceded to the United States from Mexico in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Source: The Granger Collection, New York

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earlier, they argued that the United States had a responsibility to extend both freedom and liberty across the continent. Likewise, the federal government had a responsibility to provide territory and commercial opportunity for a population that was undergoing tremendous demographic growth through natural reproduction and European immigration. Americans eventually claimed it was their “Manifest Destiny” to achieve those goals (Document 1.14). The term proved immensely popular, and it came to define the politics and culture of the 1840s and 1850s. The most direct manifestation of Manifest Destiny was the Mexican War of 1846– 1848. Sparked by a boundary dispute that was as much political contrivance as real conflict, the United States launched a rapid and highly effective invasion of the Mexican frontier. The United States Army then marched south, eventually occupying Mexico City itself. Facing total defeat, the Mexican government signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which made massive concessions on all fronts (Document 1.19). Most important, Mexico ceded all of its northern periphery, a vast territory that now constitutes most of the southwestern United States. Americans responded to this outcome with adulation, thrilled both by military victory and by the prospect of new territory. But federal policymakers soon found themselves facing a situation very similar to that of 1803. With foreign territory came foreign people as well as treaty provisions that guaranteed citizenship for those residents. The United States eventually embarked on a policy that indicated both the continuities and changes of the previous fifty years (Document 1.17). First and foremost, the territories acquired through the Mexican War entered the territorial system. Just as Americans and Louisianans had claimed that the Louisiana Purchase showed the benefits of American government over the inequality of European empires, Americans claimed that they had replaced Mexican despotism with American democracy (Document 1.16). At the same time that the territory in the Southwest might be equal, the people were not (Document 1.15). Slaves and Native Americans in the Mexican territories faced the prospect of total exclusion from citizenship in the United States. Many of the Native American villages of the Great Basin and the Rocky Mountains had preserved their autonomy against Mexico, and they struggled to do so against the United States.26 If the United States approached Native Americans in much the same way it had since 1776, the treatment facing Mexican citizens of the Southwest proved very different from that of white Louisianans after 1803. White Louisianans may have complained of ethnic chauvinism, but they nonetheless enjoyed both political and economic opportunity, and the leadership of both Louisiana and Missouri included members of the old Frenchspeaking elite. People who had been transformed from Mexican to U.S. citizens soon faced a legal system that seemed rigged against them (Document 1.18). AngloAmericans quickly dispossessed Mexicans of land and property. Meanwhile, AngloAmerican settlers and territorial officials made few efforts to incorporate Mexicans into the political leadership. Much of the reason for this depended on matters of race. Anglo-Americans knew that many of the residents of the Mexican frontier were of mixed-race ancestry that combined both European and Native American heritage. In sharp contrast, white Louisianans were unquestionably white, this in an age when race remained the primary determinant of

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citizenship. Meanwhile, the rising anti-Catholicism of the antebellum era only reinforced the belief among Anglo-American Protestants that Mexican Catholicism and democracy were incompatible. Finally, there was the simple matter of greed. With territorial officials prepared to favor Anglo-American migrants, newcomers to the Southwest recognized that they could reap windfall profits from the exclusion of the existing population.27 The combination of so many new territories was pushing the federal structure to its limits. Unable to manage so many competing responsibilities at home and abroad, the State Department surrendered most of its domestic responsibilities to the Interior Department, which Congress created in 1849. That administrative change came at an appropriate moment, in both practical and symbolic terms. The enormous demands of governing the people and territory acquired through the Mexican War forced American policymakers to restructure federal resources. But that decision only reflected the fact that the federal system had always emerged to no small degree in response to the challenge of empire. The documents that follow chronicle these years of uncertainty and change, as the United States came into being as a nation opposed to empire, only to find itself thrown into the task of imperial governance. They show how people understood the past as well as the future of North America. They also show how the places we now take for granted as “American,” places that are undeniably part of the United States, reached that point only after a protracted era of conflict and dispute.

Document 1.1 The Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787 Written by the Continental Congress, this landmark piece of legislation became the template the United States adapted to all territorial governance. The federal government applied basic principles established in the Northwest Ordinance—a civil government appointed by the federal government and reporting to the executive branch, provisions for the subsequent creation of a territorial legislature, and the expectation of eventual statehood on an equal footing with the existing states—to create a total of thirty-five states. The only exceptions were the thirteen original states, Vermont (which became an independent republic before joining the Union as a state in 1791), Kentucky and Tennessee (both of which joined the Union directly in 1792 and 1796, respectively), Texas (an independent republic annexed by the United States as a state in 1845), and California (which existed in jurisdictional limbo from 1848 to 1850 before entering the Union immediately as a state). An ORDINANCE for the GOVERNMENT of the TERRITORY of the UNITED STATES, North-West of the RIVER OHIO. BE IT ORDAINED by the United States in Congress assembled, That the said territory, for the purposes of temporary government, be one district; subject, however, to be divided into two districts, as future circumstances may, in the opinion of Congress, make it expedient. Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid, That the estates both of resident and nonresident proprietors in the said territory, dying intestate, shall descend to, and be

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distributed among their children, and the descendants of a deceased child in equal parts; the descendants of a deceased child or grand-child, to take the share of their deceased parent in equal parts among them: And where there shall be no children or descendants, them in equal parts to the next of kin, in equal degree; and among collaterals, the children of a deceased brother or sister of the intestate, shall have in equal parts among them their deceased parents share; and there shall in no case be a distinction between kindred of the whole and half blood; saving in all cases to the widow of the intestate, her third part of the real estate for life, and one third part of the personal estate; and this law relative to descents and dower, shall remain in full force until altered by the legislature of the district,—And until the governor and judges shall adopt laws as herein after mentioned, estates in the said territory may be devised or bequeathed by wills in writing, signed and sealed by him or her, in whom the estate may be, (being of full age) and attested by three witnesses;—and real estates may be conveyed by lease and release, or bargain and sale, signed, sealed, and delivered by the person being of full age, in whom the estate may be, and attested by two witnesses, provided such wills be duly proved, and such conveyances be acknowledged, or the execution thereof duly proved, and be recorded within one year after proper magistrates, courts, and registers shall be appointed for that purpose; and personal property may be transferred by delivery, saving, however, to the French and Canadian inhabitants, and other settlers of the Kaskaskies, Saint Vincent’s, and the neighbouring villages, who have heretofore professed themselves citizens of Virginia, their laws and customs now in force among them, relative to the descent and conveyance of property. Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid, That there shall be appointed from time to time, by Congress, a governor, whose commission shall continue in force for the term of three years, unless sooner revoked by Congress; he shall reside in the district, and have a freehold estate therein, in one thousand acres of land, while in the exercise of his office. There shall be appointed from time to time, by Congress, a secretary, whose commission shall continue in force for four years, unless sooner revoked, he shall reside in the district, and have a freehold estate therein, in five hundred acres of land, while in the exercise of his office; it shall be his duty to keep and preserve the acts and laws passed by the legislature, and the public records of the district, and the proceedings of the governors in his executive department; and transmit authentic copies of such acts and proceedings, every six months, to the secretary of Congress: There shall also be appointed a court to consist of three judges, any two of whom to form a court, who shall have a common law jurisdiction, and reside in the district, and have each therein a freehold estate in five hundred acres of land, while in the exercise of their offices; and their commissions shall continue in force during good behaviour. The governor and judges, or a majority of them, shall adopt and publish in the district, such laws of the original states, criminal and civil, as may be necessary, and best suited to the circumstances of the district, and report them to Congress, from time to time, which laws shall be in force in the district until the organization of the general assembly therein, unless disapproved of by Congress; but afterwards the legislature shall have authority to alter them as they shall think fit.

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The governor for the time being, shall be commander in chief of the militia, appoint and commission all officers in the same, below the rank of general officers; all general officers shall be appointed and commissioned by Congress. Previous to the organization of the general assembly, the governor shall appoint such magistrates and other civil officers, in each county or township, as he shall find necessary for the preservation of the peace and good order in the same: After the general assembly shall be organized, the powers and duties of magistrates and other civil officers shall be regulated and defined by the said assembly; but all magistrates and other civil officers, not herein otherwise directed, shall, during the continuance of this temporary government, be appointed by the governor. For the prevention of crimes and injuries, the laws to be adopted or made shall have force in all parts of the district, and for the execution of process, criminal and civil, the governor shall make proper division thereof—and he shall proceed from time to time, as circumstances may require, to lay out the parts of the district in which the Indian titles shall have been extinguished, into counties and townships, subject, however, to such alterations as may thereafter be made by the legislature. So soon as there shall be five thousand free male inhabitants, of full age, in the district, upon giving proof thereof to the governor, they shall receive authority, with time and place, to elect representatives from their counties or townships, to represent them in the general assembly; provided that for every five hundred free male inhabitants there shall be one representative, and so on progressively with the number of free male inhabitants, shall the right of representation increase, until the number of representatives shall amount to twenty-five, after which the number and proportion of representatives shall be regulated by the legislature; provided that no person be eligible or qualified to act as a representative, unless he shall have been a citizen of one of the United States three years and be a resident in the district, or unless he shall have resided in the district three years, and in either case shall likewise hold in his own right, in fee simple, two hundred acres of land within the same:—Provided also, that a freehold in fifty acres of land in the district, having been a citizen of one of the states, and being resident in the district; or the like freehold and two years residence in the district shall be necessary to qualify a man as an elector of a representative. The representatives thus elected, shall serve for the term of two years, and in case of the death of a representative, or removal from office, the governor shall issue a writ to the county or township for which he was a member, to elect another in his stead, to serve for the residue of the term. The general assembly, or legislature, shall consist of the governor, legislative council, and a house of representatives. The legislative council shall consist of five members, to continue in office five years, unless sooner removed by Congress, any three of whom to be a quorum, and the members of the council shall be nominated and appointed in the following manner, to wit: As soon as representatives shall be elected, the governor shall appoint a time and place for them to meet together, and, when met, they shall nominate ten persons, residents in the district, and each possessed of a freehold in five hundred acres of land, and return their names to Congress; five of whom Congress shall appoint and commission to serve as aforesaid; and whenever a vacancy shall happen in the council,

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by death or removal from office, the house of representatives shall nominate two persons, qualified as aforesaid, for each vacancy, and return their names to Congress; one of whom Congress shall appoint and commission for the residue of the term; and every five years, four months at least before the expiration of the time of service of the members of council, the said house shall nominate ten persons, qualified as aforesaid, and return their names to Congress, five of whom Congress shall appoint and commission to serve as members of the council five years, unless sooner removed. And the governor, legislative council, and house of representatives, shall have authority to make laws in all cases for the good government of the district, not repugnant to the principles and articles in this ordinance established and declared. And all bills having passed by a majority in the house, and by a majority in the council, shall be referred to the governor for his assent; but no bill or legislative act whatever, shall be of any force without his assent. The governor shall have power to convene, prorogue and dissolve the general assembly, when in his opinion it shall be expedient. The governor, judges, legislative council, secretary, and such other officers as Congress shall appoint in the district, shall make an oath or affirmation of fidelity, and of office, the governor before the president of Congress, and all other officers before the governor. As soon as a legislature shall be formed in the district, the council and house, assembled in one room, shall have authority by joint ballot to elect a delegate to Congress, who shall have a seat in Congress, with a right of debating, but not of voting, during this temporary government. And for extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, which form the basis whereon these republics, their laws and constitutions are erected; to fix and establish those principles as the basis of all laws, constitutions and governments, which forever hereafter shall be formed in the said territory,—to provide also for the establishment of states, and permanent government therein, and for their admission to a share in the federal councils on an equal footing with the original states, at as early periods as may be consistent with the general interest: It is hereby ordained and declared by the authority aforesaid, That the following articles shall be considered as articles of compact between the original states and the people and states in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent, to wit: Article the First. No person, demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments in the said territory. Article the Second. The inhabitants of the said territory shall always be entitled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the trial by jury; of a proportionate representation of the people in the legislature, and of judicial proceedings according to the course of the common law; all persons shall be bailable unless for capital offences, where the proof shall be evident, or the presumption great; and fines shall be moderate, and no cruel or unusual punishments shall be inflicted; no man shall be deprived of his liberty or property but by his judgment of his peers, or the law of the land; and should the public exigencies make it necessary for the common preservation to take any person’s property, or to demand his particular services, full compensation shall be made for the same;—and in the just

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preservation of rights and property it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall in any manner whatever interfere with, or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide and without fraud previously formed. Article the Third. Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they never shall be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorised by Congress; but laws found in justice and humanity shall from time to time be made, for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them. Article the Fourth. The said territory, and the states which may be formed therein, shall forever remain a part of this confederacy of the United States of America, subject to the articles of confederation, and to such alterations therein as shall be constitutionally made; and to all the acts and ordinances of the United States in Congress assembled, conformable thereto. The inhabitants and settlers in the said territory, shall be subject to pay a part of the federal debts contracted or to be contracted, and a proportional part of the expences of government, to be apportioned on them by Congress, according to the same common rule and measure by which apportionments thereof shall be made on the other states; and the taxes for paying their proportion, shall be laid and levied by the authority and direction of the legislatures of the district or districts or new states, as in the original states, within the time agreed upon by the United States in Congress assembled. The legislatures of those districts, or new states, shall never interfere with the primary disposal of the soil by the United States in Congress assembled, nor with any regulations Congress may find necessary for securing the title in such soil to the bona fide purchasers. No tax shall be imposed on lands the property of the United States; and in no case shall non-resident proprietors be taxed higher than residents. The navigable waters leading into the Missisippi and St. Lawrence, and the carrying places between the same shall be common highways, and forever free, as well to the inhabitants of the said territory, as to the citizens of the United States, and those of any other states that may be admitted into the confederacy, without any tax, impost or duty therefor. Article the Fifth. There shall be formed in the said territory, not less than three nor more than five states; and the boundaries of the states, as soon as Virginia shall alter her act of cession and consent to the same, shall become fixed and established as follows, to wit: The western state in the said territory, shall be bounded by the Missisippi, the Ohio and Wabash rivers; a direct line drawn from the Wabash and Post Vincent’s due north to the territorial line between the United States and Canada, and by the said territorial line to the lake of the Woods and Missisippi. The middle state shall be bounded by the said direct line, the Wabash from Post Vincent’s to the Ohio; by the Ohio, by a direct line drawn due north from the mouth of the Great Miami to the said territorial line, and by the said territorial line. The eastern state shall be bounded by the last mentioned direct line, the Ohio, Pennsylvania, and the said territorial line: Provided however, and it is further understood and declared, that the boundaries of these three states, shall be subject so far to be altered, that if Congress shall hereafter find it expedient, they shall

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have authority to form one or two states in that part of the said territory which lies north of an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of lake Michigan: and whenever any of the said states shall have sixty thousand free inhabitants therein, such state shall be admitted by its delegates into the Congress of the United states, on an equal footing with the original states in all respects whatever; and shall be at liberty to form a permanent constitution and state government: Provided the constitution and government so to be formed, shall be republican, and in conformity to the principles contained in these articles; and so far as it can be consistent with the general interest of the confederacy, such admission shall be allowed at an earlier period, and when there may be a less number of free inhabitants in the state than sixty thousand. Article the Sixth. There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided always, that any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original states, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid. Be it ordained by the authority aforesaid, That the resolutions of the 23d of April, 1784, relative to the subject of this ordinance, be, and the same are hereby repealed and declared null and void. DONE by the UNITED STATES in CONGRESS assembled, the 13th day of July, in the year of our Lord 1787, and of their sovereignty and independence the 12th. Source: Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, Library of Congress, American Memory Collection, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/bdsdcc.22501.

Document 1.2 The Louisiana Purchase, April 30, 1803 The Louisiana Purchase extended the boundaries of the United States beyond the Mississippi River and doubled the national domain. It was an unexpected acquisition. For close to a year, Robert R. Livingston, the American minister to France, had tried without success to negotiate a deal with France to cede New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. By the time James Monroe arrived in France to assist with the negotiations in March 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte had already decided to cede all of Louisiana in response to the collapse of French control in Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti). The final negotiations were a hurried affair, producing the treaty in less than one month. Although dated April 30, French and American officials signed the document on May 2. The U.S. Senate ratified the treaty on October 20, 1803. Much of the treaty concerned the $15 million price tag ($11.3 million in direct payments from the United States, $3.5 million in forgiveness for outstanding French debts) and subsequent commercial requirements from the United States. The following excerpts from the treaty address the status of the land itself and also its occupants. These provisions became a model that the United States applied in subsequent treaties that transferred both land and population.

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Treaty Between The United States Of America And The French Republic The President of the United States of America and the First Consul of the French Republic in the name of the French People desiring to remove all Source of misunderstanding relative to objects of discussion mentioned in the Second and fifth articles of the Convention of the 8th Vendé miaire an 9/30 September 1800 relative to the rights claimed by the United States in virtue of the Treaty concluded at Madrid the 27 of October 1795, between His Catholic Majesty & the Said United States, & willing to Strengthen the union and friendship which at the time of the Said Convention was happily reestablished between the two nations have respectively named their Plenipotentiaries to wit The President of the United States, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate of the Said States; Robert R. Livingston Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States and James Monroe Minister Plenipotentiary and Envoy extraordinary of the Said States near the Government of the French Republic; And the First Consul in the name of the French people, Citizen Francis Barbé Marbois Minister of the public treasury who after having respectively exchanged their full powers have agreed to the following Articles.

Article I Whereas by the Article the third of the Treaty concluded at St Ildefonso the 9th Vendé miaire an 9/1st October 1800 between the First Consul of the French Republic and his Catholic Majesty it was agreed as follows. “His Catholic Majesty promises and engages on his part to cede to the French Republic six months after the full and entire execution of the conditions and Stipulations herein relative to his Royal Highness the Duke of Parma, the Colony or Province of Louisiana with the Same extent that it now has in the hand of Spain, & that it had when France possessed it; and Such as it Should be after the Treaties subsequently entered into between Spain and other States.” And whereas in pursuance of the Treaty and particularly of the third article the French Republic has an incontestible title to the domain and to the possession of the said Territory—The First Consul of the French Republic desiring to give to the United States a strong proof of his friendship doth hereby cede to the United States in the name of the French Republic for ever and in full Sovereignty the said territory with all its rights and appurtenances as fully and in the Same manner as they have been acquired by the French Republic in virtue of the above mentioned Treaty concluded with his Catholic Majesty.

Art: II In the cession made by the preceeding article are included the adjacent Islands belonging to Louisiana all public lots and Squares, vacant lands and all public buildings, fortifications, barracks and other edifices which are not private property.—The Archives, papers & documents relative to the domain and Sovereignty of Louisiana and its dependances will be left in the possession of the Commissaries of the United States, and copies will be afterwards

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given in due form to the Magistrates and Municipal officers of such of the said papers and documents as may be necessary to them.

Art: III The inhabitants of the ceded territory shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States and admitted as soon as possible according to the principles of the federal Constitution to the enjoyment of all these rights, advantages and immunities of citizens of the United States, and in the mean time they shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty, property and the Religion which they profess.

Art: IV There Shall be Sent by the Government of France a Commissary to Louisiana to the end that he do every act necessary as well to receive from the Officers of his Catholic Majesty the Said country and its dependances in the name of the French Republic if it has not been already done as to transmit it in the name of the French Republic to the Commissary or agent of the United States.

Art: V Immediately after the ratification of the present Treaty by the President of the United States and in case that of the first Consul’s shall have been previously obtained, the commissary of the French Republic shall remit all military posts of New Orleans and other parts of the ceded territory to the Commissary or Commissaries named by the President to take possession—the troops whether of France or Spain who may be there shall cease to occupy any military post from the time of taking possession and shall be embarked as soon as possible in the course of three months after the ratification of this treaty.

Art: VI The United States promise to execute Such treaties and articles as may have been agreed between Spain and the tribes and nations of Indians until by mutual consent of the United States and the said tribes or nations other Suitable articles Shall have been agreed upon.

Art: VII As it is reciprocally advantageous to the commerce of France and the United States to encourage the communication of both nations for a limited time in the country ceded by the present treaty until general arrangements relative to commerce of both nations may be agreed on; it has been agreed between the contracting parties that the French Ships coming directly from France or any of her colonies loaded only with the produce and manufactures of France or her Said Colonies; and the Ships of Spain coming directly from Spain or any of her colonies loaded only with the produce or manufactures of Spain or her Colonies shall be admitted during the Space of twelve

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years in the Port of New-Orleans and in all other legal ports-of-entry within the ceded territory in the Same manner as the Ships of the United States coming directly from France or Spain or any of their Colonies without being Subject to any other or greater duty on merchandize or other or greater tonnage than that paid by the citizens of the United States. During that Space of time above mentioned no other nation Shall have a right to the Same privileges in the Ports of the ceded territory—the twelve years Shall commence three months after the exchange of ratifications if it Shall take place in France or three months after it Shall have been notified at Paris to the French Government if it Shall take place in the United States; It is however well understood that the object of the above article is to favour the manufactures, Commerce, freight and navigation of France and of Spain So far as relates to the importations that the French and Spanish Shall make into the Said Ports of the United States without in any Sort affecting the regulations that the United States may make concerning the exportation of the produce and merchandize of the United States, or any right they may have to make Such regulations.

Art: VIII In future and for ever after the expiration of the twelve years, the Ships of France shall be treated upon the footing of the most favoured nations in the ports above mentioned.

Art: IX The particular Convention Signed this day by the respective Ministers, having for its object to provide for the payment of debts due to the Citizens of the United States by the French Republic prior to the 30th Sept. 1800 (8th Vendé miaire an 9) is approved and to have its execution in the Same manner as if it had been inserted in this present treaty, and it Shall be ratified in the same form and in the Same time So that the one Shall not be ratified distinct from the other. Another particular Convention Signed at the Same date as the present treaty relative to a definitive rule between the contracting parties is in the like manner approved and will be ratified in the Same form, and in the Same time and jointly.

Art: X The present treaty Shall be ratified in good and due form and the ratifications Shall be exchanged in the Space of Six months after the date of the Signature by the Ministers Plenipotentiary or Sooner if possible. In faith whereof the respective Plenipotentiaries have Signed these articles in the French and English languages; declaring nevertheless that the present Treaty was originally agreed to in the French language; and have thereunto affixed their Seals.

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Done at Paris the tenth day of Floreal in the eleventh year of the French Republic; and the 30th of April 1803. Robt R Livingston [seal] Jas. Monroe [seal] Barbé Marbois [seal] Source: “The Louisiana Purchase: Transcriptions,” National Archives and Records Administration, www. archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/louistxt.html.

Document 1.3 William C. C. Claiborne to the People of Louisiana, December 20, 1803 William Charles Cole Claiborne was a Virginian who represented Tennessee in Congress during the 1790s before Thomas Jefferson appointed him governor of the Mississippi Territory in 1801. That assignment made him well suited (both in location and experience) to serve as one of the commissioners who oversaw the transfer of the Louisiana Purchase to the United States. Claiborne read this statement at a public ceremony at the Cabildo, the primary administrative building for the colony during the eighteenth century and now a museum of Louisiana history in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Claiborne subsequently served as appointed governor of the territory of Orleans before becoming the first elected governor of its jurisdictional successor, the state of Louisiana. In 1816 he won election to the United States Senate, only to die shortly before taking office. In this proclamation, Claiborne attempted to explain what the Louisiana Purchase would mean for the white residents of Louisiana. Fellow Citizens of Louisiana! On the great and interesting event which is now finally consummated;—An event so advantageous to yourselves, and so glorious to United America, I cannot forbear offering you my warmest congratulations.—The wise Policy of the Consul of France, has by the Cession of Louisiana to the United States secured to you a connection beyond the reach of change, and to your posterity the sure inheritance of Freedom. The American people receive you as Brothers, and will hasten to extend to you a participation in those invaluable rights which have formed the basis of their own unexampled prosperity. Under the Auspices of the American Government, you may confidently rely upon the security of your Liberty, your property and the religion of your choice;—You may with equal certainty rest assured that your commerce will be promoted, and your agriculture cherished; in a word that your interest will be among the principal cares of the National Legislature. In return for these benefits the United States will be amply remunerated, if your growing attachment to the Constitution of our Country, and your veneration for the principles on which it is founded, be duly proportioned to the blessings which they will confer.

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Among your first duties therefore you should cultivate with assiduity among yourselves the advancement of Political information; you should guide the rising generation in the paths of republican economy and virtue: you should encourage Literature, for without the advantages of education, your descendants will be unable sufficiently to appreciate the intrinsic worth of the Government transmitted to them. As for myself fellow Citizens, receive a sincere assurance that during my continuance in the situation in which the President of the United States has been pleased to place me, every exertion will be made on my part, to foster your internal happiness, and to promote your general welfare, for it is by such measures alone, that I can Secure to myself the approbation of those great and just men who preside in the Council of our nation. Source: The Letter Books of William C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816, ed. Dunbar Rowland (Jackson: Mississippi State Archive), vol. 1, 309–310.

Document 1.4 Congress Debates the Future of Louisiana, 1803–1804 and 1810–1811 Congress vigorously debated how to govern foreign people and foreign territory in 1803–1804 (when the federal government developed a preliminary government for Louisiana) and in 1810–1811 (when the territory of Orleans requested permission to draft a state constitution). These excerpts reflect concerns about managing a population that seemed unprepared for U.S. citizenship. The first set of excerpts is from November 3, 1803, as members of Congress argued with each other. Although much of the debate followed party lines (the DemocraticRepublicans supporting the plans proposed by their president, Thomas Jefferson, and the Federalists opposing those plans), some congressmen and senators broke with their parties. The chief participants were senators John Breckinridge, D-Ky.; Timothy Pickering, FMass.; John Taylor, D-R-Va.; and Samuel White, F-Del.; and representatives William Eustis, D-R-Mass.; Gaylord Griswold, F-N.Y.; Samuel Mitchill, D-N.Y.; and Joseph Nicholson, D-R-Md. The second set of excerpts consists of individual statements issued by members of the House of Representatives in January 1811. They engaged in less back-and-forth debate than their colleagues had seven years earlier. November 3, 1803 The Senate resumed the second reading of the bill, entitled “An act authorizing the creation of a stock to the amount of eleven millions two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, for the purpose of carrying into effect the convention of the 30th of April, 1803, between the United States of America and the French Republic, and making provision for the payment of the same;” and having amended the bill . . . Mr. WHITE rose and made the following remarks:

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. . . as to Louisiana, this new, immense, unbounded world, if it should ever be incorporated into this Union, which I have no idea can be done but by altering the Constitution. I believe it will be the greatest curse that could at present befall us; it may be productive of innumerable evils, and especially of one that I fear even to look upon. Gentlemen on all sides, with very few exceptions, agree that the settlement of this country will be highly injurious and dangerous to the United States . . . The gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. COCKE) has shown his usual candor on this subject, and I believe with him, to use his strong language, that you had as well pretend to inhibit the fish from swimming in the sea as to prevent the population of that country after its sovereignty shall become ours . . . Louisiana must and will become settled, if we hold it, and with the very population that would otherwise occupy part of our present territory. Thus our citizens will be removed to the immense distance of two or three thousand miles from the capital of the Union, where they will scarcely ever feel the rays of the General Government; their affections will become alienated; they will gradually begin to view us as strangers; they will form other commercial connexions, and our interests will become distinct. These, with other causes that human wisdom may not now foresee, will in time effect a separation, and I fear our bounds will be fixed nearer to our houses than the waters of the Mississippi. We have already territory enough, and when I contemplate the evils that may arise to these States, from this intended incorporation of Louisiana into the Union, I would rather see it given to France, to Spain, or to any other nation of the earth, upon the mere condition that no citizen of the United States should ever settle within its limits, than to see the territory sold for an hundred millions of dollars, and we retain the sovereignty . . . Mr. WRIGHT. . . . Can it be supposed that the Louisianians, who so lately gave so demonstrative proof of their loyalty in their answer to the address of the Prefect of France, will be less disposed to loyalty to the United States, when they recollect that we have treated them as our children, and ourselves, by securing them in their property and in their civil and religious liberty, agreeably to the principles of our own Constitution? Can they be so unwise as to prefer being the colonists of a distant European Power, to being members of this immense Empire, with all the privileges of American citizens? Can any gentleman seriously entertain such an unauthorized opinion—that that people, whom we have seen so lately, with so much respect to their late King, submit cheerfully to be citizens of the French Republic, will now, in direct violation to the royal order, refuse to obey it, and treasonably take up arms to resist its execution? It is cruel as it is unfounded! But should an infatuation so treasonable beget in them insurgent principles of resistance, I hope and trust that our troops on the spot may be permitted to aid the officers of His Catholic Majesty to reduce them to reason and submission to the royal order of their King; that they may be delivered up to be brought to condign punishment, and that their treasonable project may be nipped in the bud . . . Mr. TAYLOR. . . . Recollect, sir, that it has been proved that the United States may acquire territory. Territory, so acquired, becomes from the acquisition itself a portion of the

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territories of the United States, or may be united with their territories without being erected into a State. An union of territory is one thing; of States another. Both are exemplified by an actual existence. The United States possess territory, comprised in the union of territory, and not in the union of States. Congress is empowered to regulate or dispose of territorial sections of the Union, and have exercised the power; but it is not empowered to regulate or dispose of State sections of the Union. The citizens of these territorial sections are citizens of the United S[t]ates, and they have all the rights of citizens of the United States; but such rights do not include those political rights arising from State compacts or governments, which are dissimilar in different States. Supposing the General Government or treaty-making power have no right to add or unite States and State citizens to the Union, yet they have a power of adding or uniting to it territory and territorial citizens of the United States. . . . The Constitution recognises and the practice warrants an incorporation of a Territory and its inhabitants into the Union, without admitting either as a State . . . . . . I had hoped . . . that the gentleman from Connecticut, (Mr. TRACY) from the trouble he was so good as to give himself yesterday in assisting to amend this bill, would have voted for it; but it seems he is constrained to vote to-day against it. He asks, if the United States have power to acquire and add new States to the Union, can they not also cede States? . . . I answer they cannot; but for none of the reasons assigned by him. The Government of the United States cannot . . . because, first, it would be annihilating part of that sovereignty of the nation which is whole and entire, and upon which the Government of the United States is dependant for its existence; and secondly, because the fourth section of the fourth article of the Constitution forbids it. But how does it follow as a consequence, that because the United States cannot cede an existing State, they cannot acquire a new State? He admits explicitly that Congress may acquire territory and hold it as a territory, but cannot incorporate it into the Union. By this construction he admits the power to acquire territory, a modification infinitely more dangerous than the unconditional admission of a new State; for by his construction, territories and citizens are considered and held as the property of Government of the United States, and may consequently be used as dangerous engines in the hands of the Government against the States and people. Could we not, says the same gentleman, incorporate in the Union some foreign nation containing ten millions of inhabitants—Africa, for instance—and thereby destroy our Government? Certainly the thing would be possible if Congress would do it, and the people consent to it; but it is supposing so extreme a case and is so barely possible, that it does not merit serious refutation. It is also possible and equally probable that republicanism itself may one day or other become unfashionable, (for I believe it is not without its enemies,) and that the people of America may call for a King . . . The same gentleman . . . observes, that although Congress may admit new States, the President and Senate who are but a component part, cannot. Apply this doctrine to the case before us. How could Congress by any mode of legislation admit this country into the Union until it was acquired? And how can this acquisition be made except through the treaty-making power? Could the gentleman rise in his place and move for leave to

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bring in a bill for the purchase of Louisiana and its admission into the Union? I take it that no transaction of this or any other kind with a foreign Power can take place except through the Executive Department, and that in the form of a treaty, agreement, or convention. When the acquisition is made, Congress can then make such disposition of it as may be expedient. 1811 Representative Daniel Sheffey (F, VA), 2 January 1811 (484): Whilst he was disposed to treat the inhabitants of Orleans Territory, as brothers, and not as vassals, he was not ready to transfer the inheritance purchased by the blood of our fathers to foreigners. While he looked upon these people as equals, and was disposed to do them justice, he thought all they could demand at his hands was to be placed on the equality to which they were entitled. Representative Pleasant Miller (D-R, Tenn.), 4 January 1811 (495-496): It has been objected against the bill that the population of the State proposed will not be American. Without intimating how far this consideration may have influence on my mind, under the circumstances in which that country has been lately placed, I cannot, however, but remark that it is natural for a man to carry his feelings and prejudices about him. I was born in Virginia, sir, and I have not yet lost some of my Virginia feelings, notwithstanding an absence of fifteen years, and I cannot see why we should expect the people or Orleans to act and feel differently from other people, more particularly, when the French nation is towering so far above the other nations of the earth; they will have a secret pride in their glory, they will have some attachments, to what extent I cannot say; but, inasmuch as we know that if we send Paddy to Paris, that Paddy he will come back, the idea is certainly not unworthy of our consideration. Representative Josiah Quincy (F, MA), 14 January 1811 (524-538): To me, it appears that it [Louisiana Statehood] would justify a revolution in this country; and that, in no great length of time, may produce it . . . But, says the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. RHEA) “these people have been seven years citizens of the United States.” I deny it. Sir—as citizens of New Orleans, or of Louisiana, they never have been, and by the mode proposed never will be, citizens of the United States . . . This Constitution never was, and never can be strained to lap over all the wilderness of the West, without essentially affecting both the rights and convenience of its real properties. It was never constructed to form a covering for the inhabitants of the Missouri, and the Red River country. And whenever it is attempted to be stretched over them, it will rend asunder . . . You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties, and property of this people, in a “hotch-pot” with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the mixed, though more respectable race of Anglo-HispanoGallo Americans, who bask on the sands, in the mouth of the Mississippi. I make no objection to these from their want of moral qualities or political light. The inhabitants of New Orleans are, I suppose, like those of all other countries, some good, some bad, some indifferent. Representative Nathaniel Macon (D-R, NC), 2 January 1811 (485): There ought to be no question as to what stock they sprung from; the true question was, ought they to be a State? The true policy, Mr. M. thought, was, as they were to become a part of the United States, to make them one and indivisible as soon as possible. They had already served a

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sufficient apprenticeship to the Untied States, but not under a free government, for the Territorial governments were not free. The advantage of exacting of them the condition of using the same language, was a great one. How could they be made one with the United States unless by the use of the same language? Mr. M. wished to treat this Territory as well as the others, and no better; he would not treat one as a daughter and the other as a step-daughter. He was as willing now to make Orleans a State as he had been to make Ohio a State. The great object is to make us one people; to make this nation one. As to the Mississippi Territory, it had not served a much longer apprenticeship than Orleans, having only been acquired by the treaty with Spain in 1795. The people of Orleans possessed certainly as strong an attachment to the nation as could be expected from the time they had belonged to it. When the Spaniards invaded the Territory, they stepped forward promptly to repel them; and when some citizens of the old States forgot the love every honest heart owes to his country, they showed their attachment to the Union by the readiness with which they lent their aid to repel them. To make them a State would make the attachment still greater, and it was therefore advisable to act on the subject. Representative Nathaniel Macon (TN), 4 January 1811 (506-507): There are various political considerations which operate in favor of the formation of such a State. The people of the Territory of Orleans are petitioning to become an independent State, and I for one hope the prayer of their petition will in substance be granted. It is said that the French population of the city of New Orleans are unfriendly to the American Government. That they have strong prejudices in favor of France. Although, sir, I do not attach so much importance to that circumstance as some gentlemen do, I am willing to admit that French emigrants in Louisiana feel an attachment to their native country. I do not blush to say that were I in France, or in any other foreign country, I could never forget that I was born an American citizen . . . therefore . . . I cannot doubt that many influential French inhabitants of New Orleans entertain a predilection for the country which gave them birth. But . . . there is an American population at least sufficient to neutralize every exotic prejudice which may exist in New Orleans . . . A powerful State on the southern seacoast of the United States is an object of great magnitude in perpetuating the Union, which, for the happiness of the great American family, ought never to be dissolved. Representative John Rhea (TN), 4 January 1811 (498-502): [The Louisiana Purchase and the guarantees of incorporation in Article III are] the act of this nation; it is a solemn compact, made between the United States and the French Republic; it is by the Constitution a supreme law of the land, irrevocable and peremptorily commanding execution in every part to the full extent—it is strange, wonderful strange, indeed, that attempts shall now be made to prevent those people [the residents of the Territories of Orleans and Louisiana] from the enjoyment of all those rights, advantages, and immunities, which the French Republic secured to them and the United States have confirmed by ratification of that treaty. The people of Orleans are anxiously desirous to become a State, and by the best information had, their population appears sufficient . . . It is with states as with individuals; if an individual, the head of a family, purchases a farm adjoining that on which he lives and resides, and probably acquires all the right and title thereto, will any one deny it to be his? Will any one say that he has not power to incorporate it with his former farm, so that both shall be one, or in other words, that purchased with the other shall be but one?

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. . . In place of a waste, wild, and uncultivated territory, the United States obtained in honest and righteous manner, without blood and carnage, a fruitful, luxuriant territory, covered by a great number of people, who, since the time of their being ceded to the United States, have manifested, as much as in their power, their attachment and allegiance to the United States . . . It has been said that Orleans is vulnerable, and therefore you ought, sir, to keep the government in your own hands. I draw a conclusion directly contrary. If Orleans be vulnerable, give the people thereof everything to defend; they have now themselves, their wives and children, and their property to defend; give them all the rights of freemen and citizens, to the full extend of the term, to defend; let them have self-government; let them have all the rights of citizens; let them have a constitution and State government, and a sovereignty to defend, and then, and not until then, you will make them warriors indeed; they will then fight for themselves and for the United States, if invaded, because they will then have everything worth contending for, and because you have liberally endowed them with all these things, their grateful hearts with irresistible vigor will strengthen their arms to wield the sword against the enemies of the United States. The object of the bill is not to transfer a part of a State to a foreign territory, nor is it to favor a French population at the expense of the rights of the United States, nor is it the object of the bill to transfer to foreigners what has been obtained by the blood of the old States. The Territory of Orleans is not a foreign territory; it is a territory of the United States made and declared to be so by two solemn laws of the Congress of the united States, bottomed o the irrevocable treaty of Paris. The population of the Orleans Territory is not a French population; whatever the population was, before the treaty alluded to, it is now and for about seven years past has been a population composed of citizens, to a certain extend of the United States . . . let them be a State, and the United States will be more powerful, because the more numerous an agreeing family is, the more powerful it is; let them be a State, and they will be more induced as citizens to acquire wealth by industry, and every increase of their wealth will be an increase to that of the United States. Representative Thomas Gholson (D-R, VA), 4 January 1811 (503-4): It has been with extreme regret, sir, that I have heard so often, and upon so many former occasions, as well as in the present debate, the charges of French influence and disaffection to this Government, made either in express terms, or else intelligibly insinuated, against the people of New Orleans. Suffer me to ask, sir, where are the evidences to support these imputations? Certainly not before this House—if we examine the history of these people since their connexion with us, abundant testimony will be found, not only to exonerate them from the charge of disaffection, but to demonstrate their fidelity to the American Government. When on the acquisition of that country the most radical innovations upon its laws, customs, usages, and civil proceedings were introduced, these people peaceable submitted without any symptoms of insurgency. When they saw many of their dearest rights endangered or prostrated by new and unprecedented modes of judicial proceeding, and by the chicanery of desperate adventurers, they made no unlawful appeals for redress. When their port of entry was most unwarrentably wrested from them and delivered into the possession of an individual, they awaited the ordinary process of law to be reinstated in that use of it which nature had decreed for them, and of which they could by no earthly power

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be rightfully deprived. And when, in fine, your very borders were invaded they, as faithful citizens, were ready to defend them. Source: Annals of Congress: Debates and Proceedings of the Congress of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1834–1856), 8th Cong., 2nd sess.; 11th Cong., 3rd sess., http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/ lwac.html.

Document 1.5 Louisiana Erected into Two Territories and Temporary Government Established, March 26, 1804 Debate over Louisiana concluded with the following legislation, extending the principles of the Northwest Territory beyond the Mississippi, albeit in adapted form. In the territory of Orleans, Congress created a polity that shared a great deal with the Northwest Territory, but without any timetable for statehood. In the district of Louisiana, Congress simply created an administrative adjunct to the Indiana Territory, which Congress had created the previous year from the territory left over from the old Northwest Territory following Ohio statehood. Opposition to this approach, emanating primarily from New Orleans and St. Louis, proved so strong that Congress revised the structure in 1805, creating an elected House of Representatives and a timetable for statehood in the territory of Orleans, and reconstituting the district of Louisiana as a separate territory of Louisiana, complete with its own governor and administrative structure. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all that portion of country ceded by France to the United States, under the name of Louisiana, which lies south of the Mississippi territory, and of an east and west line to commence on the Mississippi river, at the thirty third degree of North Latitude, and to extend west to the western boundary of the said cession, shall constitute a territory of the United States, under the name of the territory of Orleans, the government whereof shall be organized and administered as follows: SEC. 2. The executive power shall be vested in a governor, who shall reside in the said territory, and hold his office during the term of three years, unless sooner removed by the President of the United States. He shall be commander in chief of the militia of the said territory, shall have power to grant pardons for offences against the said territory, and reprieves for those against the United States, until the decision of the President of the United States thereon, shall be made known, and to appoint and commission all officers civil and of the militia, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law. He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. SEC. 3. A secretary of the territory shall also be appointed, who shall hold his office during the term of four years, unless sooner removed by the President of the United States, whose duty it shall be, under the direction of the governor, to record and preserve all the papers and proceedings of the executive, and all the acts of the governor and legislative council, and transmit authentic copies of the proceedings of the governor in his executive department, every six months, to the President of the United States. In case of the vacancy of the office of governor, the government of the said territory shall devolve on the secretary.

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SEC. 4. The legislative powers shall be vested in the governor, and in thirteen of the most fit and discreet persons of the territory, to be called the legislative council, who shall be appointed annually by the President of the United States 11 from among those holding real estate therein, and who shall have resided one year at least, in the said territory, and hold no office of profit under the territory or the United States. The governor, by and with advice and consent of the said legislative council, or of a majority of them, shall have power to alter, modify, or repeal the laws which may be in force at the commencement of this act. Their legislative powers shall also extend to all the rightful subjects of legislation; but no law shall be valid which is inconsistent with the constitution and laws of the United States, or which shall lay any person under restraint, burden, or disability, on account of his religious opinions, professions, or worship; in all which he shall be free to maintain his own, and not burdened for those of another. The governor shall publish throughout the said territory, all the laws which shall be made, and shall from time to time report the same to the President of the United States to be laid before Congress; which if disapproved of by Congress, shall thenceforth be of no force. The governor or legislative council shall have no power over the primary disposal of the soil, nor to tax the lands of the United States, nor to interfere with the claims to land within the said territory. The governor shall convene and prorogue the legislative council, whenever he may deem it expedient. It shall be his duty to obtain all the information in his power, in relation to the customs, habits, and dispositions of the inhabitants of the said territory, and communicate the same from time to time, to the President of the United States. SEC. 5. The judicial power shall be vested in a superior court, and in such inferior courts, and justices of the peace, as the legislature of the territory may from time to time establish. The judges of the superior court and the justices of the peace, shall hold their offices for the term of four years. The superior court shall consist of three judges, any one of whom shall constitute a court; they shall have jurisdiction in all criminal cases, and exclusive jurisdiction in all three which are capital; and original and appellate jurisdiction in all civil cases of the value of one hundred dollars. Its sessions shall commence on the first Monday of every month, and continue till all the business depending before them shall be disposed of. They shall appoint their own clerk. In all criminal prosecutions which are capital, the trial shall be by a jury of twelve good and lawful men of the vicinage; and in all cases criminal and civil in the superior court, the trial shall be by a jury, if either of the parties require it. The inhabitants of the said territory shall be entitled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus; they shall be bailable, unless for capital offences where the proof shall be evident, or the presumption great; and no cruel and unusual punishments shall be inflicted. SEC. 6. The governor, secretary, judges, district attorney, marshal, and all general officers of the militia, shall be appointed by the President of the United States, in the recess of the Senate; but shall be nominated at their next meeting for their advice and consent. The governor, secretary, judges, members of the legislative council, justices of the peace, and all other officers civil, and of the militia, before they enter upon the duties of their respective offices, shall take an oath or affirmation to support the constitution of the United States, and for the faithful discharge of the duties of their office; the governor, before the President of the United States, or before a judge of

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the supreme or district court of the United States, or before such other person as the President of the United States shall authorize to administer the same; the secretary, judges, and members of the legislative council, before the governor, and all other officers before such persons as the governor shall direct. The governor shall receive an annual salary of five thousand dollars; The secretary of two thousand dollars; and the judges of two thousand dollars each; to be paid quarter-yearly out of the revenues of impost and tonnage accruing within the said territory. The members of the legislative council shall receive four dollars each per day, during their attendance in council. SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That the following acts, that is to say: An act for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States; An act, in addition to an act, for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States; An act to prevent citizens of the United States from privateering against nations in amity with, or against citizens of the United States; An act for the punishment of certain crimes therein specified; An act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from service of their masters; An act to prohibit the carrying on the slave trade from the United States to any foreign place or country; An act to prevent the importation of certain persons into certain states, when by the laws thereof, their admission is prohibited; An act to establish the post office of the United States; An act further to alter and establish certain post-roads, and for the more secure carriage of the mail of the United States; An act for the more general promulgation of the laws of the United States; An act, in addition to an act, intituled an act for the more general promulgation of the laws of the United States; An act to promote the progress of useful arts, and to repeal the act heretofore made for that purpose; An act to extend the privilege of obtaining patents for useful discoveries and inventions to certain persons therein mentioned, and to enlarge and define the penalties for violating the rights of patentees; An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the time therein mentioned; An act supplementary to an act, entitled an act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the time therein mentioned; and extending the benefits thereof to the arts of designing, engraving, and etching historical and other prints; An act providing for salvage in cases of recapture; An act respecting alien enemies; An act to prescribe the mode in which the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings in each state shall be authenticated, so as to take effect in every other state; An act for establishing trading-houses with the Indian tribes;

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An act for continuing in force a law, entitled An act for establishing trading-houses with the Indian tribes; and An act making provision relative to rations for Indians, and to their visits to the seat of Government, Shall extend to, and have full force and effect in the above mentioned territories. SEC. 8. There shall be established in the said territory a district court, to consist of one judge, who shall reside therein, and be called the district judge, and who shall hold, in the city of Orleans, four sessions annually; the first to commence on the third Monday in October next, and the three other sessions, progressively, on the third Monday of every third calendar month thereafter. He shall in all things, have and exercise the same jurisdiction and powers, which are by law given to, or may be exercised by the judge of Kentucky district; and shall be allowed an annual compensation of two thousand dollars, to be paid quarter-yearly out of the revenues of impost and tonnage accruing within the said territory. He shall appoint a clerk for the said district, who shall reside, and keep the records of the court, in the city of Orleans, and shall receive for the services performed by him, the same fees to which the clerk of Kentucky district is entitled for similar services. There shall be appointed in the said district, a person learned in the law, to act as attorney for the United States, who shall, in addition to his stated fees, be paid six hundred dollars, annually, as a full compensation for all extra services. There shall also be appointed a marshal for the said district, who shall perform the same duties, be subject to the same regulations and penalties, and be entitled to the same fees to which marshals in other districts are entitled for similar services; and shall moreover be paid two hundred dollars, annually, as a compensation for all extra services. SEC. 9. All free male white persons, who are house-keepers, and who shall have resided one year, at least, in the said territory, shall be qualified to serve as grand or petit jurors, in the courts of the said territory; and they shall, until the legislature thereof shall otherwise direct, be selected in such manner as the judges of the said courts, respectively shall prescribe, so as to be most conducive to an impartial trial, and to be least burdensome to the inhabitants of the said territory. SEC. 10. It shall not be lawful for any person or persons to import or bring into the said territory, from any port or place without the limits of the United States, or cause or procure to be so imported or brought, or knowingly to aid or assist in so importing or bringing any slave or slaves. And every person so offending, and being thereof convicted before any court within said territory, having competent jurisdiction, shall forfeit and pay for each and every slave so imported or brought, the sum of three hundred dollars; one moiety for the use of the United States, and the other moiety for the use of the person or persons who shall sue for the same; and every slave so imported or brought, shall thereupon become entitled to, and receive his or her freedom. It shall not be lawful for any person or persons to import or bring into the said territory, from any port or place within the limits of the United States, or to cause or procure to be so imported or brought, or knowingly to aid or assist in so importing or bringing any slave or slaves, which shall have been imported since the first day of May, one thousand seven hundred and ninety eight, into any port or place within the limits of the United States, or which

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may hereafter be so imported, from any port or place without the limits of the United States; and every person so offending, and being thereof convicted before any court within said territory, having competent jurisdiction, shall forfeit and pay for each and every slave so imported or brought the sum of three hundred dollars, one moiety for the use of the United States, and the other moiety for the use of the person or persons who shall sue for the same; and no slave or slaves shall directly or indirectly be introduced into said territory, except by a citizen of the United States, removing into said territory for actual settlement, and being at the time of such removal bona fide owner of such slave or slaves; and every slave imported or brought into the said territory, contrary to the provisions of this act, shall thereupon be entitled to, and receive his or her freedom. SEC. 11. The laws in force in the said territory, at the commencement of this act, and not inconsistent with the provisions thereof, shall continue in force, until altered, modified, or repealed by the legislature. SEC. 12. The residue of the province of Louisiana, ceded to the United States, shall be called the District of Louisiana, the government whereof shall be organized and administered as follows: The executive power now vested in the governor of the Indiana territory, shall extend to, and be exercised in the said District of Louisiana. The governor and judges of the Indiana territory shall have power to establish, in the said District of Louisiana, inferior courts, and prescribe their jurisdiction and duties, and to make all laws which they may deem conducive to the good government of the inhabitants thereof: Provided however, That no law shall be valid which is inconsistent with the constitution and laws of the United States, or which shall lay any person under restraint or disability on account of his religious opinions, profession, or worship; in all which he shall be free to maintain his own, and not burdened for those of another; And provided also, That in all criminal prosecutions, the trial shall be by a jury of twelve good and lawful men of the vicinage, and in all civil cases of the value of one hundred dollars, the trial shall be by jury, if either of the parties require it. The judges of the Indiana territory, or any two of them, shall hold annually two courts within the said district, at such place as will be most convenient to the inhabitants thereof in general, shall possess the same jurisdiction they now possess in the Indiana territory, and shall continue in session until all the business depending before them shall be disposed of. It shall be the duty of the secretary of the Indiana territory to record and preserve all the papers and proceedings of the governor, of an executive nature, relative to the district of Louisiana, and transmit authentic copies thereof every six months to the President of the United States. The governor shall publish throughout the said district, all the laws which may be made as aforesaid and shall, from time to time report the same to the President of the United States, to be laid before Congress, which, if disapproved of by Congress, shall thenceforth cease, and be of no effect. The said district of Louisiana shall be divided into districts by the governor, under the direction of the President, as the convenience of the settlements shall require, subject to such alterations hereafter as experience may prove more convenient. The inhabitants of each district, between the ages of eighteen and forty five shall be formed into a militia, with proper officers, according to their numbers, to be appointed by the governor, except the commanding officer, who shall be appointed by the President, and who whether a captain, a major or a colonel, shall be the commanding officer of the district, and as such shall, under the governor, have command of the regular officers and troops in his district, as well as of

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the militia, for which he shall have a brevet commission, giving him such command, and the pay and emoluments of an officer of the same grade in the regular army; he shall be specially charged with the employment of the military and militia of his district, in cases of sudden invasion or insurrection, and until the orders of the governor can be received, and at all times with the duty of ordering a military patrol, aided by militia, if necessary, to arrest unauthorized settlers in any part of his district, and to commit such offenders to jail, to be dealt with according to law. SEC. 16. The act passed on the thirty-first day of October, one thousand eight hundred and three, entitled “An act to enable the President of the United States to take possession of the territories ceded by France to the United States, by the treaty concluded at Paris, on the thirtieth day of April last, and for the temporary government thereof,” shall continue in force until the first day of October next, any thing therein to the contrary notwithstanding; on which said first day of October, this act shall commence, and have full force, and shall continue in force for and during the term of one year, and to the end of the next session of Congress which may happen thereafter. APPROVED, March 26, 1804. Source: The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, ed. Francis Newton Thorpe (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office), vol. 3, 1364–1371.

Document 1.6 Remonstrance of the People of Louisiana Against the Political System Adopted by Congress for Them, 1804 When news of the 1804 Governance Act reached Louisiana, local residents immediately began protesting. The document they produced, the Remonstrance of 1804, confirmed the fears of members of Congress who believed the Louisianans would never welcome their status as U.S. citizens. Yet the statement also reflected the keen desire of many white Louisianans to be more fully integrated into the political system of the United States. The remonstrance was a crucial factor in the federal government’s decision to revise the structure west of the Mississippi, fully integrating Louisiana into the emerging norms of territorial governance and the path to statehood. We the subscribers, planters, merchants and other inhabitants of Louisiana, respectfully approach the Legislature of the United States with a memorial of our rights, a remonstrance against certain laws which contravene them, and a petition for that redress to which the laws of nature, sanctioned by positive stipulation, have entitled us. Without any agency in the events which have annexed our country to the United States, we yet considered them as fortunate, and thought our liberties secured even before we knew the terms of the cession. Persuaded that a free people would acquire territory only to extend the blessings of freedom; that an enlightened nation would never destroy those principles on which its government was founded, and that their Representatives would disdain to become

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the instruments of oppression, we calculated with certainty that their first act of sovereignty would be a communication of all the blessings they enjoyed . . . It was early understood that we were to be American citizens: this satisfied our wishes, it implied every thing we could desire, and filled us with that happiness which arises from the anticipated enjoyment of a right long withheld. We knew that it was impossible to be citizens of the United States without enjoying personal freedom, protection for property, and above all the privileges of free representative government, and did not therefore imagine that we could be deprived of these rights even if there should have existed no promise to impart them; yet it was with some satisfaction we found these objects secured to use by the stipulations of treaty, and the faith of Congress pledged for their uninterrupted enjoyment. We expected them from your magnanimity, but were not displeased to see them guarantied by solemn engagements. With a firm persuasion that these engagements would be soon fulfilled, we passed under your jurisdiction with a joy bordering on enthusiasm, submitted to the inconveniences of an intermediate dominion without a murmur, and saw the last tie that attached us to our mother country severed with less regret . . . We could not bring ourselves to believe that we had so far mistaken the stipulations in our favor, or that Congress could so little regard us, and we waited the result with anxiety which distance only prevented our expressing before the passing of the bill. After a suspense which continued to the last moment of the session, after debates which only tended to show how little our true situation was known, after the rejection of every amendment declaratory of our rights, it at length became a law, and, before this petition can be presented, will take effect in our country. Disavowing any language but that of respectful remonstrance, disdaining any other but that which befits a manly assertion of our rights, we pray leave to examine the law for erecting Louisiana into two Territories and providing for the temporary government thereof, to compare its provisions with our rights, and its whole scope with the letter and spirit of the treaty which binds us to the United States. Source: American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, vol. 1, Miscellaneous 1789–1809 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832–1834), 396-405, http://memory. loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/lwsp.html.

Document 1.7 Thomas Jefferson Contemplates an American “Empire for Liberty,” 1809, 1812, and 1821 In these three letters from 1809, 1812, and 1821, Thomas Jefferson presented varied, and at times conflicting, visions of the territorial future of the United States. Writing from retirement at his home, Monticello, Jefferson continued to imagine that the United States would acquire new territory, but the extent of that territory and the possibilities he envisioned were as varied as the recipients of those letters. Writing to his close friend and confidante James Madison in 1809, Jefferson wrote openly of establishing strategic power in the Atlantic. Writing in 1812 to John Jacob Astor, a man Jefferson knew only casually, he flattered the wealthy German-born businessman by describing how the United States would extend its commercial influence into the far West through the fur trade, a business where

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Astor helped the United States displace older French and British networks. Writing to John Adams in 1821, Jefferson sought common ground with a man who had been his fellow Revolutionary in the 1770s, his bitter political rival in the 1790s, and finally a fellow elder statesman who, like Jefferson, sought to rebuild their friendship.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, April 27, 1809 Dear Sir . . . the British ministry has been driven from it’s Algerine system, not by any remaining morality in the people but by their unsteadiness under severe trial. but whencesoever it comes, I rejoice in it as the triumph of our forbearing & yet persevering system. it will lighten your anxieties, take from cabal it’s most fertile ground of war, will give us peace during your time, & by the compleat extinguishment of our public debt, open upon us the noblest application of revenue that has ever been exhibited by any nation. I am sorry they are sending a minister to attempt a treaty. they never made an equal commercial treaty with any nation, & we have no right to expect to be the first. it will place you between the injunctions of true patriotism & the clamors of a faction devoted to a foreign interest in preference to that of their own country. it will confirm the English too in their practice of whipping us into a treaty. they did it in Jay’s case; were near it in Monroe’s, & on failure of that, have applied the scourge with tenfold vigour, & now come on to try it’s effect. but it is the moment when we should prove our consistence, by recurring to the principles we dictated to Monroe, the departure from which occasioned our rejection of his treaty, and by protesting against Jay’s treaty being ever quoted, or looked at, or even mentioned. that form will for ever be a millstone round our necks unless we now rid ourselves of it, once for all. the occasion is highly favorable, as we never can have them more in our power. As to Bonaparte, I should not doubt the revocation of his edicts, were he governed by reason. but his policy is so crooked that it eludes conjecture. I fear his first object now is to dry up the sources of British prosperity by excluding her manufactures from the continent. he may fear that opening the ports of Europe to our vessels will open them to an inundation of British wares. he ought to be satisfied with having forced her to revoke the orders on which he pretended to retaliate, & to be particularly satisfied with us by whose unyielding adherence to principle she has been forced into the revocation. he ought the more to conciliate our good will, as we can be such an obstacle to the new career opening on him in the Spanish colonies. that he would give us the Floridas to withold intercourse with the residue of those colonies cannot be doubted. but that is no price; because they are ours in the first moment of the first war, & until a war they are of no particular necessity to us. but, altho’ with difficulty, he will consent to our recieving Cuba into our union to prevent our aid to Mexico & the other provinces. that would be a price, & I would immediately erect a column on the Southernmost limit of Cuba & inscribe on it a Ne plus ultra as to us in that direction. we should then have only to include the North in our confederacy, which would be of course in the first war, and we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never surveyed since the creation: & I am persuaded no constitution was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire & self government. as the Mentor went away before this change, & will leave France probably while it is still a secret in that

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hemisphere, I presume the expediency of pursuing her by a swift sailing dispatch was considered. it will be objected to our recieving Cuba, that no limit can then be drawn for our future acquisitions. Cuba can be defended by us without a navy, & this developes the principle which ought to limit our views. nothing should ever be accepted which would require a navy to defend it. Our spring continues cold & backward, rarely one growing day without two or three cold ones following. wheat is of very various complexions from very good to very bad. fruit has not suffered as much as was expected except in peculiar situations. gardens are nearly a month behind their usual state. I thank you for the Squashes from Maine. they shall be planted to day. I salute you with sincere & constant affection. Source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, ed. J. Jefferson Looney et. al (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004–[three volumes to date]), vol. 1, 168–170.

Thomas Jefferson to John Jacob Astor, May 24, 1812 Sir, — Your letter of March 14th lingered much on the road, and a long journey before I could answer it, has delayed its acknowledgment till now. I am sorry your enterprise for establishing a factory on the Columbia river, and a commerce through the line of that river and the Missouri, should meet with the difficulties stated in your letter. I remember well having invited your proposition on that subject, and encouraged it with the assurance of every facility and protection which the government could properly afford. I considered as a great public acquisition the commencement of a settlement on that point of the Western coast of America, and looked forward with gratification to the time when its descendants should have spread themselves through the whole length of that coast, covering it with free and independent Americans, unconnected with us but by the ties of blood and interest, and employing like us the rights of self-government. I hope the obstacles you state are not insurmountable; that they will not endanger, or even delay the accomplishment of so great a public purpose. In the present state of affairs between Great Britain and us, the government is justly jealous of contraventions of those commercial restrictions which have been deemed necessary to exclude the use of British manufactures in these States, and to promote the establishment of similar ones among ourselves. The interests too of the revenue require particular watchfulness . . . We certainly did not mean to interfere with the consumption of nations foreign to us, as the Indians of the Columbia and Missouri are, or to assume a right of levying an impost on that consumption . . . To guard against any surreptitious introduction of British influence among those nations, we may justifiably require that no Englishman be permitted to go with the trading parties, and necessary precautions should also be taken to prevent this covering the contravention of our own laws and views. But these once securely guarded, our interest would permit the transit free of duty. And I do presume that if the subject were fully presented to the legislature, they would provide that the laws intended to guard our own concerns only, should not assume the regulation of those of foreign and independent nations; still less that they should stand in the way of so interesting an object as that of planting the germ of an American population on the shores of the Pacific. From meddling however with

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these subjects it is my duty as well as my inclination to abstain. They are in hands perfectly qualified to direct them, and who knowing better the present state of things, are better able to decide what is right; and whatever they decide on a full view of the case, I shall implicitly confide has been rightly decided. Accept my best wishes for your success, and the assurances of my great esteem and respect. Source: The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904– 1905), vol. 11, 244–246.

Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, January 22, 1821 . . . Our anxieties in this quarter are all concentrated in the question, what does the Holy Alliance in and out of Congress mean to do with us on the Missouri question? . . . The real question, as seen in the States afflicted with this unfortunate population, is, are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger? For if Congress has the power to regulate the conditions of the inhabitants of the States, within the States, it will be but another exercise of that power, to declare that all shall be free. Are we then to see again Athenian and Lacedemonian confederacies? To wage another Peloponnesian war to settle the ascendency between them? Or is this the tocsin of merely a servile war? That remains to be seen; but not, I hope, by you or me . . . But let us turn from our own uneasiness to the miseries of our southern friends [in Central and South America, where Spanish colonies were securing their independence] . . . I feared from the beginning, that these people were not yet sufficiently enlightened for selfgovernment; and that after wading through blood and slaughter, they would end in military tyrannies, more or less numerous. Yet as they wished to try the experiment, I wished them success in it; they have now tried it, and will possibly find that their safest road will be an accommodation with the mother country . . . Representative government, native functionaries, a qualified negative on their laws, with a previous security by compact for freedom of commerce, freedom of the press, habeas corpus and trial by jury, would make a good beginning. This last would be the school in which their people might begin to learn the exercise of civil duties as well as rights. For freedom of religion they are not yet prepared . . . You see, my dear Sir, how easily we prescribe for others a cure for their difficulties, while we cannot cure our own. We must leave both, I believe, to heaven, and wrap ourselves up in the mantle of resignation, and of that friendship of which I tender to you the most sincere assurances. Source: The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904– 1905), vol. 12, 198–200.

Document 1.8 The Transcontinental Treaty, 1819 The absence of clear geographic boundaries in the Louisiana Purchase precipitated years of dispute between the United States and Spain, which claimed the territory to the Southwest. In

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1819, Spanish and American officials finally reached an agreement on those boundaries along with a variety of other long-simmering diplomatic disputes. With Spanish authority in the Americas rapidly disintegrating, Spain not only conceded U.S. boundary claims, but also ceded the Florida Peninsula. Despite these concessions, disagreements within the U.S. Senate delayed ratification of the treaty for almost two years. Sometimes called the Adams-Onís Treaty for the diplomats who led the Spanish and U.S. negotiating teams, the agreement later became known as the Transcontinental Treaty. These excerpts concern themselves with the people and territory acquired by the United States, in many ways borrowing from the language established by the Louisiana Purchase.

Treaty of Amity, Settlement, and Limits Between the United States of America and His Catholic Majesty. 1819 The United States of America and His Catholic Majesty, desiring to consolidate, on a permanent basis, the friendship and good correspondence which happily prevails between the two parties, have determined to settle and terminate all their differences and pretensions, by a treaty, which shall designate, with precision, the limits of their respective bordering territories in North America. With this intention the President of the United States has furnished with their full powers John Quincy Adams, Secretary of State of the said United States; and His Catholic Majesty has appointed the Most Excellent Lord Don Luis De Onis, Gonzales, Lopez y Vara, Lord of the Town of Rayaces, Perpetual Regidor of the Corporation of the city of Salamanca, Knight Grand Cross of the Royal American Order of Isabella the Catholic, decorated with the Lys of La Vendee, Knight Pensioner of the Royal and Distinguished Spanish Order of Charles the Third, Member of the Supreme Assembly of the said Royal Order; of the Council of His Catholic Majesty; his Secretary, with Exercise of Decrees, and His Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary near the United States of America. And the said Plenipotentiaries, after having exchanged their powers, have agreed upon and concluded the following articles:

Article I There shall be a firm and inviolable peace and sincere friendship between the United States and their citizens and His Catholic Majesty, his successors and subjects, without exception of persons or places.

Article II His Catholic Majesty cedes to the United States, in full property and sovereignty, all the territories which belong to him, situated to the eastward of the Mississippi, known by the name of East and West Florida. The adjacent islands dependent on said provinces, all public lots and squares, vacant lands, public edifices, fortifications, barracks, and other buildings, which are not private property, archives and documents, which relate directly to the property and sovereignty of said provinces, are included in this article. The said archives and

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documents shall be left in possession of the commissaries or officers of the United States, duly authorized to receive them.

Article III The boundary-line between the two countries, west of the Mississippi, shall begin on the Gulph of Mexico, at the mouth of the river Sabine, in the sea, continuing north, along the western bank of that river, to the 32d degree of latitude; thence, by a line due north, to the degree of latitude where it strikes the Rio Roxo of Nachitoches, or Red River; then following the course of the Rio Roxo westward, to the degree of longitude 100 west from London and 23 from Washington; then, crossing the said Red River, and running thence, by a line due north, to the river Arkansas; thence, following the course of the southern bank of the Arkansas, to its source, in latitude 42 north; and thence, by that parallel of latitude, to the South Sea. The whole being as laid down in Melish’s map of the United States, published at Philadelphia, improved to the first of January, 1818. But if the source of the Arkansas River shall be found to fall north or south of latitude 42, then the line shall run from the said source due south or north, as the case may be, till it meets the said parallel of latitude 42, and thence, along the said parallel, to the South Sea: All the islands in the Sabine, and the said Red and Arkansas Rivers, throughout the course thus described to belong to the United States; but the use of the waters, and the navigation of the Sabine to the sea, and of the said rivers Roxo and Arkansas, throughout the extent of the said boundary, on their respective banks, shall be common to the respective inhabitants of both nations. The two high contracting parties agree to cede and renounce all their rights, claims, and pretensions to the territories described by the said line, that is to say: The United States hereby cede to His Catholic Majesty, and renounce forever, all their rights, claims, and pretensions, to the territories lying west and south of the above-described line; and, in like manner, His Catholic Majesty cedes to the said United States all his rights, claims, and pretensions to any territories east and north of the said line, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, renounces all claim to the said territories forever.

Article IV To fix this line with more precision, and to place the landmarks which shall designate exactly the limits of both nations, each of the contracting parties shall appoint a Commissioner and a surveyor, who shall meet before the termination of one year from the date of the ratification of this treaty at Nachitoches, on the Red River, and proceed to run and mark the said line, from the mouth of the Sabine to the Red River, and from the Red River to the river Arkansas, and to ascertain the latitude of the source of the said river Arkansas, in conformity to what is above agreed upon and stipulated and the line of latitude 42, to the South Sea: they shall make out plans, and keep journals of their proceedings, and the result agreed upon by them shall be considered as part of this treaty, and shall have the same force as if it were inserted therein. The two

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Governments will amicably agree respecting the necessary articles to be furnished to those persons, and also as to their respective escorts, should such be deemed necessary.

Article V The inhabitants of the ceded territories shall be secured in the free exercise of their religion, without any restriction; and all those who may desire to remove to the Spanish dominions shall be permitted to sell or export their effects, at any time whatever, without being subject, in either case, to duties.

Article VI The inhabitants of the territories which His Catholic Majesty cedes to the United States, by this treaty, shall be incorporated in the Union of the United States as soon as may be consistent with the principles of the Federal Constitution, and admitted to the enjoyment of all the privileges, rights, and immunities of the citizens of the United States.

Article VII The officers and troops of His Catholic Majesty, in the territories hereby ceded by him to the United States, shall be withdrawn, and possession of the places occupied by them shall be given within six months after the exchange of the ratifications of this treaty, or sooner if possible, by the officers of His Catholic Majesty to the commissioners or officers of the United States duly appointed to receive them; and the United States shall furnish the transports and escort necessary to convey the Spanish officers and troops and their baggage to the Havana.

Article VIII All the grants of land made before the 24th of January, 1818, by His Catholic Majesty, or by his lawful authorities, in the said territories ceded by His Majesty to the United States, shall be ratified and confirmed to the persons in possession of the lands, to the same extent that the same grants would be valid if the territories had remained under the dominion of His Catholic Majesty. But the owners in possession of such lands, who, by reason of the recent circumstances of the Spanish nation, and the revolutions in Europe, have been prevented from fulfilling all the conditions of their grants, shall complete them within the terms limited in the same, respectively, from the date of this treaty; in default of which the said grants shall be null and void. All grants made since the said 24th of January, 1818, when the first proposal, on the part of His Catholic Majesty, for the cession of the Floridas was made, are hereby declared and agreed to be null and void . . .

Article XI The United States, exonerating Spain from all demands in future, on account of the claims of their citizens to which the renunciations herein contained extend, and

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considering them entirely cancelled, undertake to make satisfaction for the same, to an amount not exceeding five millions of dollars. To ascertain the full amount and validity of those claims, a commission, to consist of three Commissioners, citizens of the United States, shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, which commission shall meet at the city of Washington, and, within the space of three years from the time of their first meeting, shall receive, examine, and decide upon the amount and validity of all the claims included within the descriptions above mentioned. The said Commissioners shall take an oath or affirmation, to be entered on the record of their proceedings, for the faithful and diligent discharge of their duties; and, in case of the death, sickness, or necessary absence of any such Commissioner, his place may be supplied by the appointment, as aforesaid, or by the President of the United States, during the recess of the Senate, of another Commissioner in his stead. The said Commissioners shall be authorized to hear and examine, on oath, every question relative to the said claims, and to receive all suitable authentic testimony concerning the same. And the Spanish Government shall furnish all such documents and elucidations as may be in their possession, for the adjustment of the said claims, according to the principles of justice, the laws of nations, and the stipulations of the treaty between the two parties of 27th October, 1795; the said documents to be specified. when demanded, at the instance of the said Commissioners. The payment of such claims as may be admitted and adjusted by the said Commissioners, or the major part of them, to an amount not exceeding five millions of dollars, shall be made by the United States, either immediately at their Treasury, or by the creation of stock, bearing an interest of six per cent. per annum, payable from the proceeds of sales of public lands within the territories hereby ceded to the United States, or in such other manner as the Congress of the United States may prescribe by law. The records of the proceedings of the said Commissioners, together with the vouchers and documents produced before them, relative to the claims to be adjusted and decided upon by them, shall, after the close of their transactions, be deposited in the Department of State of the United States; and copies of them, or any part of them, shall be furnished to the Spanish Government, if required’ at the demand of the Spanish Minister in the United States.

Article XII The treaty of limits and navigation, of 1795, remains confirmed in all and each one of its articles excepting the 2, 3, 4, 21, and the second clause of the 22d article, which, having been altered by this treaty, or having received their entire execution, are no longer valid. With respect to the 15th article of the same treaty of friendship, limits, and navigation of 1795, in which it is stipulated that the flag shall cover the property, the two high contracting parties agree that this shall be so understood with respect to those powers who recognize this principle; but if either of the two contracting parties shall be at war with a third party, and the other neutral, the flag of the neutral shall cover the property of enemies whose government acknowledge this principle, and not of others.

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Article XIII Both contracting parties, wishing to favor their mutual commerce, by affording in their ports every necessary assistance to their respective merchant-vessels, have agreed that the sailors who shall desert from their vessels in the ports of the other, shall be arrested and delivered up, at the instance of the consul, who shall prove, nevertheless, that the deserters belonged to the vessels that claimed them, exhibiting the document that is customary in their nation: that is to say, the American Consul in a Spanish port shall exhibit the document known by the name of articles, and the Spanish Consul in American ports the roll of the vessel; and if the name of the deserter or deserters are claimed shall appear in the one or the other, they shall be arrested, held in custody, and delivered to the vessel to which they shall belong.

Article XIV The United States hereby certify that they have not received any compensation from France for the injuries they suffered from her privateers, Consuls, and tribunals on the coasts and in the ports of Spain, for the satisfaction of which provision is made by this treaty; and they will present an authentic statement of the prizes made, and of their true value, that Spain may avail herself of the same in such manner as she may deem just and proper.

Article XV The United States, to give to His Catholic Majesty a proof of their desire to cement the relations of amity subsisting between the two nations, and to favor the commerce of the subjects of His Catholic Majesty, agree that Spanish vessels, coming laden only with productions of Spanish growth or manufactures, directly from the ports of Spain, or of her colonies, shall be admitted, for the term of twelve years, to the ports of Pensacola and St. Augustine, in the Floridas, without paying other or higher duties on their cargoes, or of tonnage, than will be paid by the vessels of the United States. During the said term no other nation shall enjoy the same privileges within the ceded territories. The twelve years shall commence three months after the exchange of the ratifications of this treaty.

Article XVI The present treaty shall be ratified in due form, by the contracting parties, and the ratifications shall be exchanged in six months from this time, or sooner if possible. In witness whereof we, the underwritten Plenipotentiaries of the United States of America and of His Catholic Majesty, have signed, by virtue of our powers, the present treaty of amity, settlement, and limits, and have thereunto affixed our seals, respectively. Done at Washington this twenty-second day of February, one thousand eight hundred and nineteen. John Quincy Adams Luis De Onís Source: Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949, compilation directed by Charles I. Bevans, vol. II, Philippines-United Arab Republic (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 528–535.

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Document 1.9 Americans Create a History of Governing Others, 1821 By the 1820s, acquiring and governing both foreign territory and foreign people had become commonplace in the United States, and Americans were hard at work situating those moments in the story of their nation’s history. One of the first places this occurred was in history textbooks designed both for schools and for home reading. The following passage comes from William Grimshaw’s History of the United States, from their first settlement as colonies, to the cession of Florida, in eighteen hundred and twenty-one. Grimshaw’s explanation of events in the West was typical of the emerging narrative in the nineteenth century. Grimshaw situated the United States—both geographically and metaphysically— between the Indians to the west and the Europeans to the east. Unlike the Europeans, the United States had acquired territory and created new polities by extending both unity and representative government. In the process, they had fought Indians who, Grimshaw wrote, could not understand representative government and whose very existence constituted an impediment to the expansion of opportunity and liberty for whites. Two new states had now been admitted as members of the great federal government,—Vermont and Kentucky. Vermont was formed into an independent community against much opposition, and received into the Union in 1791. Owing to British acts of parliament, inconsistent with each other, the soil was claimed by several adjacent states; particularly, by New York. Civil war between the parties was repeatedly approached; but hostilities were restrained by the paternal advice of Washington, and finally prevented by the eloquence of Alexander Hamilton; who induced New York to acquiesce in the demand of Vermont for independence.—Kentucky owes its political existence to the liberal spirit of Virginia. It was a part of this province, until she authorised and encouraged the former in the establishment, of a separate government, to be organized by the free voice of its own inhabitants. This was accordingly done, in the year 1785; and, in 1792, it was admitted into the Union, on equal terms with its indulgent parent. Kentucky was known, at an early period, by the French; but was long carefully hidden from the knowledge of the British colonies. In 1714, Mr. Spotswood, governor of Virginia, made, a journey to the Alleghany mountains; ascertained the practicability of crossing them; and, from their lofty summits, beheld the beautiful western plains comprehended within his jurisdiction. Hunters and Indian traders, before and afterwards, had occasionally traversed them; but James M’Bride was the first white person that visited the country with a view of settling. In 1754, he carved his name on a tree, as an evidence of his taking possession. The French war, however, which immediately followed, prevented the execution of his design. The earliest permanent settlement was made by colonel Daniel Boon; who, with a few companions, explored it in 1769. But this little colony, meeting with nothing but hardships, grew exceedingly disheartened. They were plundered, dispersed, or killed, by the wandering Indians; except Boon himself, who continued a solitary inhabitant of the wilderness, until the year 1771. The colonel was not easily discouraged. He returned to this fertile region, accompanied by forty families of

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Powell’s Valley; who, in 1773, were the whole population of Kentucky, The oldest settlement is Boonsborough. This country was never inhabited by the Indians: it was only known to them by the name of the Dark and Bloody Ground; being claimed by various tribes, whose titles, if they had any, were so obscure, as to render it doubtful to which nation it belonged; and hence, it became a theatre of war, and the residence only of wild beasts. Its progress in population, and general improvement, almost exceeds belief. The annals of colonization do not, as far as our information extends, afford any previous instance of similar advancement. The extension of settlements beyond the Ohio, was much retarded by the hostile disposition of the Indians. Compelled, through necessity, to make a seeming relinquishment of those lands, on which they had drawn their earliest breath, and ranged, undisturbed, in pursuit of their favourite game, the untutored children of the forest, like the sophisticated politicians of the eastern world, adhered to their agreements no longer than they were constrained by interest or fear. The Indians were now a formidable people. They had been instructed by the French in the use of firearms, iron tomahawks, and swords; and had acquired considerable knowledge of their discipline. In natural courage, they were never deficient: though, in bodily strength, they were inferior to the Virginians, and other descendants of Europeans; especially, to those who inhabited the hilly country of the west. In the south, the Creek Indians, whose fighting men amounted to six-hundred, under M’Gillivray, the son of a white man, had been at war with Georgia: peace, however, was restored there, in 1790, in consequence of a treaty signed by that chieftain, at New York. Pacific overtures, made to the northwestern Indians, were rejected. In the following year, four-teen-hundred men, of whom three-hundred were regulars, and the remainder militia from Kentucky and Pennsylvania; the whole under the command of general Harmar; were sent to destroy their settlements on the Scioto and the Wabash; but the militia being panicstruck, the expedition was defeated, with the loss of three-hundred-and-sixty men killed. The next attempt against these people, was still more disastrous. General St. Clair, at that time governor of the western territory, being placed at the head of two-thousand militia and regulars, proceeded to destroy the Indian villages on the Miami, and expel the inhabitants from that country: but, owing to the shameful conduct of the militia, he was completely routed, by an inferior number of the enemy; who killed, in the battle and during the retreat, thirty-eight officers and nearly six-hundred privates. Amongst the dead, was the gallant general Butler: amongst the wounded, were colonels Gibson and Darke, major Butler and adjutant Sargent; officers of distinguished merit. Seldom, had the Americans experienced so severe a loss; and never from an enemy so contemptible in number. St. Clair, having resigned, was succeeded by general Wayne; who, in September, 1793, reached the ground where that officer was defeated, erected a fort, to which, he gave the name of Recovery, and made every preparation for advancing against the Indian settlements early in the following year. On the 20th of August, after his ineffectually endeavouring to negotiate a peace, a general engagement ensued near the Miami. The Indians amounted to about two-thousand; the American army, to three-thousand: of whom, two-thirds were regulars, and the remainder mounted militia, from Kentucky, commanded by general Scott. The action was decisive; the Indians were completely routed. General Wayne remained for three days in front of the field of battle, laying waste the houses and corn-fields; drove

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the Indians out of the country, and erected forts in the midst of their late settlements, to prevent their return. In the year after, Wayne concluded, at Greenville, treaties with the hostile Indians north-west of the Ohio; by which, peace was established, on terms mutually satisfactory and beneficial. A humane system now commenced for ameliorating their condition. They were, henceforth, protected by the United States from the impositions and incursions of lawless white people; taught the use of the loom, and encouraged in the pursuits of agriculture: measures reflecting high praise on colonel Hawkins, who was amongst the first to execute the benevolent intentions, originally projected by the humane spirit of general Washington . . . Fostered by the parental nature of the government, emigrations from the European world continued to increase. New manufactures were introduced into the United States: the sciences were, annually spreading. Hardy labourers from Germany and Ireland assisted in giving strength to the republic, by an important addition to its numbers. The axe every where resounded through the western forests, and new communities sought association with the old. Since we noticed the establishment of Kentucky, two other states were joined in the federal constitution—Tennessee and Ohio; formed out of the ancient dominions of the Union. In 1789, North Carolina had assigned to the United States a large tract of her western lands. This country was called the southern territory, and erected by congress into a separate government, on the same plan as the north-western. In 1794, its inhabitants, having amounted to thirtythousand, sent a delegate to congress, who, by law, was allowed a seat in the lower house, with a right of debating, but not of voting; and, in two years afterwards, it was erected into a state, called Tennessee, and admitted to a full participation in the advantages of the Union. Ohio, a portion of the territory westward of Pennsylvania, became a member of the general government in the year 1802; under the first American constitution, that declared explicitly, against the practice of holding slaves; in conformity with a restriction humanely imposed, by congress, upon all that region of which it forms a part. Its earliest settlers were a colony from New England; who, in 1788, founded Marietta, under the superintendence of general Putnam. In 1803, Louisiana was purchased from the French government, for the sum of fifteenmillions of dollars; two-millions-and-a-half of which were to be retained by the United States, as compensation for illegal captures made by France. At this period, its population did not entitle it to an independent rank; but a district of it was subsequently admitted to that privilege, and formed the eighteenth member of the great American confederation. In Louisiana, from the undisturbed navigation of the Mississippi, now secured; by which, the Atlantic is connected with the remote regions of the west, and, (by its joining the Ohio,) with the ancient colonies as far as Pennsylvania; the United States have acquired a territory lessened in value only by its magnitude. Nature is there found in all the majesty of youth. A new field of enterprise is opened, and new productions are added to the rich variety of their former catalogue. Source: William Grimshaw, History of the United States, from their first settlement as colonies, to the cession of Florida, in eighteen hundred and twenty-one (Philadelphia: William Grimshaw, 1821), 182– 185, 195–196.

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Document 1.10 John Marshall on American Indians, 1823, 1831, and 1832 Chief Justice of the United States John Marshall was not only one of the most important figures in American law and jurisprudence, but in the 1820s and 1830s he played a crucial role in shaping American Indian policy. These three cases illustrate his thinking on the status of peoples governed by the United States. The case of Johnson v. McIntosh began as a commercial dispute between two land companies, one of which acquired property in the West through a title that dated back to a sale by Indians. In his lengthy opinion on the case, Marshall established the discovery doctrine, which not only confirmed legal ownership to the Europeans who had “discovered” the New World, but also proscribed that the only valid transfers could occur when Indians ceded their land to governments and not to private individuals or organizations. In the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Cherokees protested state laws in Georgia providing for the subdivision and sale of Cherokee land. Marshall found that Indians were neither independent sovereign nations nor polities within the United States on par with states and therefore lacked standing for the Court to intercede on their behalf. Finally, in Worcester v. Georgia, the state of Georgia arrested a white missionary named Samuel Worcester for living on Cherokee land without the permit required by state law. Worcester was convicted and was serving a sentence of four years at hard labor when the case reached the Supreme Court. Marshall seemed to reverse himself, writing that Cherokees were a self-governing polity and that only the Cherokees—and not the state of Georgia—could govern who lived in Cherokee land, including whites. Together, these decisions reflect the complex, ambiguous status of American Indians within the nation’s legal structure.

Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. William M’intosh On the discovery of this immense continent, the great nations of Europe were eager to appropriate to themselves so much of it as they could respectively acquire. Its vast extent offered an ample field to the ambition and enterprise of all; and the character and religion of its inhabitants afforded an apology for considering them as a people over whom the superior genius of Europe might claim an ascendency. The potentates of the old world found no difficulty in convincing themselves that they made ample compensation to the inhabitants of the new, by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity, in exchange for unlimited independence. But, as they were all in pursuit of nearly the same object, it was necessary, in order to avoid conflicting settlements, and consequent war with each other, to establish a principle, which all should acknowledge as the law by which the right of acquisition, which they all asserted, should be regulated as between themselves. This principle was, that discovery gave title to the government by whose subjects, or by whose authority, it was made, against all other European governments, which title might be consummated by possession. The exclusion of all other Europeans, necessarily gave to the nation making the discovery the sole right of acquiring the soil from the natives, and establishing settlements upon it. It was a right with which no Europeans could interfere. It was a

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right which all asserted for themselves, and to the assertion of which, by others, all assented . . . While the different nations of Europe respected the right of the natives, as occupants, they asserted the ultimate dominion to be in themselves; and claimed and exercised, as a consequence of this ultimate dominion, a power to grant the soil, while yet in possession of the natives. These grants have been understood by all, to convey a title to the grantees, subject only to the Indian right of occupancy. The history of America, from its discovery to the present day, proves, we think, the universal recognition of these principles . . . Thus has our whole country been granted by the crown while in the occupation of the Indians. These grants purport to convey the soil as well as the right of dominion to the grantees. In those governments which were denominated royal, where the right to the soil was not vested in individuals, but remained in the crown, or was vested in the colonial government, the king claimed and exercised the right of granting lands, and of dismembering the government at his will . . . Thus, all the nations of Europe, who have acquired territory on this continent, have asserted in themselves, and have recognised in others, the exclusive right of the discoverer to appropriate the lands occupied by the Indians. Have the American States rejected or adopted this principle? By the treaty which concluded the war of our revolution, Great Britain relinquished all claim, not only to the government, but to the “propriety and territorial rights of the United States,” whose boundaries were fixed in the second article. By this treaty, the powers of government, and the right to soil, which had previously been in Great Britain, passed definitively to these States. We had before taken possession of them, by declaring independence; but neither the declaration of independence, nor the treaty confirming it, could give us more than that which we before possessed, or to which Great Britain was before entitled. It has never been doubted, that either the United States, or the several States, had a clear title to all the lands within the boundary lines described in the treaty, subject only to the Indian right of occupancy, and that the exclusive power to extinguish that right, was vested in that government which might constitutionally exercise it . . . After these States became independent, a controversy subsisted between them and Spain respecting boundary. By the treaty of 1795, this controversy was adjusted, and Spain ceded to the United States the territory in question. This territory, though claimed by both nations, was chiefly in the actual occupation of Indians. The magnificent purchase of Louisiana, was the purchase from France of a country almost entirely occupied by numerous tribes of Indians, who are in fact independent. Yet, any attempt of others to intrude into that country, would be considered as an aggression which would justify war. Our late acquisitions from Spain are of the same character; and the negotiations which preceded those acquisitions, recognise and elucidate the principle which has been received as the foundation of all European title in America . . . That law which regulates, and ought to regulate in general, the relations between the conqueror and conquered, was incapable of application to a people under such circumstances. The resort to some new and different rule, better adapted to the actual

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state of things, was unavoidable. Every rule which can be suggested will be found to be attended with great difficulty. However extravagant the pretension of converting the discovery of an inhabited country into conquest may appear; if the principle has been asserted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained; if a country has been acquired and held under it; if the property of the great mass of the community originates in it, it becomes the law of the land, and cannot be questioned. So, too, with respect to the concomitant principle, that the Indian inhabitants are to be considered merely as occupants, to be protected, indeed, while in peace, in the possession of their lands, but to be deemed incapable of transferring the absolute title to others. However this restriction may be opposed to natural right, and to the usages of civilized nations, yet, if it be indispensable to that system under which the country has been settled, and be adapted to the actual condition of the two people, it may, perhaps, be supported by reason, and certainly cannot be rejected by Courts of justice.

Source: Reprinted with the permission of LexisNexis.

The Cherokee Nation v. The State Of Georgia The bill asserts the Cherokee nation of Indians are acknowledged and treated with as sovereign and independent states, within the boundary arranged by those treaties . . . They have established a constitution and form of government, the leading features of which they have borrowed from that of the United States; dividing their government into three separate departments, legislative, executive and judicial. In conformity with this constitution, these departments have all been organized. They have formed a code of laws, civil and criminal, adapted to their situation; have erected courts to expound and apply those laws, and organized an executive to carry them into effect. They have established schools for the education of their children, and churches in which the Christian religion is taught; they have abandoned the hunter state, and become agriculturists, mechanics, and herdsmen; and, under provocations long continued and hard to be borne, they have observed, with fidelity, all their engagements by treaty with the United States . . . The condition of the Indians, in relation to the United States, is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence. In general, nations not owing a common allegiance are foreign to each other. The term foreign nation is with strict propriety applicable by either to the other. But the relation of the Indians to the United States is marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist no where else . . . [The Court’s Opinion Follows] If courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a case better calculated to excite them can scarcely be imagined. A people once numerous, powerful, and truly independent, found by our ancestors in the quiet and uncontrolled possession of an ample domain, gradually sinking beneath our superior policy, our arts and our arms, have yielded their lands by successive treaties, each of which contains a solemn guarantee of the residue, until they retain no more of their formerly extensive territory than is deemed

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necessary to their comfortable subsistence. To preserve this remnant, the present application is made. Before we can look into the merits of the case, a preliminary inquiry presents itself. Has this court jurisdiction of the cause? . . . A question of much more difficulty remains. Do the Cherokees constitute a foreign state in the sense of the constitution? The counsel have shown conclusively that they are not a state of the union, and have insisted that individually they are aliens, not owing allegiance to the United States. An aggregate of aliens composing a state must, they say, be a foreign state. Each individual being foreign, the whole must be foreign. This argument is imposing, but we must examine it more closely before we yield to it. The condition of the Indians in relation to the United States is perhaps unlike that of any other two people in existence. In the general, nations not owing a common allegiance are foreign to each other. The term foreign nation is, with strict propriety, applicable by either to the other. But the relation of the Indians to the United States is marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist no where else. The Indian territory is admitted to compose a part of the United States. In all our maps, geographical treatises, histories, and laws, it is so considered . . . Though the Indians are acknowledged to have an unquestionable, and, heretofore, unquestioned right to the lands they occupy, until that right shall be extinguished by a voluntary cession to our government; yet it may well be doubted whether those tribes which reside within the acknowledged boundaries of the United States can, with strict accuracy, be denominated foreign nations. They may, more correctly, perhaps, be denominated domestic dependent nations. They occupy a territory to which we assert a title independent of their will, which must take effect in point of possession when their right of possession ceases. Meanwhile they are in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian. They look to our government for protection; rely upon its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and address the president as their great father. They and their country are considered by foreign nations, as well as by ourselves, as being so completely under the sovereignty and dominion of the United States, that any attempt to acquire their lands, or to form a political connexion with them, would be considered by all as an invasion of our territory, and an act of hostility. These considerations go far to support the opinion, that the framers of our constitution had not the Indian tribes in view, when they opened the courts of the union to controversies between a state or the citizens thereof, and foreign states . . . The court has bestowed its best attention on this question, and, after mature deliberation, the majority is of opinion that an Indian tribe or nation within the United States is not a foreign state in the sense of the constitution, and cannot maintain an action in the courts of the United States. A serious additional objection exists to the jurisdiction of the court. Is the matter of the bill the proper subject for judicial inquiry and decision? It seeks to restrain a state from the forcible exercise of legislative power over a neighbouring people, asserting their independence; their right to which the state denies. On several of the matters alleged in

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the bill, for example on the laws making it criminal to exercise the usual powers of self government in their own country by the Cherokee nation, this court cannot interpose; at least in the form in which those matters are presented. That part of the bill which respects the land occupied by the Indians, and prays the aid of the court to protect their possession, may be more doubtful. The mere question of right might perhaps be decided by this court in a proper case with proper parties. But the court is asked to do more than decide on the title. The bill requires us to control the legislature of Georgia, and to restrain the exertion of its physical force. The propriety of such an interposition by the court may be well questioned. It savours too much of the exercise of political power to be within the proper province of the judicial department. But the opinion on the point respecting parties makes it unnecessary to decide this question. If it be true that the Cherokee nation have rights, this is not the tribunal in which those rights are to be asserted. If it be true that wrongs have been inflicted, and that still greater are to be apprehended, this is not the tribunal which can redress the past or prevent the future. The motion for an injunction is denied. Source: Reprinted with the permission of LexisNexis.

Samuel A. Worcester, Plaintiff In Error v. The State Of Georgia It behoves this court, in every case, more especially in this, to examine into its jurisdiction with scrutinizing eyes; before it proceeds to the exercise of a power which is controverted . . . The indictment and plea in this case draw in question, we think, the validity of the treaties made by the United States with the Cherokee Indians; if not so, their construction is certainly drawn in question; and the decision has been, if not against their validity, “against the right, privilege or exemption, specially set up and claimed under them.” They also draw into question the validity of a statute of the state of Georgia, “on the ground of its being repugnant to the constitution, treaties and laws of the United States, and the decision is in favour of its validity.” It is, then, we think, too clear for controversy, that the act of congress, by which this court is constituted, has given it the power, and of course imposed on it the duty, of exercising jurisdiction in this case. This duty, however unpleasant, cannot be avoided . . . It has been said at the bar, that the acts of the legislature of Georgia seize on the whole Cherokee country, parcel it out among the neighbouring counties of the state, extend her code over the whole country, abolish its institutions and its laws, and annihilate its political existence . . . Did these adventurers, by sailing along the coast, and occasionally landing on it, acquire for the several governments to whom they belonged, or by whom they were commissioned, a rightful property in the soil, from the Atlantic to the Pacific; or rightful dominion over the numerous people who occupied it? Or has nature, or the great Creator of all things, conferred these rights over hunters and fishermen, on agriculturists and manufacturers?

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But power, war, conquest, give rights, which, after possession, are conceded by the world; and which can never be controverted by those on whom they descend. We proceed, then, to the actual state of things, having glanced at their origin; because holding it in our recollection might shed some light on existing pretensions . . . The actual state of things at the time, and all history since, explain these charters; and the king of Great Britain, at the treaty of peace, could cede only what belonged to his crown. These newly asserted titles can derive no aid from the articles so often repeated in Indian treaties; extending to them, first, the protection of Great Britain, and afterwards that of the United States. These articles are associated with others, recognizing their title to self government. The very fact of repeated treaties with them recognizes it; and the settled doctrine of the law of nations is, that a weaker power does not surrender its independence — its right to self government, by associating with a stronger, and taking its protection. A weak state, in order to provide for its safety, may place itself under the protection of one more powerful, without stripping itself of the right of government, and ceasing to be a state. Examples of this kind are not wanting in Europe. “Tributary and feudatory states,” says Vattel, “do not thereby cease to be sovereign and independent states, so long as self government and sovereign and independent authority are left in the administration of the state.” At the present day, more than one state may be considered as holding its right of self government under the guarantee and protection of one or more allies. The Cherokee nation, then, is a distinct community occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, in which the laws of Georgia can have no force, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties, and with the acts of congress. The whole intercourse between the United States and this nation, is, by our constitution and laws, vested in the government of the United States . . . It is the opinion of this court that the judgment of the superior court for the county of Gwinnett, in the state of Georgia, condemning Samuel A. Worcester to hard labour, in the penitentiary of the state of Georgia, for four years, was pronounced by that court under colour of a law which is void, as being repugnant to the constitution, treaties, and laws of the United States, and ought, therefore, to be reversed and annulled. Source: Reprinted with the permission of LexisNexis.

Document 1.11 The Choctaw Protest, 1826 By 1826, the Choctaw Indians had become suspicious of the American notion of empire. Living in villages scattered throughout the lower Mississippi Valley and the Gulf Coast, the Choctaws had sided with the colonies during the American Revolution. As white settlers coveted Choctaw land, however, the federal government applied varying forms of pressure to force the Choctaws to cede territory and, eventually, to relocate entirely. The following is an

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excerpt from negotiations between U.S. and Choctaw leaders in November 1826. It begins with the interpretation of the American negotiators: William Clark, the coleader of the Lewis and Clark expedition who emerged as the most important federal Indian official in the West, and John Hinds, a Mississippi politician serving as a commissioner for the negotiations. Clark’s own reading of events naturally differed from the interpretations of the Choctaw chiefs, but these materials suggest the continuities of Indian policy and American imperial vision. The Choctaws’ claims were common to Indians throughout the West who felt betrayed by the U.S. government. Considered alongside the Remonstrance of 1804, however, they also indicate the ways that numerous peoples throughout the frontiers of North America sought to apply pressure to the federal leadership. Like the white Louisianans, the Choctaws considered themselves a self-governing people, and they argued that the federal government was bound by treaty and precedent to respect that state of affairs. Unlike the white Louisianans who successfully petitioned for political change in 1804, President John Quincy Adams was no more willing to make concessions to nonwhites than were his predecessors or his successors. Clark’s own comments were typical of his negotiating style. He made numerous claims of his support for Indian concerns, but the negative consequences of disobeying the federal government were made clear. Clark’s threats proved prescient. In the 1830s, the vast majority of Choctaws were forcibly relocated to what is now Oklahoma. TREATY GROUND, NEAR WILSON’S, IN THE CHOCTAW NATION, November 19, 1826. Sir: Agreeably to previous notice given to the Choctaw nation, we, the undersigned commissioners on the part of the United States, met the nation here in council on the 6th of the present month. After the mingoes, chiefs, and warriors had convened in council, and notified us that they were in readiness to commence business, we proceeded to inform them of the views of the United States in wishing to obtain a cession of their country here, and to remove them to their lands on the west of the Mississippi; in which communication we endeavored, as far as we were informed on the subject, to explain to them the wishes of our Government, and the advantages that would result to the Choctaw nation by their removal to the west. After which, we offered them the terms on which the United States would pay the nation for the country they claim on the east side of the Mississippi, if they would consent to cede the same. The commissioners were aware of the friendly disposition the United States feel towards the Choctaws, and the earnest desire to do them justice in all transactions had with that nation. It was therefore determined to offer them, in the first instance, the full extent that would be given them for their country; and which offer was so liberal, on the part of the United States, that the nation certainly would have accepted it, had they not determined previously that they would not accede to any terms offered them. After the council, in behalf of the nation, had given a pointed refusal to the offer, with a declaration, on their part, that they would not sell their country upon any terms that might be offered them, it was then proposed by the commissioners of

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the United States that the nation should cede a small tract of country on the Tombigbee river, and to adjoin Monroe county, in the State of Mississippi, so as to enable that State to form a judicial district, for the convenience and benefit of that part of the State which is so unhappily cut off from the other settlements by an extensive Indian country; and, to obtain this small cession, it had been determined to pay the nation the most liberal price. Much pains was taken to impress on their minds this very desirable object, as well as to assure them that, if they would agree to make the cession, they should receive for it a consideration to their entire satisfaction. To this proposal they also returned a flat denial, in which they vainly boasted of the many favors they have done for the United States heretofore, and ended with a determination to hold fast to all the country they now claim. Thus it will be seen that we have failed in every proposition that has been made them for the whole or any part of their country. But, for your better information, we herewith enclose you a copy of the journal of our proceedings, which shows the precise terms offered this nation, and their pointed and positive rejection of them . . . It is also stated, and believed, that at one of the meetings of the Choctaws some of the most intelligent and best informed Chickasaws were invited and attended their council; at which time it is believed that cross-resolutions were entered into by both nations, each pledging to the other a fixed determination not to cede any part of their country . . . We have the honor to be, with great respect, sir, your obedient servants, William Clark Thomas Hinds

Friday morning, November 10, 1826 . . .

General Coffee then read the following talk, which was interpreted to the nation in council by Major John Pitchlynn, the interpreter appointed by the commissioners for this service. We the commissioners of the United States, have met you here, by order of our great father the President. We come to make you proposals, on the most liberal terms, for the cession of your lands; such terms as your father the President believes to be calculated to promote your best interests, both now and hereafter. But since we came into the nation, we have been told that resolutions have been entered into, either in council or by sundry individuals, that if any man in this nation would propose the sale of any land to the commissioners of the United States at this time, such person should suffer death. Now, if such threats have been made, to prevent individuals from speaking freely, as well in your private as your public councils, it may become the duty of the commissioners to adopt and pursue a different course from the one they now propose to follow; for, under these threats, there certainly is not a man among you who would risk his life for the privilege of speaking his mind candidly . . .

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General Humming Bird, his X mark. Ah-che-la-tah, his X mark. Red Dog, his X mark. Lewis Perry, his X mark. P. P. Pitchlynn M. Foster, jun.

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Nettuckachee, his X mark. E-a-ho-ka-tubbee, his X mark. John Garland, his X mark. Jessp. Brashears, his X mark. Joel H. Nail Israel Folsom, J. L. McDonald

Selectmen, acting as commissioners on the part of the Choctaw Council

Saturday, November 11, 1826.

This evening the commissioners, at four o’clock, attended the council; when the following talk was read, on the part of the nation, by James L. McDonald, and interpreted by Mackey, United States interpreter . . . It is true that several councils have been held among us since the last spring, for the purpose of adopting certain laws and regulations for the benefit of our country, in which the intended treaty has occasionally become the subject of discussion; but in no one of them has the resolution or law referred to been adopted. The privilege of speaking freely and candidly your sentiments on any subject is highly prized by us, and we have been far indeed from wishing to restrict it. The contrary has been the fact . . . We regret that such reports should have been circulated . . . In one instance, at a council held in the northwest district of the nation, a resolution, it is true, was entered into, that if any man should so far forget his duty as to accept money as a bribe to sell his country, he should suffer a severe penalty. But this measure, whether necessary or not, was not unjustifiable . . . Respectfully, your friends and brothers,

November 11, 1826.

As we informed you yesterday, we will now deliver to you the talk of our great father the President of the United States. We shall explain his views and reasons for wishing to remove his red children to the west of the Mississippi, and also the terms upon which he is willing to purchase the land you now live on. From long experience, the Choctaws know that their father the President has been to them a kind and indulgent parent. They have seen and felt that his fatherly kindness has been extended alike to his red children and his white children, and that he is equally desirous to promote the interest and happiness of both. After many years spent in reflection, he has determined upon a plan that will best promote the true interest and real happiness of the Choctaws, and all the other tribes of red people who are under the protection of the strong arm of our Government . . . The United States have a large unsettled and unappropriated country on the west side of the great river Mississippi, into which they do not intend that their white settlement shall extend. This is the country in

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which our father the President intends to settle all his red children. When he gets them there, he proposes to introduce among them such wholesome rules and regulations for their government as will be best suited to their various conditions, and such as may be approved by each nation separately. He calculates that then, under one general superintendence, and an agent to each tribe, he will be enabled to carry on the work of civilization, promote education and agriculture, introduce among them all the mechanic arts which their necessities may require, and do all things for the general good of all the Indian tribes. In this way only can the future growth and prosperity of our red brothers be easily promoted by our Government . . . William Clark Thomas Hinds John Coffee Tuesday evening, November 14, 1826.

This evening the council met, and the commissioners, being notified, attended . . . Your talks of the 11th and 13th instant, giving the views of our father the President of the United States, and stating the terms upon which it is proposed that we shall cede away all our lands east of the Mississippi, have been fully interpreted and explained to the chiefs, captains, and warriors here assembled, and it now becomes our duty to give their decision; which is, that they cannot accede to your propositions. Regarding the welfare of their wives and children, and that of those of the Choctaw nation who are absent from this council, they have determined not to part with their country. This determination is made with great unanimity on the part of those here present, and we are satisfied that we speak the sentiments of nine-tenths of the nation. It would be needless to enter into the various reasons which have determined us to decline the acceptance of your proposals. It is sufficient that this is the land of our birth, and that when once sold it could never be recovered. It is a sure asylum for our infirm and aged countrymen, where, surrounded by their offspring, and among the plains, and the hills, and the streams of their youth, they might pass the remnant of their days in peace; and where, if undisturbed, we may all remain as prosperous and happy as in any other country . . . Why should we sell? Why seek new homes, when we are living here in peace, and, to such as are reasonably industrious, in plenty? . . . To please our father the President, we could do many things—have done many things, and at much sacrifice to our feelings; but we cannot consent to part with our country . . . General Hinds remarked, that he was much disappointed to find so few of the Choctaw nation assembled on this important occasion; that complaints as to inconveniences under which those who were here labored, came very improperly from men when the dearest interests of themselves and their posterity were involved in the business upon which they had been called together, and upon which so few of the nation were now assembled . . . The commissioners of the United States have been sent here more for the benefit of the nation than to serve their own Government, and it was these who had a right to complain if anyone had . . . After so much pains had been taken by the Government to apprize the nation of the importance of this business, how

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could they call themselves a large nation when there were so few of them now assembled to listen to the proposals that were made? Is not this treatment disrespectful and unjust? It will not be borne with by the President. If the nation is large, and cannot be assembled here, their people must be on the other side of the river; and the commissioners would place your headmen in an unpleasant situation, if they should go over the river and there treat with the Choctaw nation . . . The United States . . . had fostered and protected this people . . . The Choctaws deceived themselves, if they supposed this state of things could exist much longer . . .

November 15, 1826.

. . . the following talk was delivered by the commissioners . . . You say that to please your father the President you have done many things, and would do many things; but you say, in substance, that you are determined to do nothing; that it was needless to give the various reasons that determined you to decline his proposals; and, finally, you assure the President that you entertain for him the highest respect and veneration, and that you continue to rely on his parental protection. There appears to be a strange inconsistency between your words and your actions. We fear that you presume too much upon the goodness of our Government, by supposing that it will indulge you in refusing to receive the terms that have been offered you, and which have been so liberal as to convince you of the desire of the United States to do your nation full justice . . . Any man who will examine the subject will plainly see that the United States cannot, nor will not, indulge you in the course you are pursuing. You must submit to the wishes of our Government, or it will make such laws for you as to it may seem best suited to your condition, and compel you to abide by them. William Clark Thomas Hinds John Coffee

TREATY GROUND, CHOCTAW NATION, November 16, 1826 . . . . . . The following talk, in answer to the last talk of the commissioners, was read to the council in presence of the commissioners: The day before yesterday we gave an answer to the propositions contained in your talk of the 13th instant. We refused, but in respectful terms, to sell our country. You have now varied your proposition, and requested us to cede to the United States a portion of our lands bordering on the Tombigbee river, and adjoining the county of Monroe. The views of our father the President on this point, as expressed by you, have been fully explained to the council; and we are authorized to say that to this proposition, also, we are compelled to give their decided negative. A strong and sufficient reason may be briefly given. As it is the wish of the great body of our people to remain on their lands east of the Mississippi, and have the arts of civilized life introduced among them here, it is important that the limits of our

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country should be distinctly marked and defined. The Mississippi bounds us on the west; our brothers, the Chickasaws, bound us on the north; and the Tombigbee river presents an admirable natural boundary on the east. Ten years ago, at a treaty held at the Choctaw trading-house, the advantage of having so distinguished a boundary between us and the white people was strongly urged by the commissioners of the United States. It was stated, in substance, that, by having a broad and deep river for our boundary, we should be less liable to intrusion from the whites, and our people would remain in greater security. The argument was strong; the advice seemed good; and we ceded away all our lands east of the Tombigbee. The argument which seemed strong and good then, is equally so now; and we should indeed be justly chargeable with inconsistency, if we consented to alter a boundary so distinctly marked by nature. Source: American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States, vol. 2, Indian Affairs (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832–1834), 709–716, http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/amlaw/lwsp.html.

Document 1.12 Andrew Jackson, First Annual Message, December 8, 1829 Reporting to Congress a year after winning election as the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson established in no uncertain terms his own vision of Indian policy. This message was more than a report to the American people. It also established a legislative agenda for Congress. With Jackson’s party, the Democracy (later called the Democratic Party), holding clear majorities in both houses, Congress was quick to act on his suggestions. The condition and ulterior destiny of the Indian tribes within the limits of some of our States have become objects of much interest and importance. It has long been the policy of Government to introduce among them the arts of civilization, in the hope of gradually reclaiming them from a wandering life. This policy has, however, been coupled with another wholly incompatible with its success. Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have at the same time lost no opportunity to purchase their lands and thrust them farther into the wilderness. By this means they have not only been kept in a wandering state, but been led to look upon us as unjust and indifferent to their fate. Thus, though lavish in its expenditures upon the subject, Government has constantly defeated its own policy, and the Indians in general, receding farther and farther to the west, have retained their savage habits. A portion, however, of the Southern tribes, having mingled much with the whites and made some progress in the arts of civilized life, have lately attempted to erect an independent government within the limits of Georgia and Alabama. These States, claiming to be the only sovereigns within their territories, extended their laws over the Indians, which induced the latter to call upon the United States for protection. Under these circumstances the question presented was whether the General Government had a right to sustain those people in their pretensions. The Constitution

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declares that “no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State” without the consent of its legislature. If the General Government is not permitted to tolerate the erection of a confederate State within the territory of one of the members of this Union against her consent, much less could it allow a foreign and independent government to establish itself there . . . Actuated by this view of the subject, I informed the Indians inhabiting parts of Georgia and Alabama that their attempt to establish an independent government would not be countenanced by the Executive of the United States, and advised them to emigrate beyond the Mississippi or submit to the laws of those States. Our conduct toward these people is deeply interesting to our national character. Their present condition, contrasted with what they once were, makes a most powerful appeal to our sympathies. Our ancestors found them the uncontrolled possessors of these vast regions. By persuasion and force they have been made to retire from river to river and from mountain to mountain, until some of the tribes have become extinct and others have left but remnants to preserve for awhile their once terrible names. Surrounded by the whites with their arts of civilization, which by destroying the resources of the savage doom him to weakness and decay, the fate of the Mohegan, the Narragansett, and the Delaware is fast overtaking the Choctaw, the Cherokee, and the Creek. That this fate surely awaits them if they remain within the limits of the States does not admit of a doubt. Humanity and national honor demand that every effort should be made to avert so great a calamity . . . As a means of effecting this end I suggest for your consideration the propriety of setting apart an ample district west of the Mississippi, and without the limits of any State or Territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes as long as they shall occupy it, each tribe having a distinct control over the portion designated for its use. There they may be secured in the enjoyment of governments of their own choice, subject to no other control from the United States than such as may be necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several tribes. There the benevolent may endeavor to teach them the arts of civilization, and, by promoting union and harmony among them, to raise up an interesting commonwealth, destined to perpetuate the race and to attest the humanity and justice of this Government. This emigration should be voluntary, for it would be as cruel as unjust to compel the aboriginies to abandon the graves of their fathers and seek a home in a distant land. But they should be distinctly informed that if they remain within the limits of the States they must be subject to their laws. In return for their obedience as individuals they will without doubt be protected in the enjoyment of those possessions which they have improved by their industry. But it seems to me visionary to suppose that in this state of things claims can be allowed on tracts of country on which they have neither dwelt nor made improvements, merely because they have seen them from the mountain or passed them in the chase. Submitting to the laws of the States, and receiving, like other citizens, protection in their persons and property, they will ere long become merged in the mass of our population. Source: A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896–1899), vol. 2, 456–459.

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Document 1.13 An Act to Provide for an Exchange of Lands with the Indians Residing in Any of the States or Territories, and for Their Removal West of the River Mississippi, 1830 Often referred to as the Removal Act of 1830, this was the formal instrument permitting President Andrew Jackson to enact the plan he outlined in his First Annual Message. When the Supreme Court subsequently rejected the efforts by Georgia to evict the Cherokee Indians, Jackson simply ignored the decision, claiming that the federal judiciary had no binding power over the executive. The Cherokees, who endured death and privation in their subsequent forced migration to the West, called their ordeal the “the trail of tears.” Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That it shall and may be lawful for the President of the United States to cause so much of any territory belonging to the United States, west of the river Mississippi, not included in any state or organized territory, and to which the Indian title has been extinguished, as he may judge necessary, to be divided into a suitable number of districts, for the reception of such tribes or nations of Indians as may choose to exchange the lands where they now reside, and remove there; and to cause each of said districts to be so described by natural or artificial marks, as to be easily distinguished from every other. SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful for the President to exchange any or all of such districts, so to be laid off and described, with any tribe or nation within the limits of any of the states or territories, and with which the United States have existing treaties, for the whole or any part or portion of the territory claimed and occupied by such tribe or nation, within the bounds of any one or more of the states or territories, where the land claimed and occupied by the Indians, is owned by the United States, or the United States are bound to the state within which it lies to extinguish the Indian claim thereto. SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That in the making of any such exchange or exchanges, it shall and may be lawful for the President solemnly to assure the tribe or nation with which the exchange is made, that the United States will forever secure and guaranty to them, and their heirs or successors, the country so exchanged with them; and if they prefer it, that the United States will cause a patent or grant to be made and executed to them for the same: Provided always, That such lands shall revert to the United States, if the Indians become extinct, or abandon the same. SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That if, upon any of the lands now occupied by the Indians, and to be exchanged for, there should be such improvements as add value to the land claimed by any individual or individuals of such tribes or nations, it shall and may be lawful for the President to cause such value to be ascertained by appraisement or otherwise, and to cause such ascertained value to be paid to the person or persons rightfully claiming such improvements. And upon the payment of such valuation, the improvements so valued and paid for, shall pass to the United States, and possession shall not afterwards be permitted to any of the same tribe.

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SEC. 5. And be it further enacted, That upon the making of any such exchange as is contemplated by this act, it shall and may be lawful for the President to cause such aid and assistance to be furnished to the emigrants as may be necessary and proper to enable them to remove to, and settle in, the country for which they may have exchanged; and also, to give them such aid and assistance as may be necessary for their support and subsistence for the first year after their removal. SEC. 6. And be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful for the President to cause such tribe or nation to be protected, at their new residence, against all interruption or disturbance from any other tribe or nation of Indians, or from any other person or persons whatever. SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That it shall and may be lawful for the President to have the same superintendence and care over any tribe or nation in the country to which they may remove, as contemplated by this act, that he is now authorized to have over them at their present places of residence. Approved: May 28, 1830 Source: The Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1845), vol. 4, 411–412.

Document 1.14 John L. O’Sullivan Announces Manifest Destiny, 1845 A writer and editor with a penchant for overstatement, John L. O’Sullivan was part of a broader literary community called Young America. Unwavering in its support of territorial expansion and of the notion that the United States had a mission to civilize the world, Young America was most active in the 1840s and 1850s. O’Sullivan published this article in the Democratic Review under the simple title of “Annexation.” In it, he advocated the specific goal of annexing Texas. But O’Sullivan also took the opportunity to make broader claims about the United States, establishing the phrase “Manifest Destiny,” which would come to embody the American outlook at midcentury. It is time now for opposition to the Annexation of Texas to cease . . . It is time for the common duty of Patriotism to the Country to succeed . . . Texas is now ours. Already before these words are written, her Convention has undoubtedly ratified the acceptance, by her Congress, of our proffered invitation into the Union; and made the requisite changes in her already republican form of constitution to adapt it to its future federal relations. Her star and her stripe may already be said to have taken their place in the glorious blazon of our common nationality; and the sweep of our eagle’s wing already includes within its circuit the wide extent of her fair and fertile land. She is no longer to us a mere geographical space—a certain combination of coast, plain, mountain, valley, forest and stream. She is no longer to us a mere country on the map. She comes within the dear and sacred designation of Our Country . . . It is time then that all should cease to treat her as alien and even adverse—cease to denounce and vilify all and everything connected with her

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accession—cease to thwart and oppose the remaining steps for its consummation . . . Let their reception into “the family” be frank, kindly, and cheerful, as befits such an occasion, as comports not less with our own self-respect than patriotic duty towards them. Ill betide those foul birds that delight to ’file their own nest, and disgust the ear with perpetual discord of ill-omened croak. Why, were other reasoning wanting, in favor of now elevating this questions of the reception of Texas into the Union out of the lower region of our past party dissentions, up to its proper level of a high and broad nationality, it surely is to be found, found abundantly, in the manner in which other nations have undertaken to intrude themselves into it between us and the proper parties to the case, in a spirit of hostile interference against us, for the avowed object of thwarting our policy and hampering our power, limiting our greatness and checking the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions. This we have seen done by England, our old rival and enemy; and by France, strangely coupled with her against us . . . It is wholly untrue, and unjust to ourselves, the pretence that the Annexation has been a measure of spoilation, unrightful and unrighteous—of military conquest under forms of peace and law—of territorial aggrandizement at the expense of justice due by a double sanctity to the weak. This view of the question is wholly unfounded, and has been before so amply refuted in these pages, as well as in a thousand other modes, that we shall not again dwell upon it. The independence of Texas was complete and absolute. It was an independence, not only in face, but of right . . . She was released, rightfully and absolutely released, from all Mexican allegiance, or duty of cohesion to the Mexican political body, by the acts and fault of Mexico herself, and Mexico alone. There never was a clearer case. It was not revolution; it was resistance to revolution; and resistance under such circumstances as left independence the necessary resulting state, caused by the abandonment of those with whom her former federal association had existed. What then can be more preposterous than all this clamor by Mexico and the Mexican interest, against Annexation, as a violation of any rights of hers, any duties of ours? . . . California will, probably, next fall away from the loose adhesion which, in such a country as Mexico, holds a remote province in a slight equivocal kind of dependence on the metropolis. Imbecile and distracted, Mexico never can exert any real governmental authority over such a country. The impotence of the one and the distance of the other, must make the relation one of virtual independence; unless, by stunting the province of all natural growth, and forbidding that immigration which can alone develope its capabilities and fulfil the purposes of its creation, tyranny may retain a military dominion, which is no government in the legitimate sense of the term. In the case of California this is now impossible. The Anglo-Saxon foot is already on its borders. Already the advance guard of the irresistible army of Anglo-Saxon emigration has begun to pour down upon it, armed with the plough and the rifle, and making its trail with schools and colleges, courts and representative halls, mills and meeting-houses. A population will soon be in actual occupation of California, over which it will be idle for Mexico to dream of dominion. They will necessarily become independent. All this without agency of our government, without

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responsibility of our people—in the natural flow of events, the spontaneous working of principles, and the adaption of the tendencies and wants of the human race to the elemental circumstances in the midst of which they find themselves placed. And they will have a right to independence—to self-government—to the possession of the homes conquered from the wilderness by their own labors and dangers, sufferings and sacrifices— a better and a truer right than the artificial title of sovereignty in Mexico, a thousand miles distant, inheriting from Spain a title good only against those who have none better. Their right to independence will be the natural right to self-government belonging to any community strong enough to maintain it—distinct in position, origin and character, and free from any mutual obligations of membership of a common political body, binding it to others by the duty of loyalty and compact of public faith. This will be their title to independence; and by this title, there can be no doubt that the population now fast streaming down upon California will both assert and maintain that independence. Whether they will then attach themselves to our Union or not, is not to be predicted with any certainty. Unless the projected railroad across the continent to the Pacific be carried into effect, perhaps they may not; though even in that case, the day is not distant when the Empires of the Atlantic and Pacific would again flow together into one, as soon as their inland border should approach each other. But the great work, colossal as appears the plan on its first suggestion, cannot remain long unbuilt. Its necessity for this very purpose of binding and holding together in its iron clasp our fast-settling Pacific region with that of the Mississippi valley—the natural facility of the route—the ease with which any amount of labor for the construction can be drawn in from the overcrowded populations of Europe, to be paid in the lands made valuable by the progress of the work itself—and its immense utility to the commerce of the world with the whole eastern coast of Asia, alone almost sufficient for the support of such as road—these considerations give assurance that the day cannot be distant which shall witness the conveyance of the representatives from Oregon and California to Washington within less time than a few years ago was devoted to a similar journey by those from Ohio; while the magnetic telegraph will enable the editors of the “San Francisco Union,” the “Astoria Evening Post,” or the “Nootka Morning News,” to set up in type the first half of the President’s Inaugural before the echoes of the latter half shall have died away beneath the lofty porch of the Capitol, as spoken from his lips. Away, then, with all idle French talk of balances of power on the American Continent. There is no growth in Spanish America! Whatever progress of population there may be in the British Canadas, is only for their own early severance of their present colonial relation to the little island three thousand miles across the Atlantic; soon to be followed by Annexation, and destined to swell the still accumulating momentum of our progress. And whosoever may hold the balance, though they should cast into the opposite scale all the bayonets and cannon, not only of France and England, but of Europe entire, how would it kick the beam against the simple, solid weight of the two hundred and fifty, or three hundred millions—and American millions—destined to gather beneath the flutter of the stripes and stars , in the fast hastening year of the Lord 1945! Source: The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, July–August 1845.

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Document 1.15 Proclamation to the Residents of New Mexico, August 22, 1846 Stephen Watts Kearny spent his entire career advocating the American notion of empire. In the 1820s and 1830s, he commanded military units throughout the Missouri River valley, and devoted most of his efforts to supervising the removal of Indians and the migration of white settlers. He married the stepdaughter of William Clark, who had co-led the Lewis and Clark expedition before serving as territorial governor of Missouri and becoming one of the most important Indian agents in U.S. history. A brigadier general in the Mexican War, Kearny led troops into New Mexico, where he issued this proclamation to local residents. Kearny later served as military governor of California, securing its transition from Mexican province to American state. He then served briefly as military commander in Veracruz, Mexico. He contracted malaria and returned to St. Louis, where he died in 1848.

The undersigned has come to New Mexico with a strong military force and an equally strong one is following close in his rear. He has more troops than is necessary to put down any opposition that can possible be brought against him, and therefore it would be but folly or madness for any dissatisfied or discontented persons to think of resisting him. The undersigned has instructions from his government to respect the religious institutions of New Mexico—to protect the property of the church—to cause the worship of those belonging to it to be undisturbed, and their religious rights in the amplest manner preserved to them—also to protect the persons and property of all quiet and peaceable inhabitants within its boundaries against their enemies, the Eutaws, the Navajoes, and others; and when he assures all that it will be his pleasure, as well as his duty, to comply with those instructions, he calls upon them to exert themselves in preserving order, in promoting concord, and in maintaining the authority and efficacy of the laws. And he requires of those who have left their homes and taken up arms against the troops of the United States, to return forthwith to them, or else they will be considered as enemies and traitors, subjecting their persons to punishment and their property to seizure and confiscation for the benefit of the public treasury. It is the wish and intention of the United States to provide for New Mexico a free government, with the least possible delay, similar to those in the United States; and the people of New Mexico will then be called on to exercise the rights of freemen in electing their own representatives to the territorial legislature. But until this can be done, the laws hitherto in existence will be continued until changed or modified by competent authority; and those persons holding office will continue in the same for the present, provided they will consider themselves good citizens and are willing to take the oath of allegiance to the United States. The United States hereby absolves all persons residing within the boundaries of New Mexico from any further allegiance to the republic of Mexico, and hereby claims them as citizens of the United States. Those who remain quiet and peaceable, will be considered good citizens and receive protection—those who are found in arms, or instigating others against the United States, will be considered as traitors, and treated accordingly.

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Don Manuel Armijo, the late governor of this department, has fled from it: the undersigned has taken possession of it without firing a gun or spilling a single drop of blood, in which he most truly rejoices, and for the present will be considered as governor of the territory. Given at Santa Fé, the capital of the territory of New Mexico, this 22d day of August, 1846, and in the 71st year of the independence of the United States. S. W. KEARNY, Brigadier General U.S. Army Source: Messages of the President of the United States, with the Correspondence, Therewith Communicated, between the Secretary of War and Other Officers of the Government, on the Subject of the Mexican War, U.S. Serial Set, Ex. Doc. No. 60 (Washington, D.C.: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848), 170–171.

Document 1.16 Laws for the Government of the Territory of New Mexico, 1846 Established to create strategic and commercial inroads with the Indians of the Great Basin and the Rocky Mountains, New Mexico consisted mostly of a few small outposts and the central trading center of Santa Fe. The United States faced little difficulty evicting Mexican authority in 1846, but making U.S. sovereignty a reality proved more challenging. This document captures the dual nature of U.S. rule in New Mexico. At one moment, the United States was a conqueror seeking to establish its rule and crush any residual resistance. At the same time, the United States also sought to extend a political system that rejected the strict hierarchies of European empires. Soon after arriving in New Mexico, Stephen Watts Kearny issued the following laws to serve as a bridge between a Mexican imperial history and an American future that at once embraced and rejected empire.

Organic Law Of The Territory Of New Mexico The government of the United States of America ordains and establishes the following organic law for the territory of New Mexico, which has become a territory of the said government:

Article I. Sec. 1. The country heretofore known as New Mexico shall be known hereafter and designated as the territory of New Mexico, in the United States of America, and the temporary government of the said territory shall be organized and administered in the manner herein prescribed.

Article II. Executive power.

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Sec. 2. The executive power shall be vested in a governor, who shall reside in the said territory, and shall hold his office for two years, unless sooner removed by the President of the United States. He shall be the commander-in-chief of the militia of the said territory, except when called into the service of the United States, and ex officio superintendent of Indian affairs. He shall have power to fill all civil and military offices which shall be established, the appointments to which shall not be otherwise provided for by law. He shall cause the laws to be distributed and faithfully executed, and shall be conservator of the peace throughout the territory . . .

Article III. Legislative power. Sec. 1. The legislative power shall be vested in a general assembly, which shall consist of a legislative council and a house of representatives. . . . Sec. 8. All free male citizens of the territory of New Mexico who then are, and for three months next preceding the election shall have been, residents of the county or district in which they shall offer a vote, shall be entitled to vote for a delegate to the Congress of the United States, and for members of the general assembly, and for all other officers elected by the people . . . Bill of Rights. That the great and essential principles of liberty and free government may be recognized and established, it is hereby declared— 1st. That all political power is vested in and belongs to the people. 2d. That the people have the right peaceably to assemble for their common good, and to apply to those in power for redress of grievances, by petition or remonstrance. 3d. That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to worship Almighty God according to the dictates of their consciences; that no person can ever be hurt, molested, or restrained in his religious professions, if he do not disturb others in their religious worship, and that all Christian churches shall be protected and none oppressed, and that no person on account of his religious opinions, shall be rendered ineligible to any office of honor, trust, or profit. 4th. That courts of justice shall be open to every person; just remedy given for every injury to person and property; that right and justice shall be administered without sale, denial, or delay, and that no private property shall be taken for public use without just compensation. 5th. That the right of trial by jury shall be inviolate. 6th. That in all criminal cases the accused has the right to be heard by himself and counsel, to demand the nature and cause of the accusation, to have compulsory process for witnesses in his favor, to meet the witness against him face to face, and to have a speedy trial by jury of his country. 7th. The accused cannot be compelled to give evidence against himself, or be deprived of life, liberty, or property, but by a verdict of a jury and the laws of the land. 8th. No person, after having been once acquitted by a jury, can be tried a second time for the same offence.

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9th. That all persons shall be bailed by sufficient sureties, except in capital offences, where the proof of guilt is evident; and the privileges of the writ of “habeas corpus” cannot be suspended except the public safety shall require it, in the case of a rebellion or invasion. 10th. Excessive bail shall not be required, excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. 11th. That the people shall be secure in their persons, papers, houses, and effects, from unreasonable searches and seizures; and that no writ shall issue for search or seizure without a probable case of guilt is made out under oath. 12th. That the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of freemen and that every person may freely speak, write, and print on any subject, being responsible for every abuse of that liberty. 13th. That no vicar, priest, or preacher of the Gospel, nor teacher, of any religious denomination, shall ever be compelled to bear arms, or to serve on juries, work on roads, or perform military duty. Done at the government house in the city of Santa Fé, in the Territory of New Mexico, by Brigadier General Stephen W. Kearny, by virtue of the power and authority conferred on him by the government of the United States, this twenty-second September, 1846. S. W. KEARNY, Brigadier General, U.S.A. Source: Messages of the President of the United States, with the Correspondence, Therewith Communicated, between the Secretary of War and Other Officers of the Government, on the Subject of the Mexican War, U.S. Serial Set, Ex. Doc. No. 60 (Washington, D.C.: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848), 177–183.

Document 1.17 Congress Debates a Government for the West, 1848 Slavery dominated the debate over newly acquired territory during the 1840s. Much of that argument turned less on the evils of slavery than on the battle for political supremacy between North and South, both of which saw the obvious implications of creating new states in the Southwest. Nonetheless, Americans situated that debate within the familiar issues of empire. Specifically, they contemplated how much political freedom to allow the peoples of the Southwest. Likewise, they worried about how best to preserve the union within a nation that now reached from sea to shining sea. Until the Mexican War, many in Congress believed they had settled the matter of slavery in 1820 through the Missouri Compromise, which provided for the admission of new slave states in the South and new free states in the North, with the Mason-Dixon Line dividing the two regions. But that compromise applied only to the Louisiana Purchase. In 1848, Congress argued about the territory acquired through the Mexican War as well as the Oregon Country, a region in the Northwest acquired piecemeal through a series of agreements with Great Britain. In July 1848, congressional debate over a preliminary plan by the Committee on Territories reflected this array of concerns. Sen. John Clayton (Whig) of Delaware expressed the concern of

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many in both the House and the Senate who feared that the slavery issue would destroy the Union. He preferred to focus instead on the immediate practicalities of governing new territory. In the following pronouncement on the residents of New Mexico, Clayton articulated the sort of ethnic chauvinism that Anglo-Americans typically expressed toward the Hispanic residents of New Mexico. Sen. John Niles (D) of Connecticut expressed the growing frustration of northerners who resented the way silence and subterfuge enabled slaveholders to extend their power into the Southwest. Finally, Sen. John C. Calhoun (D) of South Carolina, one of the dominant political figures of the antebellum era, made a brief defense of slavery of the sort that marked his political career. Congress created the Oregon Territory without slavery in August 1848, but a resolution on New Mexico and California proved more difficult. It was only through the Compromise of 1850 that Congress provided for the creation of California as a free state and for a New Mexico Territory that would decide whether to be free or slave via popular sovereignty.

July 19, 1848

Mr. CLAYTON, from the select committee on the Territories of Oregon, California, and New Mexico, reported a bill for the organization of Territorial Governments in each of them. (It appeared to be a very long bill, containing no less than thirty-seven sections.) Mr. CLAYTON said the subjects referred to this committee were of infinite difficulty. The Territories for which temporary civil governments were to be organized embraced an area of 1,044,492 square miles—about as large as that of one-third of all Europe, and capable of sustaining, sooner or later, the population of a mighty empire. The intrinsic difficulties necessarily belonging to such an organization were increased by the nature and character of the population now existing there, as well as that hereafter to be introduced by the extension of the Constitution and laws of the United States over so vast a country. . . . a vote [within the committee on territories] was taken on a proposition moved by the Senator from Missouri [Mr. ATCHISON] “that the spirit of the Missouri compromise be adopted to govern the settlement of all the Territories of the United States.” On this question the committee divided, five for and three against the motion. The Senator from Indiana [Mr. BRIGHT] then moved the proposition, notice of which had been previously given in the Senate, containing the words of the Missouri compromise. As the condition of the territory was now said to be different from that to which the compromise applied in 1820, a motion was made by the Senator from Kentucky [Mr. UNDERWOOD] to amend that proposition by providing that “all the territory in New Mexico and California, south of the parallel of 360 301, shall be placed on the same footing in all respects as to slavery that existed in Louisiana while it was a territory.” On this question the committee divided, four for the motion and four against it. After the failure of this motion, the question was taken on the proposition of the Senator from Kentucky, and with a like result—the committee being again equally divided. At this stage of the proceedings all compromise appeared to be impossible. But the committee proceeded afterwards to consider a proposition to endeavor to adjust the

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great question, at least so far as to enable Congress to extend the laws over and provide for the administration of justice in the Territories, leaving for the present the settlement of it to the laws of population, or the adaptation of soil, climate, and all circumstances to the various kinds of labor. While it was admitted on all sides that by far the greatest portion of the Territories was properly adapted to free labor, and would necessarily be free soil forever, yet it was also with equal unanimity conceded that there was a portion of it where free labor never could be introduced, owing to the climate and the peculiar productions of that portion. It was thought that in Oregon, which no one imagines can ever be slaveholding, could be organized as the people of that Territory desired, by the temporary adoption of their present laws interdicting or prohibiting slavery till the Territorial Legislature proposed to be organized by a popular vote, under the bill referred to us, could enact some law on the subject, most of the objections which had been urged in debate, to the twelfth section would be obviated without any sacrifice of principle by those who, urged them; and that, after thus disposing of the question, so far as relates to Oregon, the Territories of California and New Mexico could be organized in the same bill by the appointment of a governor, senator, and judges, to compose, according to the old precedents, a temporary Legislature for each of these Territories, but without the power to legislate on the subject of slavery; thus placing that question beyond the power of the Territorial Legislature, and resting the right to introduce or prohibit slavery in these two Territories on the Constitutions the same should be expounded by the judges, with a right of appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States. It was thought that by this means Congress would avoid the decision of this distracting question, leaving it to be settled by the silent operation of the Constitution itself . . . I now, sir, have the honor to report, as an amendment and a substitute for the bill referred to the select committee, “A bill to establish the Territorial Governments of Oregon, California, and New Mexico.” The committee, with all becoming modesty, desire to say that they do not view their work as perfect; but it is the very best which, under all the embarrassing circumstances of their position, they have been able to propose. To the Senate they appeal for assistance to correct any errors into which they may have inadvertently fallen. But it is the honest opinion of a large majority of the committee, that by the passage of this bill the safety of the Union will be placed beyond the reach of agitation, and that the question, and the only question, which now threatens to endanger it, may be, not immediately but ultimately, put at rest forever. The bill was then read a first time and unanimously ordered to be printed. On motion, the Senate adjourned . . . Mr. CLAYTON rose and said: There may possibly be some misapprehension in regard to a portion of the remarks made by me yesterday in introducing the bill for the organization of Territorial Governments in Oregon, New Mexico, and California, and I desire to correct it if any such exist. The Select Committee desired, and in that desire I fully concur, that the bill should speak for itself, and that it should be regarded as the exponent of their views and opinions. It was not my purpose to submit the remarks which I made yesterday in lieu of a report; nor were they to be regarded as tantamount to a report. The bill, I repeat, is to speak for itself. It fully reveals the sentiments of the committee, and for that very reason a formal report was deemed unnecessary. I do not know that it is now

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necessary, for me to say anything more than to add that a large majority of the committee decidedly expressed the wish that this measure might become a law, with the expectation and design that it would prove to be an adjustment of the great question now in controversy between the North and the South. I shall, if there be no objection, call up the bill to-morrow, and then every member of the committee will have an opportunity of expressing his views upon the subject—an opportunity of which I design to avail myself . . .

July 22, 1848

. . . Mr. NILES said the main question had been the question of the power of Congress to interfere with the question of slavery. He wished to know if that Senator regarded this bill as taking the affirmative side of this question. He also desired to know what was the compromise effected or exhibited in the bill. Mr. CLAYTON replied that this bill neither affirms nor disaffirms the power, and herein consists the compromise. If any Senator is opposed to this compromise, let him stand up and say so. Mr. NILES said it appeared then, that the compromise left the matter where it found it. It left the question just as it was, as yielding all the claims which the advocates of slavery had put forward. Mr. CALHOUN repudiated any idea other than an object national in its character, the harmony and preservation of the Union. The South only looked to the protection of its rights which it had derived from its ancestors. Mr. NILES expressed his pleasure at hearing this declaration. But he did not exactly comprehend the extent of the Senator’s remark. He thought the question of the right of the South to carry property into the free States, was to be made the subject of compromise. He expressed his belief that the question might be compromised on the principle of equality of rights between the North and the South. Mr. DICKINSON explained his course in the committee. They saw three great Territories before them. What was to be done to bring these into the Union? Midsummer had passed, and something was necessary to be done. A committee was appointed, and a bill was reported extending the Constitution and the laws over these Territories without touching the question of slavery. Mr. NILES explained some parts of his observations previously-made. The Senator from New York seemed to approve of this bill, and this in the face of a speech which he made early in the session, a well-considered speech, in which he denied the power of Congress to, interfere with the government of Territories. As the Senator had changed his tone on this question, there was some hope that further change would ultimately bring him round to a correct position. He insisted that this bill is no compromise; it is no compromise at all. Yet it is not altogether negative; on one point it is affirmative. It prohibits the inhibition of slavery, in the Territory. Was that nothing? He thought it most significant and most important. He feared that when these Territories would come and knock at our doors for admission as States in the Union, the same difficulties might arise which arose on the unfortunate Missouri

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question. The questions involved in this matter are before the country and Congress, and they must be met now or hereafter. He did not see how this bill was to settle the question. The people, who are intelligent, and who know what the question is, will be apt to ask how it is settled? The Territory of California, New Mexico, and Oregon, has come into our hands free as God has made it. He did not expect anything beneficial from the committee; but he certainly did not expect such a dodging, such an evasion of the question as was evident in the bill. Which had cowardice stamped on it. Mr. DICKINSON replied, and asserted that there was no inconsistency in his course. He referred to the resolutions he had offered early in the session, and stated that they sustained the Oregon bill, he went for the freedom of Government, not the freedom of the cut-throat. He would not substitute the dagger and the rifle for the power of the law. He complimented Mr. CALHOUN, and all the members of the committee, for the proper spirit which they brought into the discussion of the bill. Mr. CORWIN referred to the speeches of Mr. CALHOUN, which maintained that Congress had no power to touch the question of slavery. Such, also, was the argument of his friend from Georgia, [Mr. BERRIEN]. He wished to know if the committee made any investigation ‘on the subject of this power, and if so, to what result?’ He wished to know if the committee believed that this question could be carried to the Supreme Court by any lawyer? He wished to know how the law relative to fugitives could be executed? The Territorial judge would be perplexed. The master would appeal to the Constitution, according to the principle in this bill; and if the slave was handed back to his master, and he appealed to the Supreme Court, how is the value of the property to be ascertained? And if the value of the slave is not $2,000, the case must be decided by one of the Territorial judges, some fifteen hundred miles from the seat of Government. He considered it a question worth looking after in this noon of the nineteenth century; whether Cuffee or his master was the right man? He wished, also, to know why New Mexico and California should not be entitled to the same privileges of the other two States? Mr. CLAYTON explained, that the inhabitants of New Mexico were not admitted, to equal privileges with Oregon, because they were too ignorant for self-government. Source: The Congressional Globe (Washington, D.C.: Blair & Rives, 1833–1873), 30th Cong., 1st sess., 950, 953, 988.

Document 1.18 The Residents of New Mexico Respond to American Rule, 1846–1847 Unlike the Louisiana Purchase, which received general approbation among white residents of the Mississippi Valley, the residents of Mexican North America were more circumspect, and rightly so. Initially, they worried they would be treated as conquered peoples. Even more frustrating for them were the initial promises of equal treatment followed by the reality of political exclusion and economic subjugation. The responses of New Mexico’s residents were varied, as the following documents demonstrate. In his first communication with Stephen Watts Kearny, Juan Bautisita Vigil y Alarid, the acting governor of New Mexico, echoed many of the comments of white Louisianans who swore allegiance to

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the United States and condemned the colonial structure of other empires. At the same time, he made clear why local residents might resent the invasion that brought about their transfer of nationality. Others in New Mexico were less genteel in their expressions of discontent. In January 1847, an insurrection erupted outside present-day Taos, New Mexico. Comprising Mexicans and Taos Indians, the Taos revolt grew quickly and spread throughout the region. Their target was the symbol of U.S. power. The insurrectionists murdered Charles Bent, the territorial governor, as well as other well-placed Anglo-Americans. The United States responded by dispatching hundreds of troops to crush the revolt and reestablish federal authority. Unfortunately, few participants in the revolt left any accounts of their motivations or their actions. In an address to local residents, Donaciano Vigil, the acting governor, condemned the revolt. Rather than celebrate U.S. control, however, Vigil was more concerned that local residents—particularly Indians—would rise against lawful authority of any kind. It was left for an Anglo-American observer to publish a series of revealing questions about the Taos revolt. In his published narrative of travels through the West, Lewis Gerrard invoked the standard white concerns about racial revolt, but he nonetheless concluded that the Taos revolt was the natural result of long-brewing resentments.

Juan Bautisita Vigil y Alarid to Stephen Watts Kearny, Santa Fe, August 19, 1846 General:—The address which you have just delivered, in which you announce that you have taken possession of this great country in the name of the United States of America, gives us some idea of the wonderful future that awaits us. It is not for us to determine the boundaries of nations. The cabinets of Mexico and Washington will arrange these differences. It is for us to obey and respect the established authorities, no matter what may be our private opinions. The inhabitants of this Department humbly and honorably present their loyalty and allegiance to the government of North America . . . Source: The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico . . ., ed. Ralph Emerson Twitchell (Denver: Smith-Brooks Company, 1909), 74–75.

Donaciano Vigil to the People of New Mexico Fellow Citizens: The gang of Pablo Montoya and Cortes, in Taos, infatuated in consequence of having sacrificed to their caprice his excellency, the governor, and other peaceable citizens, and commenced their great work of plunder by sacking the houses of their victims, according to principles proclaimed by them, for the purpose of making proselytes, yesterday encountered in the vicinity of La Cañada the forces of the Government restorative of order and peace, and in that place, unfortunately for them, their triumph ended . . . Their hosts were composed of scoundrels and desperadoes, so that it may be said that the war was one of the rabble against honest and discreet men; not one of the latter has as yet

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been found among this crew of vagabonds, unless, perhaps, some one actuated by the fear of losing his life while in their power or of being robbed of his property. The Government has the information, and congratulates itself that within ten days the inquietude caused you by the cry of alarm raised in Taos will cease, and peace, the precursor of the felicity of the country, will return to take her seat on the altar of concord and reciprocal confidence. The ringleaders of the conspiracy, if they should be apprehended, will receive the reward due to their signal crimes, and the Government, which for the present has been compelled to act with energy in order to crush the head of the revolutionary hydra which begin to show itself in Taos, will afterwards adopt lenient measures, in order to consolidate the union of all the Inhabitants of this beautiful country under the aegis of law and reason. I hope, therefore, that, your minds being now relieved of past fears, you will think only on the security and protection of the law; and, uniting with your Government, will afford it the aid of your intelligence, in order that it may secure to you the prosperity desired by your fellow-citizen and friend, Donaciano Vigil Santa Fe, January 25, 1847 FELLOW CITIZENS: Your regularly appointed governor had occasion to go on private business as far as the town of Taos. A popular insurrection, headed by Pablo Montoya and Manuel Cortez, who raised the cry of revolution, resulted in the barbarous assassination of his excellency, the governor, of the greater part of the Government officials, and some private citizens. Pablo Montoya, whom you already know, notorious for his insubordination and restlessness, headed a similar insurrection in September, 1837 . . . Another of his pretended objects is to wage war against the foreign government. Why, if he is so full of patriotism, did he not exert himself and lead troops to prevent the entry of American forces in the month of August, instead of glutting his insane passions and showing his martial valor by the brutal sacrifice of defenseless victims, and this at the very time when an arrangement between the two Governments, with regard to boundaries, was expected. Whether this country has to belong to the Government of the United States or return to its native Mexico, is it not a gross absurdity to foment rancorous feelings toward people with whom we are either to compose one family, or to continue our commercial relations. Unquestionably it is. To-day or to-morrow a respectable body of troops will commence their march for the purpose of quelling the disorders of Pablo Montoya in Taos. The Government is determined to pursue energetic measures toward all the refractory until they are reduced to order, as well as to take care of and protect honest and discreet men; and pray you that, hearkening to the voice of reason, for the sake of the common happiness and your own preservation, you will keep yourselves quiet and engaged in your private affairs . . . Donaciano Vigil. Santa Fe, January 22, 1847 Source: Insurrection Against the Military Government in New Mexico and California, 1847–48, S. Doc. 442, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 27–28.

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Lewis Garrard on the Execution of the Taos Rebels The sheriff (Metcalfe, formerly a mountaineer, soninlaw to Estis) was in want of the wherewith to hang the criminals, so he borrowed our rawhide lariats, and two or three hempen picket cords of a teamster. In a room adjoining the bar, we put the hangman’s noose on one end, tugging away quite heartily . . . The poor pelados marched slowly, with down-cast eyes, arms tied behind, and bare heads, with the exception of white cotton caps, stuck on the back part, to be pulled over the face as the last ceremony . . . When within fifteen paces of the gallows, the sideguard, filing off to the right and left, formed, at regular distances from each other, three sides of a hollow square; the mountaineers and myself composed the fourth and front side, in full view of the trembling prisoners, who marched up to the tree, under which was a government wagon, with two mules attached. The driver and sheriff assisted them in, ranging them on a board, placed across the hinder end, which maintained its balance, as they were six—an even number—two on each extremity, and two in the middle. The gallows was so narrow they touched. The ropes, by reason of size and stiffness, despite the soaping given them, were adjusted with difficulty; but, through the indefatigable efforts of the sheriff and the lieutenant (who accompanied us from the ranch), all preliminaries were arranged. The former, officiating as deputy sheriff for the occasion, seemed to enjoy the position—but the blue uniform looked sadly out of place on a hangman. With rifles grounded, we awaited the consummation of the fearful tragedy. No crowd was around to disturb; a death-like stillness reigned. The spectators on the azoteas seemed scarcely to move their eyes directed to the painful sight of the doomed wretches, with harsh halters now circling their necks. The sheriff and assistant sat down; and, succeeding a few moments of intense expectation, the heart-wrung victims said a few words to their people. But one, said that they had committed murder, and deserved death. In their brief, but earnest appeals, which I could but imperfectly comprehend, the words mi padre, mi madre—“my father, my mother”—could be distinguished. The one sentenced for treason showed a spirit of martyrdom worthy of the cause for which he died—the liberty of his country; and, instead of the cringing, contemptible recantation of the others, his speech was firm asseverations of his own innocence, the unjustness of his trial, and the arbitrary conduct of his murderers. With a scowl, as the cap was pulled over his face, the last words he uttered between his gritting teeth were, “Caraho, los Americanos!” The atrocity of the act of hanging that man for treason is most damnable; with the execution of those for murder no fault should be found. Source: Lewis H. Garrard, Wah-To-Yah, and the Taos Trail (Cincinnati: H. W. Darby, 1850), 220–228.

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Document 1.19 The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 1848 Written at the end of the Mexican War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo marked the first time the United States was able to press its own terms on a conquered enemy with few restrictions. As a result, the United States could dictate the text, including these passages addressing the status of the territory acquired through the treaty and the treatment of its residents. Treaty Of Peace, Friendship, Limits, And Settlement Between The United States Of America And The United Mexican States Concluded At Guadalupe Hidalgo, February 2, 1848; Ratification Advised By Senate, With Amendments, March 10, 1848; Ratified By President, March 16, 1848; Ratifications Exchanged At Queretaro, May 30, 1848; Proclaimed, July 4, 1848. IN THE NAME OF ALMIGHTY GOD The United States of America and the United Mexican States animated by a sincere desire to put an end to the calamities of the war which unhappily exists between the two Republics and to establish Upon a solid basis relations of peace and friendship, which shall confer reciprocal benefits upon the citizens of both, and assure the concord, harmony, and mutual confidence wherein the two people should live, as good neighbors have for that purpose appointed their respective plenipotentiaries, that is to say: The President of the United States has appointed Nicholas P. Trist, a citizen of the United States, and the President of the Mexican Republic has appointed Don Luis Gonzaga Cuevas, Don Bernardo Couto, and Don Miguel Atristain, citizens of the said Republic; Who, after a reciprocal communication of their respective full powers, have, under the protection of Almighty God, the author of peace, arranged, agreed upon, and signed the following Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlement between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic.

Article I There shall be firm and universal peace between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic, and between their respective countries, territories, cities, towns, and people, without exception of places or persons.

Article II Immediately upon the signature of this treaty, a convention shall be entered into between a commissioner or commissioners appointed by the General-in-chief of the forces of the United States, and such as may be appointed by the Mexican Government, to the end that a provisional suspension of hostilities shall take place, and that, in the places occupied by the said forces, constitutional order may be reestablished, as regards the political,

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administrative, and judicial branches, so far as this shall be permitted by the circumstances of military occupation . . .

Article V The boundary line between the two Republics shall commence in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande, otherwise called Rio Bravo del Norte, or Opposite the mouth of its deepest branch, if it should have more than one branch emptying directly into the sea; from thence up the middle of that river, following the deepest channel, where it has more than one, to the point where it strikes the southern boundary of New Mexico; thence, westwardly, along the whole southern boundary of New Mexico (which runs north of the town called Paso) to its western termination; thence, northward, along the western line of New Mexico, until it intersects the first branch of the river Gila; (or if it should not intersect any branch of that river, then to the point on the said line nearest to such branch, and thence in a direct line to the same); thence down the middle of the said branch and of the said river, until it empties into the Rio Colorado; thence across the Rio Colorado, following the division line between Upper and Lower California, to the Pacific Ocean. The southern and western limits of New Mexico, mentioned in the article, are those laid down in the map entitled “Map of the United Mexican States, as organized and defined by various acts of the Congress of said republic, and constructed according to the best authorities. Revised edition. Published at New York, in 1847, by J. Disturnell,” of which map a copy is added to this treaty, bearing the signatures and seals of the undersigned Plenipotentiaries. And, in order to preclude all difficulty in tracing upon the ground the limit separating Upper from Lower California, it is agreed that the said limit shall consist of a straight line drawn from the middle of the Rio Gila, where it unites with the Colorado, to a point on the coast of the Pacific Ocean, distant one marine league due south of the southernmost point of the port of San Diego, according to the plan of said port made in the year 1782 by Don Juan Pantoja, second sailing-master of the Spanish fleet, and published at Madrid in the year 1802, in the atlas to the voyage of the schooners Sutil and Mexicana; of which plan a copy is hereunto added, signed and sealed by the respective Plenipotentiaries. In order to designate the boundary line with due precision, upon authoritative maps, and to establish upon the ground land-marks which shall show the limits of both republics, as described in the present article, the two Governments shall each appoint a commissioner and a surveyor, who, before the expiration of one year from the date of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty, shall meet at the port of San Diego, and proceed to run and mark the said boundary in its whole course to the mouth of the Rio Bravo del Norte. They shall keep journals and make out plans of their operations; and the result agreed upon by them shall be deemed a part of this treaty, and shall have the same force as if it were inserted therein. The two Governments will amicably agree regarding what may be necessary to these persons, and also as to their respective escorts, should such be necessary. The boundary line established by this article shall be religiously respected by each of the two republics, and no change shall ever be made therein, except by the express and free consent of both nations, lawfully given by the General Government of each, in conformity with its own constitution.

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Article VI The vessels and citizens of the United States shall, in all time, have a free and uninterrupted passage by the Gulf of California, and by the river Colorado below its confluence with the Gila, to and from their possessions situated north of the boundary line defined in the preceding article; it being understood that this passage is to be by navigating the Gulf of California and the river Colorado, and not by land, without the express consent of the Mexican Government. If, by the examinations which may be made, it should be ascertained to be practicable and advantageous to construct a road, canal, or railway, which should in whole or in part run upon the river Gila, or upon its right or its left bank, within the space of one marine league from either margin of the river, the Governments of both republics will form an agreement regarding its construction, in order that it may serve equally for the use and advantage of both countries . . .

Article VIII Mexicans now established in territories previously belonging to Mexico, and which remain for the future within the limits of the United States, as defined by the present treaty, shall be free to continue where they now reside, or to remove at any time to the Mexican Republic, retaining the property which they possess in the said territories, or disposing thereof, and removing the proceeds wherever they please, without their being subjected, on this account, to any contribution, tax, or charge whatever. Those who shall prefer to remain in the said territories may either retain the title and rights of Mexican citizens, or acquire those of citizens of the United States. But they shall be under the obligation to make their election within one year from the date of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty; and those who shall remain in the said territories after the expiration of that year, without having declared their intention to retain the character of Mexicans, shall be considered to have elected to become citizens of the United States. In the said territories, property of every kind, now belonging to Mexicans not established there, shall be inviolably respected. The present owners, the heirs of these, and all Mexicans who may hereafter acquire said property by contract, shall enjoy with respect to it guarantees equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States.

Article IX The Mexicans who, in the territories aforesaid, shall not preserve the character of citizens of the Mexican Republic, conformably with what is stipulated in the preceding article, shall be incorporated into the Union of the United States, and be admitted at the proper time (to be judged of by the Congress of the United States) to the enjoyment of all the rights of citizens of the United States, according to the principles of the Constitution; and in the mean time, shall be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction. ...

Article XI Considering that a great part of the territories, which, by the present treaty, are to be comprehended for the future within the limits of the United States, is now occupied

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by savage tribes, who will hereafter be under the exclusive control of the Government of the United States, and whose incursions within the territory of Mexico would be prejudicial in the extreme, it is solemnly agreed that all such incursions shall be forcibly restrained by the Government of the United States whensoever this may be necessary; and that when they cannot be prevented, they shall be punished by the said Government, and satisfaction for the same shall be exacted all in the same way, and with equal diligence and energy, as if the same incursions were meditated or committed within its own territory, against its own citizens. It shall not be lawful, under any pretext whatever, for any inhabitant of the United States to purchase or acquire any Mexican, or any foreigner residing in Mexico, who may have been captured by Indians inhabiting the territory of either of the two republics; nor to purchase or acquire horses, mules, cattle, or property of any kind, stolen within Mexican territory by such Indians . . .

Article XII In consideration of the extension acquired by the boundaries of the United States, as defined in the fifth article of the present treaty, the Government of the United States engages to pay to that of the Mexican Republic the sum of fifteen millions of dollars . . .

Article XVIII All supplies whatever for troops of the United States in Mexico, arriving at ports in the occupation of such troops previous to the final evacuation thereof, although subsequently to the restoration of the custom-houses at such ports, shall be entirely exempt from duties and charges of any kind; the Government of the United States hereby engaging and pledging its faith to establish and vigilantly to enforce, all possible guards for securing the revenue of Mexico, by preventing the importation, under cover of this stipulation, of any articles other than such, both in kind and in quantity, as shall really be wanted for the use and consumption of the forces of the United States during the time they may remain in Mexico. To this end it shall be the duty of all officers and agents of the United States to denounce to the Mexican authorities at the respective ports any attempts at a fraudulent abuse of this stipulation, which they may know of, or may have reason to suspect, and to give to such authorities all the aid in their power with regard thereto; and every such attempt, when duly proved and established by sentence of a competent tribunal. They shall be punished by the confiscation of the property so attempted to be fraudulently introduced . . .

Article XXI If unhappily any disagreement should hereafter arise between the Governments of the two republics, whether with respect to the interpretation of any stipulation in this treaty, or with respect to any other particular concerning the political or commercial relations of the two nations, the said Governments, in the name of those nations, do promise to each other that they will endeavour, in the most sincere and earnest manner, to settle the differences so arising, and to preserve the state of peace and friendship in which the two countries are now placing themselves, using, for this end, mutual representations and pacific negotiations.

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And if, by these means, they should not be enabled to come to an agreement, a resort shall not, on this account, be had to reprisals, aggression, or hostility of any kind, by the one republic against the other, until the Government of that which deems itself aggrieved shall have maturely considered, in the spirit of peace and good neighbourship, whether it would not be better that such difference should be settled by the arbitration of commissioners appointed on each side, or by that of a friendly nation. And should such course be proposed by either party, it shall be acceded to by the other, unless deemed by it altogether incompatible with the nature of the difference, or the circumstances of the case . . .

Article XXIII This treaty shall be ratified by the President of the United States of America, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate thereof; and by the President of the Mexican Republic, with the previous approbation of its general Congress; and the ratifications shall be exchanged in the City of Washington, or at the seat of Government of Mexico, in four months from the date of the signature hereof, or sooner if practicable. In faith whereof we, the respective Plenipotentiaries, have signed this treaty of peace, friendship, limits, and settlement, and have hereunto affixed our seals respectively. Done in quintuplicate, at the city of Guadalupe Hidalgo, on the second day of February, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight. N. P. Trist Luis P. Cuevas Bernardo Couto Migl. Atristain Source: Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949, compilation directed by Charles I. Bevans, vol. 9, Iraq–Muscat (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 791–807.

NOTES 1. Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 17 April 1809, in The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, ed. Robert A. Rutland et al. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986–), vol. 1, 123. 2. Madison to Jefferson, 24 April 1809, The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series, vol. 1, 135–136. 3. Carl A. Brasseaux, “Confusion, Conflict, and Currency: An Introduction to the Rebellion of 1768?” Louisiana History 18 (1977): 161–197; Hilda Neatby, The Quebec Act: Protest and Policy (Scarborough, Ont.: Prentice-Hall of Canada, 1972). 4. Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States (New York: Norton, 1986). 5. Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 47–53; Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds., An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1985); Gregory H. Nobles, American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest (New York: Hill & Wang, 1997), 86–96.

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6. Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). 7. Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951 [thirty-five volumes to date]), vol. 4, 237–238. 8. Report on Government for Western Territory, 1 March 1784, in Jefferson Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 377. 9. Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911). 10. For the implications of the Northwest Ordinance and the redefinition of empire, see Greene, Peripheries and Center; Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). 11. Quoted in Andrew R. L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), 69. 12. James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 173–209; Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 167–196. 13. Anthony F. C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). 14. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), 61–63, 314–320. 15. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). 16. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008). 17. Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). 18. Everett Somerville Brown, ed., William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807 (New York: Macmillan Company, 1923), 111. 19. Annals of Congress: Debates and Proceedings of the Congress of the United States (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1834–1856), 8th Cong., 1st sess., 463. 20. Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 1st sess., 43–44. 21. Annals of Congress, 8th Cong., 2nd sess., 1016. 22. Peter J. Kastor, The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 86–108. 23. Robert Pierce Forbes, The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 24. Jefferson to John Adams, 10 December 1819, The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–1905), vol. 12, 151. 25. Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 109–146. 26. Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 184–200. 27. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 231–234.

CHAPTER

2

An Empire Is Born, 1848–1900

A

t the dawn of the twentieth century, New York governor Theodore Roosevelt addressed America’s role in the world. A charismatic speaker and a combative politician, Roosevelt was only too happy to make his case to a large audience. Speaking to the 1900 Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, Roosevelt addressed one of the most important developments of the previous decade: the Spanish-American War and the farflung territories the United States had acquired in its wake: “The Nation has not sought its new responsibilities, but the Nation does not shrink from An 1897 cartoon entitled “The Reluctant Bridegroom” them.” Addressing the enormous chronicled the growing annexation movement. Secretary of State John Sherman officiates, President William McKinley is Uncle challenges that came with governing Sam’s best man, and the president of the Republic of Hawaii, territories stretching halfway around Sanford B. Dole, is giving the bride away. the world, Roosevelt explained that Source: The Granger Collection, New York Americans should “declare that we are a Nation of men and not a Nation of weaklings, and that we as little fear to face our duty in the far islands of the Eastern seas as we fear to face our duties at home.”1 In crafting these comments, Roosevelt shared Thomas Jefferson’s outlook on empire. At least he thought he did. A voracious reader and a prodigious writer, Roosevelt published books and articles on all manner of subjects, but he had a special affinity for the world of Thomas Jefferson. Whether writing about the American West or the War of 1812, Roosevelt sought lessons from the early Republic. Chief among those lessons were the sources and benefits of American greatness. To Roosevelt, much of that greatness resided in a particular notion of empire. For all his invocations of the early Republic, Roosevelt himself had been among the key figures in transforming the American notion of empire. Roosevelt helped orchestrate a broader shift through which the United States became an empire along the familiar European model. But this was hardly a simple change. It was only in the waning years of the nineteenth century, and only through the most complex intellectual gymnastics, that 86

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Americans embraced the mantle of empire. While Roosevelt enjoyed considerable support in his own imperial policy, that support was never absolute. Americans continued to believe that becoming an empire brought more dangers as well as benefits. These changes occurred as the American struggle with empire proceeded on two trajectories: one continental and consistent with principles established in the early Republic, the other global and fundamentally new in its embrace of European concepts of imperial rule. On the North American continent, the federal government continued to pursue the orderly incorporation of territory and people, primarily in the West. To this end, the territorial system continued to function as the primary means for converting the foreign into the American. White residents continued to reap the benefits, while nonwhites—especially Indians—suffered the consequences. The result was a process that preserved both jurisdictional and individual equality, but always premised on the complete exclusion of nonwhites. Americans even sought to adapt these principles to the greatest challenge of civil governance in the second half of the nineteenth century: the Reconstruction of southern states in the 1860s and 1870s. At the same time, however, Americans were also looking beyond continental limits. In a process that began during the 1840s but built steam only in the 1880s and 1890s, Americans sought noncontiguous territories, primarily in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Unlike territories in North America, the United States abandoned its long-standing goal of incorporating territories into the union on equal terms. Equally important, Americans accommodated themselves to this approach in part because they hoped to compete alongside the great empires of the world rather than differentiate themselves as something other than an empire.

CONSOLIDATING

THE

PERIPHERY

Americans had confidently gone to war with Mexico because they believed they had solved the old problem of empire. Americans governed their new western territories accordingly. Throughout the 1850s, federal policy makers extended the familiar principles of the territorial system further west, certain that the system would adapt itself to new circumstances. This may well explain why so many Americans were surprised to find that the acquisition of territory in the West eventually tore the Union apart as Americans argued over whether slavery could expand into the West. Throughout the 1840s and 1850s, the federal government sought to secure its new western empire through the same combination of “force and affection” that Congress had first described in 1804. The force took various forms but was primarily directed against Indians. Already engaged in the grand task of Removal, the federal government spent the 1830s and 1840s coercing Indians on both sides of the Mississippi River into a forced migration to territory on the southwestern fringe of the Louisiana Purchase. It is for this reason that so many Indian reservations are now located in Oklahoma: not because it was the site of intensive Indian settlement, but because the federal government selected that territory for Indian relocation. The federal government had its greatest successes in the Pacific Northwest. A series of agreements between the United States and Great Britain eventually provided a complete cession of the Oregon Country. Meanwhile, a combination of epidemic disease and

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effective coercion by the federal government had devastated the Indians of the Pacific Northwest. The United States encountered far greater difficulty securing its territorial pretensions in the continental interior during the 1840s and 1850s. In the northern Plains, the various bands of Sioux Indians remained fiercely independent despite a half century of federal efforts to secure their subordination. Although the Louisiana Purchase gave the United States a claim to the continental interior, Indians effectively resisted efforts to make that sovereignty a reality. Meanwhile, the territories acquired through Mexican War proved equally challenging. Indians of the Rocky Mountains and the Great Basin—most notably the Comanches, Utes, and Apaches—successfully preserved their own autonomy in the face of mounting federal efforts.2 Not only did Indian autonomy upset claims that the United States “controlled” the West, so too did the unique challenge coming from the marshes surrounding the Great Salt Lake. Founded in the United States in 1830, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints had moved to the Great Salt Lake in 1846. The Mormons had faced exclusion throughout the United States, and they established their new western settlement specifically for its isolation. Outside the boundaries of the United States and beyond the control of Mexico, the Mormon colony governed itself until the Mexican War. Although most Mormons still considered themselves U.S. citizens, they resented efforts to superimpose territorial rule. After the Mexican War, they once again found themselves living on territory owned by the United States. They demanded that the federal government immediately recognize a new state of Deseret (named for the desert in which it was located), assuming Brigham Young, who had directed the Mormons since 1844, would take charge of an elected Mormon leadership. The U.S. government immediately rejected this plan and instead created a territory of Utah with most of the land that now constitutes the states of Utah and Wyoming. Throughout the 1850s, the Mormons publicly rejected or privately ignored both the rules and the authority of the federal government. They claimed that they were a self-created society. They believed the United States was supposed to operate on principles of local selfgovernance and individual freedom. In so doing, they joined a long line of groups—Indians, white Louisianans, Hispanic New Mexicans—that claimed that the territorial system collided with the nation’s founding principles if it postponed statehood or minimized local political representation. The ongoing challenges of governing the West continued to consume both the attention and the resources of federal leaders in Washington. Americans had long feared the challenge of governing a western empire would be the nation’s undoing. In the end, they were right, but not for the reasons they had suspected. When the western territory of the United States destroyed the Union, it was not a result of the challenges of western government but because the West sparked a war between North and South over slavery. The debate that had erupted about slavery in the Mexican territories only became more heated in the 1850s. Although the arguments concerned the expansion of slavery, the tactics were rooted in the particulars of territorial government. Some members of Congress hoped to dictate whether a territory could enter the Union with or without slavery. This approach generated opposition from western settlers, who claimed that the

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United States had always avoided the pitfalls of empire by permitting territorial residents to decide their own futures. Those western settlers joined with others in Congress advocating popular sovereignty, but this approach caused its own controversy because it spelled the end to the Missouri Compromise. Meanwhile, increasingly diehard Americans opposed any policy that posed even the slightest threat to their own efforts to support slavery or to end it. As a result, secession in 1861 occurred in no small part in response to the challenge of governing the foreign territory the United States had acquired in the West from 1803 to 1848. Despite the consensus that supported territorial acquisition per se, Americans were violently divided on whether to extend slavery into the West and what role western residents should play in making that decision. Repeated disputes over the new territories carved from the land acquired through the Louisiana Purchase and the Mexican War placed the expansion of slavery at the center of American political debate. By 1861, a party system that had struggled for a decade to avoid the issue had been reduced to a Democratic Party that many perceived as the party of the slaveholding South and a Republican Party of an industrializing North opposed to the expansion of slavery. Convinced that the election of Abraham Lincoln, an Illinois Republican, signaled the first step in a broader process of northern political dominance, white southerners opted for secession.3

REBUILDING

A

FRACTURED NATION

If the Civil War erupted as a result of incorporating foreign territory, so, too, did the ways Americans imagined an end to the war. Those connections first appeared in May 1862, when Maj. Gen. Benjamin Butler marched into New Orleans at the head of an army whose exact task was uncertain. Was Butler liberating a city that had been illegally governed by a cohort of traitors? Was he commanding foreign territory with foreign citizens, as William C. C. Claiborne had done in 1803? Could he convert the human property of New Orleans and its surrounding plantation district into citizens of the United States, or were Louisiana slaves to continue living in a semi-alien status? All of these questions were on the table in New Orleans in 1862, as they were indeed for the nation as a whole. From 1861 to 1876, the crisis of secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction returned Americans to the question of who was or was not an American and how the federal government should approach the task of governing people and territory who rejected federal authority. Early Union victories like the capture of New Orleans in 1862 forced the federal government to grapple with difficult questions about how best to conceive of southerners, both white and black. The Lincoln administration steadfastly maintained that the South was in a state of rebellion and that those who fought for the Confederacy were engaged in an act of treason. This remained the U.S. government’s policy throughout the war. Confederates wanted to have things both ways. Throughout the Civil War, they maintained that they were an independent country that deserved formal recognition by the United States. When Union troops arrived, however, many Confederates were quick to claim that they deserved to be immediately restored to U.S. citizenship.

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Butler found himself squeezed in the middle. When Butler provided supplies for residents of New Orleans, critics in the North charged he was helping the enemy war effort. When he imposed punitive regulations in New Orleans, local residents called him a monster who disrespected his own countrymen (Document 2.1). The situation in New Orleans was a dress rehearsal for 1865. When the Confederacy collapsed, the reunited United States faced enormous questions, both practical and philosophical. At the practical level, the federal government had to develop a far-reaching plan of reconstruction in a region where secession and civil war had left destruction and chaos in its wake. Beyond these immediate challenges, Americans also recognized that Reconstruction posed broad questions about citizenship. Were white Confederates traitors or conquered people? Likewise, were former slaves fully incorporated citizens or simply free people? Since Independence, free people of color had always occupied a status akin to immigrants, enjoying certain protections and rights but nonetheless existing within a special legal status different from that of white citizens. In approaching Reconstruction, American policy makers returned to the questions they had asked since 1804, when Congress considered whether foreigners would be governed by force or affection. In the immediate aftermath of the war, President Andrew Johnson and his allies in Congress opted for affection (Document 2.2). They advocated a system of rapid reconstruction that resembled a form of accelerated territorial rule. The federal government would assume a short-term role in direct government, quickly restore representation in Congress, and make few changes in the local state of affairs. Although there was no attempt to reinstitute slavery, this period of Presidential Reconstruction (as historians now call it) did not directly challenge the power of whites in general or the white elite in particular. After the election of 1866, however, control of Congress shifted to Radical Republicans who concluded that only force could successfully incorporate the former Confederacy (Document 2.3). They advocated a longer period before restoring congressional representation, demanded greater federal protection for former slaves, and believed the federal government should follow a punitive approach in punishing the old southern elites who had supported secession.4 Among the first people to capitalize on Radical Reconstruction were free people of color and former slaves. The end of slavery and the extension of suffrage created an active and mobilized black electorate that immediately elected African Americans to state legislatures, governorships, and Congress. Disorganized white southerners, forced to compete for the first time, were shocked by the sudden rise of black political power. So, too, were many northern whites, who continued to consider African Americans inferior and believed they should occupy a quasi-foreign status within the United States: acknowledged as residents but denied the full rights of citizenship. Radical Reconstruction proved a short-lived movement as public support faded in the late 1860s and early 1870s. White members of Congress and their constituencies showed only limited support for a system of racial equality in the United States. By the time Ulysses S. Grant won election as the seventeenth president of the United States in 1868, white southerners were already using a combination of economic coercion, legal manipulation, and physical violence to reestablish the racial hierarchy they had known before Emancipation. Grant, who had always taken a hard line against Confederates

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during the Civil War, dispatched federal troops to quell what he considered resistance to the lawful authority of the federal government. But the United States descended into an economic recession in 1873, and Grant’s administration suffered from a variety of corruption scandals. Grant lost the political power to continue his own vision of Reconstruction. Although he secured reelection in 1872, most whites—North and South—were eager to see an end to Reconstruction. Few were willing to expend federal resources to improve the lives of African Americans. These factors combined to accelerate a process of reintegrating the former Confederacy into the United States. Congress had allowed Tennessee to begin sending a congressional delegation as early as 1866, and other southern states soon followed suit. The disputed presidential election of 1876 finally witnessed an end to Reconstruction. By the time the last federal troops withdrew from the former Confederacy, white southerners had successfully reestablished racial supremacy. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, southern whites replaced slavery with a new system of racial supremacy called Jim Crow, which technically acknowledged emancipation but nonetheless found numerous ways of excluding African Americans from true equality. To many white southerners, the Jim Crow system seemed modern. It used law, public administration, and social sciences to rationalize a strict racial hierarchy. Yet Jim Crow also reflected the wellestablished systems by which the United States had governed nonwhite people in newly acquired territory.5 From 1865 to 1877, the United States adapted principles from the territorial system to reintegrate the former Confederacy. White southerners concluded that the relative ease of reintegration had validated their rebellion. They eventually interpreted the Civil War by creating a legend of the “lost cause” in which they had justly defended regional honor before rejoining the United States, their status as Americans secured by the fact that they had been defending what they believed was the true form of democratic government.6 Reconstruction—or rather the failure of it—reinforced the notion that nonwhites would continue to occupy a status similar to that of immigrants, aliens within the nation but not fully incorporated by it. Unlike white immigrants who eventually acquired citizenship, however, there would be no full naturalization for African Americans. Reconstruction reaffirmed many of the principles that informed how the United States governed foreign people and foreign territory. The federal government moved rapidly to transform conquered white subjects back into fully incorporated citizens. The United States put down southern dissent but always with strong limits on the severity of those efforts. Whites who opposed Reconstruction—either peacefully or violently—faced censure and occasional incarceration but never lengthy jail terms or execution. Only Confederate political and military leaders like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee were denied restoration of the rights of citizenship. President Grant’s effort to crush the Ku Klux Klan—a white supremacist group that first emerged in the postwar South—was brief, and white resisters faced harsh punishment through the criminal law only when they committed serious crimes against other whites. Situating the unique challenges of Reconstruction alongside the broader process of acquiring territory and people makes sense only by considering the racial dimensions of federal policy. The leniency of American policy toward former Confederates and the effort to

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secure national reunion through affection rather than force always had racial limits. The U.S. government’s policies during Reconstruction—with the exception of the brief, failed period of Radical Reconstruction—were entirely consistent with policies in Louisiana after 1803 or in New Mexico after 1848. The federal government permitted numerous forms of dissent among whites, rejecting the harsh recriminations against dependent peoples so common in other empires. At the same time, the United States accepted no dissent from nonwhites, whose protests were met with swift, often brutal, subjugation. The continuity between territorial policy and post–Civil War policy became abundantly clear during Reconstruction, as the federal leadership attempted to restore the South at the same time that it was trying to finally secure its empire in the West.

EXPANDING

INTO THE

WEST

If the Civil War and Reconstruction had revealed the complex intersection of race and loyalty in American politics, the same process was still at work in the West. In the end, it was the Civil War that provided the means to consolidate federal authority over foreign territory and foreign peoples. A modern army forged by the Civil War descended on the West in the 1870s. In less than a decade, that army had transformed the region into a place where the United States finally controlled the foreign territory it had long claimed but had never really governed. By the turn of the century, the conquest of the West finally enabled the United States to proclaim that its territory was actually “American.” In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the federal government disbanded most of the Grand Army of the Republic, the massive military force that had defeated the Confederacy. Some of the remaining troops were stationed in the South to support Reconstruction, but most of the United States Army continued to do what it had done before the Civil War: support territorial governance in the West, prevent white unrest, and crush Indian resistance. The United States had used the army for the same purpose in the Northwest Territory, the Louisiana Purchase, and the Mexican territories. For all the successes the United States had achieved, however, much of the continental interior, from the Great Plains through the Sierra Mountains, remained under Indian control. By 1870, the federal government had new resources at its disposal. Transported by railroad, armed with more effective rifles and cannons, and commanded by hardened veterans of the Civil War, the United States Army pursued a new policy of conquest against the Indians of the West. The war that ensued had two fronts: the northern Great Plains and the Great Basin. In the northern plains, the United States hoped to secure sovereignty over territory it had purchased in 1803. In the Great Basin, the United States hoped to establish control over land ceded by Mexico in 1848. Each region witnessed sporadic warfare, and each produced a legendary Indian leader: Sitting Bull in the northern Plains and Geronimo in the Great Basin. Leading U.S. forces were the two most famous Union generals of the Civil War. Ulysses S. Grant had secured a Confederate surrender through a relentless campaign, recognizing that the United States needed to make full use of its overwhelming superiority in men and supplies. As commanding general of the United States Army and later as president, Grant

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endorsed a similar approach in confronting Indians. Grant had a ready ally in William Tecumseh Sherman. Although Sherman had been named for Tecumseh, an Indian who had led resistance to white authority in the Northwest Territory, this hardly meant that Sherman was sympathetic to Indians. To the contrary, towns and white residents in the Ohio of Sherman’s birth had Indian names in order to proclaim the white victory over Indians. During the Civil War, Sherman shared Grant’s commitment to a campaign that would crush the Confederacy, punish its residents, and compel them into submission. In 1865, Sherman moved to St. Louis, took charge of western forces, and immediately sought a more aggressive strategy against Indians. Writing to his brother, John, in 1868, Sherman predicted that “All [Indians] who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off”7 (Document 2.4). Promoted to commanding general of the United States Army in 1869, Sherman continued the strategy that would crush Indian resistance once and for all. In 1877, Sitting Bull led his forces into Canada, forestalling defeat for himself but effectively ending the militant Indian resistance in the northern Great Plains. After four years of privation, Sitting Bull’s forces returned to the United States and surrendered in 1881. Five years later, American forces captured Geronimo, effectively ending the Indian wars in the South. Once in captivity, Sitting Bull and Geronimo entered the new world for Indians that the United States was constructing in the West. Since the 1780s, the United States had signed treaties through which Indians ceded land in exchange for pledges of short- and long-term “gifts” consisting of popular trade goods. In the antebellum era, Jacksonian Removal involved the more direct supervision of Indians by the federal government. Nonetheless, Indians still governed themselves, their leaders negotiating with the United States through designated Indian agents. In 1851, however, the Indian Appropriations Act created a system of Indian reservations. In geographic terms, relocating Indians to reservations continued the process of Removal already in place. In political terms, however, the reservations promised a new order of government in North America. Indians would be isolated within specific geographies. Most important, they would cede most of their own leadership and self-government, allowing the federal government to assume direct authority over internal affairs among Indians. The Grant administration aggressively expanded the reservation system, creating an elaborate structure that was supposed to “civilize” Indians by teaching them new forms of agriculture, converting them to Christianity, and subordinating their system of chiefs to the leadership of white public officials. The reservation system marked the final conquest of Indian political autonomy by the United States. Americans still claimed they were not an empire on a European model, in part because they had done what no European empire had been able to achieve. Rejecting the French system of an empire built on alliance, the United States pursued conquest. Rejecting the Spanish system of an empire that transformed Indians into a servile labor force, the United States excluded Indians from the mainstream altogether. Finally, ignoring Britain’s failed attempts to conquer Indians by force, the United States developed a constitutional and military structure that was ideally poised to capitalize on the technological changes of the nineteenth century in the pursuit of racial conquest.

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In the final years of the nineteenth century, the federal government designated Indians as domestic dependents. Resistance proved increasingly difficult. Confined on reservations, Indians lacked the freedom of movement that had been a foundation of their opposition to federal control of the West (Document 2.6). Excluded from formal participation in the federal system of government, they lacked the means to place demands on Congress or the administration. Indian inequality stood in marked contrast with the jurisdictional equality of the states created from the territory the Indians had once controlled or the individual equality of the white settlers who moved onto Indian land. As western land entered the federal union on equal terms as states through the territorial system, Indians continued to embody the racial inequality in the American approach to governing land and people.

EXTENDING

THE

FRONTIER

These developments on the North American continent were entirely consistent with the original American conception of empire. Indeed, the reservation system was the logical extension of Jefferson’s vision of an “empire for liberty.” The revolution in how Americans responded to the challenge of empire would take shape thousands of miles away. In the Caribbean and in the Pacific, the United States developed a new way to govern foreign territory and foreign people. The American global empire that emerged in the twentieth century was rooted in matters of trade during the nineteenth century. Americans had always concerned themselves with international trade, and policy makers believed access to global trade routes was a precondition for economic prosperity and political unity. Indeed, the first American imperial ambitions in the West had emerged from commercial concerns. The United States had purchased Louisiana primarily to secure the Mississippi River as an avenue for Caribbean and Atlantic trade. Meanwhile, competing against both Indians and Europeans, Americans had sought to secure the Missouri and Columbia river valleys in order to gain access to Pacific trade. The United States hoped to compete in the lucrative markets of Asia, specifically China and Russia. And it was Pacific trade more than any other that fueled American efforts to create a global empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.8 The first tentative steps came in the 1840s, as a trickle of American missionaries began arriving in Hawaii. United under a hereditary monarchy since the 1770s, Hawaii served as an increasingly important commercial outpost between Europe and Asia. American merchants and policy makers soon recognized the value of a strategic relationship with the Hawaiian government. In 1874, the United States secured its first treaty with Hawaii, guaranteeing favorable trading relationships and helping attract the first generation of white planters to the emerging sugar economy. Hawaii suffered for its strategic location. The constant arrival of merchant ships brought diseases that devastated the Hawaiian population. Eager for labor and for political support, the Hawaiian leadership responded by welcoming immigrants from North America and East Asia. Successful and ambitious Americans also became increasingly important as advisers to the monarchy.

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Although the United States took no steps toward acquiring Hawaii, Americans nonetheless continually sought to secure outposts and markets in the Pacific. In 1867, the United States bought Alaska from Russia. After decades in which Americans had seen territorial acquisition as a means to promote settlement or commerce, the remote location and brutal climate of Alaska hardly made it seem a logical purchase. But Secretary of State William Seward considered Alaska a vital component in supporting American trade across the Pacific. In the 1870s and 1880s, the United States aggressively pursued new trading relationships in East Asia. Americans had long complained that European empires enjoyed trading monopolies in the ports of the Pacific Rim. Borrowing from long-standing critiques of empire, Americans began to demand a free trade arrangement where the United States could enjoy unfettered access and engage in free trade on a global scale. Americans eventually referred to this as the Open Door policy. The calls for expanding overseas trade became increasingly loud during the 1880s and 1890s (Document 2.5). So too did the consensus supporting a large-scale American presence in the Pacific islands and Asian ports that would sustain that trade. Yet even as these commercial ambitions marked a new era of American involvement in other countries some of the loudest demands for the acquisition of Pacific outposts came from people looking to the nation’s western past. They claimed that American prosperity had emerged in no small part through territorial expansion on the North American continent. New land had expanded opportunities for a growing population. Western settlers had produced raw materials that supplied markets in the eastern United States and overseas. Conversely, building and maintaining western settlements had fueled industrial development in the East. The result was a cycle of trade and growth that propelled the nation’s prosperity.9 By the 1880s, some Americans had come to fear this growth was reaching its limits. It seemed that the West would soon reach a stage of diminishing returns for the nation’s commercial economy. These Americans logically concluded that the principles of Manifest Destiny applied to territorial acquisition and settlement in the North American West would logically extend to commercial expansion in the Pacific. Linking the nation’s western history to its global future soon defined the career of one of the most important figures in the historical profession. Frederick Jackson Turner was born in Wisconsin in 1861, and he was raised on stories of how early white settlers had built that state founded on equality and opportunity for all its citizens. When he began graduate studies in history at Johns Hopkins University in 1884, he was among the first generation of modern historians, trained in the type of formal graduate programs that remain in place to this day. The American graduate programs were modeled on those of European universities, but if the Europeans suggested how Americans might study history, Americans rejected the story that Europeans told. Few Europeans found much of interest about the United States, except to treat it as a watered-down version of European culture. In the 1870s and 1880s, historians began to craft a vision of American history claiming that the United States did indeed have a national culture distinct from Europe’s, with roots in New England. Many of these historians were themselves New Englanders, and they argued that American culture stemmed from the Puritans. Writing in the wake of the Civil War, they sought to revise the standard

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accounts of American history that emphasized the importance of southerners like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison.10 Turner concluded that this vision was equally one-sided because it ignored the dynamic developments on the nation’s western periphery. Turner wrote a dissertation on the Wisconsin fur trade and then returned home to become a history professor at the University of Wisconsin. He immediately turned his attention to considering the regional dimensions of national development. He first articulated these principles in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a paper he delivered at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association (Document 2.7). The paper soon became a published article and later served as the foundation for much of Turner’s subsequent work. Turner directly refuted the Europeans who argued that the United States had simply inherited its institutions of government from across the Atlantic. Instead, Turner proudly announced that the United States had invented its own democratic institutions that made the United States more free and more prosperous than all of western Europe. Turner also took on his own countrymen in the profession. Rather than New England or Virginia serving as the wellspring of American democracy, Turner claimed it was the particular challenge of settling the frontiers of North America that produced American democratic culture. He believed it was western settlers, not New England Puritans or Virginia patriots, who had invented the institutions of representative government that served as the foundation of American freedom.11 In a manner typical of his time, Turner saw as virtues what Americans now see as tragedies. The near eradication of Indians by the federal government, the war of aggression against Mexico and the suffering of Hispanics within the United States, and the preservation of white supremacy against Indians and slaves were great achievements to Turner. These developments all proved that Americans could overcome enormous obstacles in the pursuit of spreading democracy into the West. Turner specifically set this experience in opposition to European empires. He claimed that Europe might possess institutions of representative government, but they were stunted in comparison with the United States specifically because Europe had no equivalent frontier experience. In contrast, Europe possessed only a series of colonies that, even if they made Europe more powerful than the United States in certain economic and military terms, nonetheless prevented Europeans from developing in the same positive way as Americans. As he turned his attention to the nation’s future, Turner announced that the frontier was “closed.” Not only did the United States extend across the continent, but the bonanza of opportunity on existing frontiers seemed to be fading. Where would the United States look to continue this process of renewal? Americans were quick to look to the lucrative markets of Asia and Europe. They believed that commercial expansion into these frontiers would provide opportunities in the twentieth century to match the developments of the nineteenth century. And in the same way that Turner claimed the European empires lacked a productive frontier experience, other Americans complained bitterly that European empires continued to block the new American frontier of global trade.

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Among Frederick Jackson Turner’s admirers was Theodore Roosevelt. An accomplished historian in his own right, Roosevelt shared Turner’s belief in the relationship between the frontier and American destiny. If Jefferson had been the architect of the continental struggle with empire, Theodore Roosevelt became the architect of the global struggle with empire. In doing so, Roosevelt capitalized on a world of new technologies and newfound American power. By the time Roosevelt gave his speech to the Republican National Convention in 1900, proclaiming that “the Nation has not sought its new responsibilities, but the Nation does not shrink from them,” he had developed a sophisticated and unshakable belief that the United States could and should extend its influence overseas. Unlike Jefferson, however, Roosevelt was fully prepared to acquire both territory and people and to hold them in the sort of empire that Jefferson himself would never have accepted. Born in 1858 to a wealthy family from New York’s old Dutch landholding and merchant elite, Theodore Roosevelt pursued a diverse set of interests with the same single-minded determination that marked Thomas Jefferson. While still an undergraduate at Harvard, Roosevelt began researching the role of the United States Navy in the War of 1812. By the time he published a book on the topic in 1882, Roosevelt was already in his second year in the New York State Assembly, having resigned from Columbia Law School to run for office. By the age of twenty-four, Roosevelt was a rising star in the Republican Party. And then Roosevelt’s world fell apart. His wife and mother died within one month of each other. As Roosevelt recorded in his diary on February 14, 1884: “The light has gone out of my life.”12 Devastated, Roosevelt left his infant daughter in the care of relatives, purchased a ranch in the Dakota Territory, and moved west. Arriving in the northern plains only four years after Sitting Bull’s surrender, Roosevelt saw the immediate implications of the white victory over Indian power. Although neighboring settlers often dismissed Roosevelt as a condescending dilettante, Roosevelt welcomed the challenges and the company he found in the West. Roosevelt’s ranch actually proved a financial disaster, but it was an emotional resurrection. In 1886 he emerged from the experience rejuvenated and ready to rejoin the life he knew in New York. He remarried and threw himself back into politics, and his appointment to the U.S. Civil Service Commission in 1889 marked the first in a series of increasingly powerful appointed offices. Inspired by his experience in the Dakotas, Roosevelt also wrote a multivolume history entitled The Winning of the West. In his book, completed in 1894 just as Frederick Jackson Turner was forging his own frontier thesis, Roosevelt showed that he shared Turner’s belief that conquering the West was at the foundation of American democracy. But Roosevelt carried the argument further. He focused particular attention on the importance of violent conflict, writing that the Anglo-Saxon migrants to North America had proved their superiority not just by conquering the Indians but by achieving this conquest where other European races (namely the French and Spanish) had fallen short. This vision of conflict and glory would prove crucial to the world Roosevelt hoped to create. Indeed, Roosevelt saw the prospects of a new American empire in the Pacific. In 1887, the Anglo-Americans who served as advisers to the Hawaiian king, David Kala–kaua,

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imposed the “Bayonet Constitution,” which not only eliminated the monarchy’s power but also imposed substantial property requirements for voting and prohibited suffrage for the large number of Asian immigrants in Hawaii. The Bayonet Constitution was only the final stage of a de facto coup in which a small cohort of Americans, many of them wealthy planters and merchants, secured control of Hawaii. The U.S. government kept the new government at arm’s length, continuing to voice support of the monarchy but actually doing little to support it (Documents 2.8 and 2.9). Repeated protests from native Hawaiians generated little assistance from the United States. But when Hawaiians attempted to evict the American coup leaders in 1893 in a campaign that included seizing U.S. government buildings, the United States responded by dispatching troops. In 1894, the Morgan Report (Document 2.10) absolved the United States government and American citizens of improper behavior in Hawaii and dismissed the protests of Queen Lili’uokalani, the heir to the Hawaiian monarchy (Document 2.11). Americans eventually established the Republic of Hawaii in 1894, with the queen serving a ceremonial role and Americans clearly in control. In 1896, the United States formally annexed Hawaii. It was a momentous shift, constituting the first acquisition of territory outside North America. But it was a logical move within a national political culture undergoing momentous change. Americans were accommodating themselves to the notion of becoming not just a global power, but an empire. Leading the way was Theodore Roosevelt. In 1897, Roosevelt became assistant secretary of the navy in the administration of President William McKinley. He arrived in Washington committed to creating an American empire. In the Dakota Territory, Roosevelt was convinced the United States had created unprecedented opportunity for white settlers while also winning the glorious struggle against Indian savagery. In Hawaii, he believed Americans had replaced a corrupt monarchy with representative democracy. Roosevelt lamented only the fact that the United States lacked a real empire. Looking around him, Roosevelt saw how, throughout the nineteenth century, a series of great powers had divided the globe into empires of unprecedented reach. Unlike so many American policy makers who had kept Britain at arm’s length after a century of disputes dating back to the American Revolution, Roosevelt saw much to admire in the British Empire. Specifically, he believed Great Britain had brought civilization to its far-flung colonial holdings in Africa, South Asia, Australia, and numerous smaller islands scattered around the globe. Meanwhile, Germany, France, and Belgium had announced themselves as great powers through their colonial possessions, primarily in Africa. AustriaHungary controlled much of eastern Europe, its own territory ending at the borders with the massive Russian empire. The Ottoman Empire controlled the Middle East and portions of both West Asia and North Africa. Finally, even Japan had remade itself as a grand empire. Only a few decades after ending two centuries of self-imposed isolation, Japan had become a modern industrial state keen on extending its reach in the western Pacific. Rather than view these empires as examples of how extraterritorial possessions led to corruption and despotism, Roosevelt envied the wealth, power, and prestige that came with imperial holdings. Nor was he alone in these goals. Other Americans had abandoned many of the nation’s old fears and were keen to acquire an empire of their own. A cohort of business leaders and political officials, academic specialists and public commentators had all concluded that the nation’s future depended on acquiring influence and, in specific cases, territory overseas.

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Roosevelt focused his own attention on the Spanish Empire. Four centuries after reaching the height of its power in Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific, Spanish power was crumbling. Spain had lost its colonies in Central and South America in the 1820s. As Roosevelt himself confided to William Wingate Sewall, “I quite agree with you that Spain and Turkey are the two powers I would rather smash than any in the world.”13 All that remained of the Spanish empire was a series of islands that served as commercial outposts and sources of plantation agriculture. And these islands caused their own problems. In the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, local residents had mobilized against the Spanish regime. Their objectives varied from imperial reform to full-blown independence. The Spanish showed little interest in these complexities. Regardless of the islanders’ goals, the Spanish government was struggling to suppress this opposition. It was one of these revolts that gave the United States the pretext to acquire a global empire. Convinced that American business interests might be endangered by the revolt in Cuba, the United States dispatched the battleship Maine to Havana. When the Maine exploded in the Cuban port on February 15, 1898, an official U.S. inquiry concluded it was the result of a Spanish mine. The Spanish claimed it was an accident most likely caused by the Maine’s store of munitions. Investigations during the century that followed generally confirmed the Spanish conclusion, but the American public was quick to conclude Spain was somehow at fault. In the weeks that followed, the United States pursued a policy that encapsulated all the ambiguities at work in the American struggle with empire. In April 1898, Congress recognized Cuban independence and approved President McKinley’s request to send troops in support of that movement. In other words, the United States would continue in its efforts to destroy old empires and support local self-government. When Spain subsequently broke diplomatic relations, Congress declared war and the U.S. military went to work acquiring an empire for the United States. In other words, the United States expanded its new policy, first seen in Hawaii, of acquiring nonterritorial jurisdictions. Roosevelt immediately acted to end Spanish control over the most coveted possessions in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Although the United States was not the world’s leading naval power, by 1898 the United States Navy possessed new vessels employing the steam power, high-caliber guns and munitions, and armored steel construction that had revolutionized naval warfare in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. With the telegraph further transforming military planning, Roosevelt immediately dispatched the U.S. Asiatic Squadron to the Philippines. Eleven days after the declaration of war, the United States Navy crushed a Spanish squadron defending Manila Bay and immediately began supporting Philippine revolutionaries pursuing their own national independence. The United States invaded and captured Guam and Puerto Rico, two islands almost half a world away from each other but both highly desirable to Americans eager to extend their nation’s commercial and strategic reach. Theodore Roosevelt himself resigned from the Navy Department, securing a commission in the army. On May 2, 1898, he wrote a letter to Commodore George Dewey, who commanded the U.S. squadron in the Philippines: “Let me congratulate you with all my heart upon your magnificent work.” The same day, he also sent a telegram to Brooks Brothers, the men’s clothing store, reading simply, “Ordinary

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In the cartoon entitled ‘Well, I Hardly Know Which To Take First!’ President William McKinley, right, takes Uncle Sam's order in an effort to sate his seemingly insatiable imperialist appetite. Source: The Granger Collection, New York

Cavalry lieutenant colonel’s uniform in blue Cravenette.” 14 Both messages were typical of the élan that Roosevelt brought to the prospect of imperial acquisition and military conquest. Roosevelt commanded troops in Cuba, which the United States invaded in June 1898. The assault on San Juan Hill, which earned Roosevelt his place as a battlefield soldier, was typical of the land and sea campaigns of the SpanishAmerican War. Fierce but brief battles concluded in overwhelming victories for the United States. Support for the war was widespread but hardly universal. President McKinley himself had been hesitant to declare war on Spain. Meanwhile, many Americans concluded that this was a war of aggression, in which the attack on the Maine had served as a pretext for taking territory from Spain. The opposition took various forms. The Anti-Imperialist League formed in 1898, consisting of a diverse group of Americans joined in their opposition to the annexation of the Philippines. Some of the nation’s leading writers—Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Ambrose Bierce—decried the war, in the process helping to create the belief that writers should assume a critical stance toward federal policy. Finally, members of Congress—including members of the Republican delegation—concluded the war was incompatible with their own commitment to reform. With anti-imperialism serving as their rallying cry, critics protested a war that seemed to serve business interests at the expense of the peoples of the Pacific and Caribbean and, perhaps worse, at the expense of the most important American ideals (Document 2.14 and 2.15).

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Despite this criticism, many Americans believed the United States had a right to strike back against Spain. They also believed the United States had a right to commercial expansion and a responsibility to extend democratic governance. Some of the most craven defenses of war came from American newspapers, most notably practitioners of the “yellow journalism” associated with William Randolph Hearst. But it is too easy to explain support for the war as an irrational frenzy whipped up by inscrutable journalists. It was not difficult for many Americans to support the war because they considered it a noble conflict in pursuit of a just cause. Ironically, Americans who criticized the war were thinking in much the same way as those who celebrated it. Both still believed that Americans could avoid the pitfalls of imperialism by extending equality and liberty to their territorial acquisitions. The United States and Spain formally ended hostilities in August 1898. In December American and Spanish negotiators concluded the Treaty of Paris in which Spain ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam (Document 2.12). In fewer than four months of fighting, the United States had destroyed the last remnants of the Spanish empire. The independence movements in the Philippines and Cuba remained officially in place, now facing the United States rather than Spain (Document 2.13). The situation on all these islands resembled that of Hawaii. The United States wielded de facto rule. And yet Americans were still uncomfortable with the word “colony.” In the case of Hawaii, the United States imposed the territorial system but with no plans for eventual statehood. In the cases of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, the United States imposed various forms of governance (Document 2.16). Breaking from a century of tradition, members of Congress did not provide for the incorporation of residents of any of these territories as citizens of the United States. Much of this was the result of the nonwhite majorities on these islands. Just as the federal government had struggled to secure racial supremacy in its continental acquisitions, so too did the United States seek to preserve racial supremacy in its new island acquisitions.15 The greatest beneficiary of the Spanish-American War may well have been Teddy Roosevelt himself. He felt personally validated in his claims that the United States could secure its future with limited cost by striking at the Spanish Empire. Meanwhile, after a lifetime in which Roosevelt had celebrated Americans who had conquered their enemies, Roosevelt successfully led troops in combat. Roosevelt also emerged from the war with a national reputation that he quickly translated into political success. In November 1898, a month before negotiators actually signed the treaty ending the Spanish-American War, Theodore Roosevelt was elected governor of New York. It was in these circumstances that Roosevelt addressed the Republican National Convention in September 1900 (Document 2.17). He believed the United States had a right and a responsibility to extend its power overseas. If the territory and people of the Pacific and the Caribbean marked a new chapter in the American struggle with empire, he nonetheless believed it was the logical extension of acquiring territory in the West and suppressing Indian revolts. Roosevelt soon joined the presidential ticket as McKinley’s vice-presidential nominee, filling a vacancy left by Vice President Garret Hobart’s death in 1899. McKinley’s reelection in 1900 meant that Roosevelt would return to Washington, ready to begin the

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new century committed to extending American influence around the globe. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was announcing itself as a world power. It did so by becoming an empire, all the while still decrying colonies.16

Document 2.1 Benjamin Butler in New Orleans, 1862 Benjamin Franklin Butler entered the Civil War passionately committed to the Union. A well-connected lawyer, he served in the Massachusetts state legislature and was a vocal participant in the 1860 Democratic National Convention. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he joined the Union army and rose quickly. In May 1862, New Orleans became the first major Confederate city to fall to Union troops. Butler, a major general of volunteers, arrived at the head of the Union army. His tenure as the military commander of New Orleans proved tumultuous and controversial, both in the city and among the Union political and military leadership in Washington. Butler’s career survived accusations from all sides, and he continued to hold major commands throughout the war. After the war, Butler served as a Republican member of Congress and later as the governor of Massachusetts. These documents suggest four perspectives concerning the handling of captured Confederate territory. The first is Butler’s May 1, 1862, general order proclaiming himself military commander of New Orleans and establishing rules for the city. Butler sought to enact a policy that would enable him to crush Confederate sympathy without undermining efforts to restore public commitment to the Union. Some of the loudest opposition came from the women of New Orleans, as exemplified in the second document, a letter Butler received on May 7. His response was to issue the third document, General Order 28, which singled out women who insulted or opposed federal troops. This order generated no end of anger from New Orleans residents. Men considered it an insult to their honor. Women considered it a slur on their character. This order helped earn Butler the nickname of “Beast Butler” in New Orleans. But the cartoon from Harper’s Magazine shows how Butler’s advocates viewed his actions; it suggests that General Order 28 actually encouraged civil relations between federal troops and the women of New Orleans.

Proclamation of General Butler Head-Quarters, Department of the Gulf, New Orleans, May 1, 1862 The city of New Orleans and its environs, with all its interior and exterior defenses, having surrendered to the combined naval and land forces of the United States, and being now in the occupation of the forces of the United States, who have come to restore order, maintain public tranquillity, and enforce peace and quiet under the laws and constitution of the United States, the major-general commanding hereby proclaims the object and purposes of the government of the United States in thus taking possession of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana, and the rules and regulations by which the laws of the United States will be for the present, and during the state of war,

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enforced and maintained, for the plain guidance of all good citizens of the United States, as well as others who may have heretofore been in rebellion against their authority. Thrice before has the city of New Orleans been rescued from the hands of a foreign government, and still more calamitous domestic insurrection, by the money and arms of the United States. It has of late been under the military control of the rebel forces, and at each time, in the judgment of the commanders of the military forces holding it, it has been found necessary to preserve order and maintain quiet by an administration of martial law. Even during the interim from its evacuation by the rebel soldiers and its actual possession by the soldiers of the United States, the civil authorities have found it necessary to call for the intervention of an armed body known as the European Legion, to preserve the public tranquillity. The commanding general, therefore, will cause the city to be guarded, until the restoration of the United States authority and his further orders, by martial law. All persons in arms against the United States are required to surrender themselves, with their arms, equipments, and munitions of war. The body known as the European Legion, not being understood to be in arms against the United States, but organized to protect the lives and property of the citizens, are invited to still co-operate with the forces of the United States to that end, and, so acting, will not be included in the terms of this order, but will report to these headquarters. All ensigns, flags, devices, tending to uphold any authority whatever, save the flags of the United States and those of foreign consulates, must not be exhibited, but suppressed. The American ensign, the emblem of the United States, must be treated with the utmost deference and respect by all persons, under pain of severe punishment. All persons well disposed towards the government of the United States, who shall renew the oath of allegiance, will receive a safeguard of protection to their persons and property from the army of the United States, and the violation of such safeguard will be punishable with death. All persons still holding allegiance to the Confederate States will be deemed rebels against the government of the United States, and regarded and treated as enemies thereof. All foreigners, not naturalized and claiming allegiance to their respective governments, and not having made oath of allegiance to the government of the Confederate States, will be protected in their persons and property, as heretofore, under the laws of the United States. All persons who may have heretofore given adherence to the supposed government of the Confederate States, or been in their service, who shall lay down or deliver up their arms, return to peaceful occupations, and preserve quiet and order, holding no farther correspondence nor giving aid and comfort to enemies of the United States, will not be disturbed in their persons or property, except so far, under the orders of the commanding general, as the exigencies of the public service may render necessary . . . Sufficient force will be kept in the city to preserve order and maintain the laws. The killing of American soldiers by any disorderly person or mob is simply assassination and murder, and not war, and will be so regarded and punished. The owner of any house in which such murder shall be committed will be held responsible therefor, and the house be liable to be destroyed by the military authority. All disorders, disturbances of the peace, and crimes of an aggravated nature, interfering with the forces or laws of the

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United States, will be referred to a military court for trial and punishment. Other misdemeanors will be subject to the municipal authority, if it desires to act . . . The armies of the United States came here not to destroy, but to restore order out of chaos, to uphold the government and the laws in the place of the passions of men. To this end, therefore, the efforts of all well-disposed are invited, to have every species of disorder quelled . . . And, finally, it may be sufficient to add, without farther enumeration, that all the requirements of martial law will be imposed as long as, in the judgment of the United States authorities, it may be necessary; and while it is desired by these authorities to exercise this government mildly, and after the usages of the past, it must not be supposed that it will not be rigorously and firmly administered as the occasion calls for it. By Command of Major-General Butler Source: Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 433–436.

From the Wife of a Southern Planter May 7, 1862 In your order Number 22, you speak of having been informed that “lying, rebellious, and desperate men, having misrepresented the intentions of the United States government towards the Planters.” If you have been so informed, allow me to correct the false impression produced on your mind. We have never been deceived: One and all with what our unbiased judgment consider good reasons: detest your government, and feel your orders as insults to our common sense. We are however willing to send you our cotton, if this enclosed sample pleases your majesty. ’Tis the last of 600 bales we burnt on our plantation. Twelve thousand bales in Baton Rouge were prepared for your acceptance in a similar manner. Indeed, if you had continued your summer tour up the river in time, your eyes would have been charmed, and your amiable, just, generous disposition wrought to the loftiest height of enthusiastic admiration at the touching alacrity with which Old Abe’s “disobedient flock,” fire-brand in hand, rushed with one accord to lay the fruits of our industry at your feet. “But Yankee, proud Yankee! drest in a little brief authority,” when our gallant Beauregard comes to deliver us from the inflated myrmidon of the tyrannical Buffoon at Washington, we shall see with intense joy the noble Picayune Butler flying from the Vatican, in finished Bull Run or Bethel style, with all his Yankee rabble infesting our City at his heels . . . Do you dare meet our brave Generals, our gallant defenders on land? No-no-no-cowards, you dare not. You can bluster and tyrannize over a defenceless City, won by no courage or military skill, but by the impossibility of our coping with your Navy at the present time. Our Cities you may steal: That is acting according to your base Yankee nature. Our hearts you can never, never subdue . . . Source: Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 448–449.

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Source: Harper’s Weekly, July 12, 1862, from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

General Orders No. 28 Headquarters Department of the Gulf, New Orleans, May 15, 1862 As the officers and soldiers of the United States have been subject to repeated insults from the women (calling themselves ladies) of New Orleans, in return for the most scrupulous noninterference and courtesy on our part, it is ordered that hereafter when any female shall, by word, gesture, or movement, insult or show contempt for any officer or soldier of the U.S., she shall be regarded and held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation. Source: Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 1, 490.

Document 2.2 A Cartoonist Contemplates Reconstruction, 1865 This illustration from July 1865 exemplifies the way some Americans imagined the process of reintegrating the Confederacy. Published only a few months after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the illustration suggests that Lincoln wanted to simply “stitch” the Union back together. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, stands ready to complete the process. The illustration itself is the work of Currier & Ives, a company that produced thousands of illustrations that attempted to use pictures and only a few words to tell grand stories about the nation’s development. Many Americans understood events like Manifest Destiny, western settlement, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the images of Currier & Ives.

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Source: J. E. Baker, “The ‘Rail Splitter’ at Work Repairing the Union,” 1865, Currier and Ives, New York, in American Memory Collection, Library of Congress

Document 2.3 Congress Proposes a System of Reconstruction, 1865 The illustration in Document 2.2 shows how some Americans imagined a swift process of Reconstruction through which the Confederacy would rapidly rejoin the Union, making the United States stronger in the process. The selection that follows describes a very different process. In 1865, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction examined how best to approach the task of Reconstruction. The committee concluded that through secession and civil war, the Confederacy had demonstrated that it was unprepared for full membership in the Union. In both Document 2.2 and 2.3, Americans turned to the same concerns about loyalty, freedom, and union they had rehearsed in their arguments about territorial acquisitions in the West.

To ascertain whether any of the so-called Confederate States “are entitled to be represented in either house of Congress,” the essential inquiry is, whether there is, in anyone of them, a constituency qualified to be represented in Congress. The question how far persons claiming seats in either house possess the credentials necessary to enable them to represent a duly qualified constituency is one for the consideration of each house separately, after the preliminary question shall have been finally determined.

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We now propose to re-state, as briefly as possible, the general facts and principles applicable to all the States recently in rebellion: First. The seats of the senators and representatives from the so-called Confederate States became vacant in the year 1861, during the second session of the thirty-sixth Congress, by the voluntary withdrawal of their incumbents, with the sanction and by direction of the legislatures or conventions of their respective States. This was done as a hostile act against the Constitution and government of the United States, with a declared intent to overthrow the same by forming a southern confederation. This act of declared hostility was speedily followed by an organization of the same States into a confederacy, which levied and waged war, by sea and land, against the United States. That war continued more than four years, within which period the rebel armies besieged the national capital, invaded the loyal States, burned their towns and cities, robbed their citizens, destroyed more than 250,000 loyal soldiers, and imposed an increased national burden of not less than $3,500,000,000, of which seven or eight hundred millions have already been met and paid. From the time these confederated States thus withdrew their representation in Congress and levied war against the United States, the great mass of their people became and were insurgents, rebels, traitors, and all of them assumed and occupied the political, legal, and practical relation of enemies of the United States. This position is established by acts of Congress and judicial decisions, and is recognized repeatedly by the President in public proclamations, documents, and speeches. Second. The States thus confederated prosecuted their war against the United States to final arbitrament, and did not cease until all their armies were captured, their military power destroyed, their civil officers, State and confederate, taken prisoners or put to flight, every vestige of State and confederate government obliterated, their territory overrun and occupied by the federal armies, and their people reduced to the condition of enemies conquered in war, entitled only by public law to such rights, privileges, and conditions as might be vouchsafed by the conqueror. This position is also established by judicial decisions, and is recognized by the President in public proclamations, documents, and speeches. Third. Having voluntarily deprived themselves of representation in Congress for the criminal purpose of destroying the federal Union, and having reduced themselves, by the act of levying war, to the condition of public enemies, they have no right to complain of temporary exclusion from Congress; but, on the contrary, having voluntarily renounced the right to representation, and disqualified themselves by crime from participating in the government, the burden now rests upon them, before claiming to be reinstated in their former condition, to show that they are qualified to resume federal relations. In order to do this, they must prove that they have established, with the consent of the people, republican forms of government in harmony with the Constitution and laws of the United States, that all hostile purposes have ceased, and should give adequate guarantees against future treason and rebellion—guarantees which shall prove satisfactory to the government against which they rebelled, and by whose arms they were subdued. Fourth. Having, by this treasonable withdrawal from Congress, and by flagrant rebellion and war, forfeited all civil and political rights and privileges under the federal

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Constitution, they can only be restored thereto by the permission and authority of that constitutional power against which they rebelled and by which they were subdued. Fifth. These rebellious enemies were conquered by the people of the United States, acting through all the co-ordinate branches of the government, and not by the executive department alone. The powers of conqueror are not so vested in the President that he can fix and regulate the terms of settlement and confer congressional representation on conquered rebels and traitors. Nor can he, in any way, qualify enemies of the government to exercise its law-making power. The authority to restore rebels to political power in the federal government can be exercised only with the concurrence of all the departments in which political power is vested; and hence the several proclamations of the President to the people of the Confederate States cannot be considered as extending beyond the purposes declared, and can only be regarded as provisional permission by the commander-in-chief of the army to do certain acts, the effect and validity whereof is to be determined by the constitutional government, and not solely by the executive power. Sixth. The question before Congress is, then, whether conquered enemies have the right, and shall be permitted at their own pleasure and on their own terms, to participate in making laws for their conquerors; whether conquered rebels may change their theatre of operations from the battle-field, where they were defeated and overthrown, to the halls of Congress, and, through their representatives, seize upon the government which they fought to destroy; whether the national treasury, the army of the nation, its navy, its forts and arsenals, its whole civil administration, its credit, its pensioners, the widows and orphans of those who perished in the war, the public honor, peace and safety, shall all be turned over to the keeping of its recent enemies without delay, and without imposing such conditions as, in the opinion of Congress, the security of the country and its institutions may demand. Seventh. The history of mankind exhibits no example of such madness and folly. The instinct of self-preservation protests against it. The surrender by Grant to Lee, and by Sherman to Johnston, would have been disasters of less magnitude, for new armies could have been raised, new battles fought, and the government saved. The anti-coercive policy, which, under pretext of avoiding bloodshed, allowed the rebellion to take form and gather force, would be surpassed in infamy by the matchless wickedness that would now surrender the halls of Congress to those so recently in rebellion until proper precautions shall have been taken to secure the national faith and the national safety. Eighth. As has been shown in this report, and in the evidence submitted, no proof has been afforded to Congress of a constituency in any one of the so-called Confederate States, unless we except the State of Tennessee, qualified to elect senators and representatives in Congress. No State constitution, or amendment to a State constitution, has had the sanction of the people. All the so-called legislation of State conventions and legislatures has been had under military dictation. If the President may, at his will, and under his own authority, whether as military commander or chief executive, qualify persons to appoint senators and elect representatives, and empower others to appoint and elect them, he thereby practically controls the organization of the legislative department. The constitutional form of government is thereby practically destroyed, and its powers absorbed in the Executive. And while your committee do not for a moment impute to the

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President any such design, but cheerfully concede to him the most patriotic motives, they cannot but look with alarm upon a precedent so fraught with danger to the republic. Ninth. The necessity of providing adequate safeguards for the future, before restoring the insurrectionary States to a participation in the direction of public affairs, is apparent from the bitter hostility to the government and people of the United States yet existing throughout the conquered territory, as proved incontestably by the testimony of many witnesses and by undisputed facts. Tenth. The conclusion of your committee therefore is, that the so-called Confederate States are not, at present, entitled to representation in the Congress of the United States; that, before allowing such representation, adequate security for future peace and safety should be required; that this can only be found in such changes of the organic law as shall determine the civil rights and privileges of all citizens in all parts of the republic, shall place representation on an equitable basis, shall fix a stigma upon treason, and protect the loyal people against future claims for the expenses incurred in support of rebellion and for manumitted slaves, together with an express grant, of power in Congress to enforce those provisions. To this end they offer a joint resolution for amending the Constitution of the United States, and the two several bills designed to carry the same into effect, before referred to. Before closing this report, your committee beg leave to state that the specific recommendations submitted by them are the result of mutual concession, after a long and careful comparison of conflicting opinions. Upon a question of such magnitude, infinitely important as it is to the future of the republic, it was not to be expected that all should think alike. Sensible of the imperfections of the scheme, your committee submit it to Congress as the best they could agree upon, in the hope that its imperfections may be cured, and its deficiencies supplied, by legislative wisdom; and that, when finally adopted, it may tend to restore peace and harmony to the whole country, and to place our republican institutions on a more stable foundation. W. P. Fessenden. James W. Grimes. Ira Harris. J. M. Howard. George H. Williams. Thaddeus Stevens. Elihu B. Washburne. Justin S. Morrill. Jno. A. Bingham. Roscoe Conkling. George S. Boutwell. Source: Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, at the First Session Thirty-Ninth Congress (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1866), xix–xxi.

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Document 2.4 William Tecumseh Sherman’s Indian Policy, 1868 William Tecumseh Sherman, best known as one of the leading generals of the Civil War, had an extensive postwar military career. In 1865, Sherman took command of all military forces west of the Mississippi River. In this capacity, he was in charge of the nation’s ongoing military operations against Indians, reporting directly to Ulysses S. Grant, the commanding general of the United States Army. When Grant became president in 1869, Sherman succeeded him as commanding general, a post he held for ten years. Throughout these years, Sherman pursued an aggressive policy designed to crush the remaining pockets of Indian resistance in the northern Great Plains and the Southwest. In contrast with William T. Sherman, who treated political parties with disdain, Sen. John Sherman, the general’s brother, was an active Whig and later a Republican. Elected to Congress from Ohio in 1854, John eventually benefited from his brother’s wartime celebrity, serving as secretary of Treasury throughout the Hays administration (1877–1881) and as William McKinley’s secretary of state in 1897–1898.

Headquarters Military Division of The Missouri, Sept. 23, 1868 Dear Brother: The Indian War on the plains need simply amount to this. We have now selected and provided reservations for all, off the great roads. All who cling to their old hunting grounds are hostile and will remain so till killed off. We will have a sort of predatory war for years, every now and then be shocked by the indiscriminate murder of travellers and settlers, but the country is so large, and the advantage of the Indians so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it. From the nature of things we must take chances and clean out Indians as we encounter them. Our troops are now scattered and have daily chases and skirmishes, sometimes getting the best and sometimes the worst, but the Indians have this great advantage,—they can steal fresh horses when they need them and drop the jaded ones. We must operate each man to his own horse, and cannot renew except by purchase in a distant and cheap market. I will keep things thus, and when winter starves their ponies they will want a truce and shan’t have it, unless the civil influence compels me again as it did last winter. If Grant is elected, that old Indian system will be broken up, and then with the annuities which are ample expended in connection with and in subordination to military movements, will soon bring the whole matter within easy control. Then there are $134,000 appropriated for the Cheyennes and Arapahoes, all of whom are at war, and yet the Indian Bureau contend they are forced by law to invest it in shoes, stockings, blankets, and dry goods for these very Indians. They don’t want any of these things, but if it could be put in corn, salt, and cattle, we could detach half the hostiles and get them down on the Canadian, two hundred miles south of the Kansas road . . . Source: William Tecumseh Sherman to John Sherman, 23 September 1868, in The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891, ed. Rachel Sherman Thorndike (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 321–322.

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Document 2.5 Americans Debate Hawaii’s Future, 1885 In 1885, Hawaii was an independent monarchy, but many of the king’s advisers were Americans. Meanwhile, Americans debated whether to establish a formal alliance with the monarchy or pursue a policy of eventual annexation. All the while, Americans were deeply suspicious of British efforts to preserve their own influence with the king. This editorial from the Pacific Commercial Advertiser is typical of the sort of opinion journalism that circulated throughout the United States in the 1880s. Perhaps most difficult for contemporary readers are the numerous references to people without much description. This sort of vague language was common throughout the nineteenth century, even to the point that some newspapers simply deployed nicknames, assuming that informed readers who shared the newspapers’ opinion would understand.

The Independence of Hawaii. Editorial Article from the Pacific Commercial Advertiser, July 28th, 1885. The Bulletin publishes the following from the London Times, transmitted, as all that paper’s American news is, by its Philadelphia correspondent: PHILADELPHIA, June 24th.—The Government of the Sandwich Islands has appointed a Commissioner, Mr. Daggett, who has just arrived at San Francisco, to visit Washington in order to open negotiations for the admission of the Sandwich Islands to the American Union. Most of the various interests in the Hawaiian Kingdom are now controlled by Americans, while the existing Reciprocity Treaty provides for the mutual exchange of products. The views of the American Government on the proposal of annexation have not been announced. We saw this publication in the Times, but took no notice, whatever of it, inasmuch as it was only the canard which appeared in the San Francisco press telegraphed as a serious fact by the Philadelphia correspondent of the Thunderer. That the dispatch was sent and printed in good faith by the Times is undoubted, but that it should be copied and commented upon by a Honolulu newspaper is indeed surprising. And the grounds of its adverse comment are more surprising still. Because the present Administration has appointed two American citizens to represent this Kingdom, in different capacities in their own country, after having served the American Government Credibly in this one, we are told that the impression will be conveyed to Europe, and especially to England “that the Hawaiian Kingdom is bankrupt and anxious to sell out at any sacrifice;” but that should the sale not be accomplished, “it will be concluded that the United States holds a mortgage upon the country which is not worth while foreclosing.” These conclusions are at once illogical and absurd, and the Bulletin is in a position to know this for itself without reminder from us.” If there be one feature in the policy of the present Administration more pronounced than another, and which the Opposition hates it for more than another, it is its devotion to the independence of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and determination to preserve its

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autonomy at all hazerds. The present Premier and Foreign Minister, Mr. Gibson, came into public prominence in this Kingdom by reason of his antagonism to the Government of that day, now represented by the Opposition party, which proposed the cession of a portion of the territory of this Kingdom to a foreign power as a bribe for executing a treaty of commercial reciprocity. This cession was not only proposed by the Ministry in question, but it was advocated as a step which would conduce, more than any other, to the welfare of this country. In other words, it was urged that Hawaii should virtually surrender its independence and pass under the protection of the United States. Mr. Gibson’s determined opposition to ceding one inch of Hawaiian territory to any foreign power, or bating one iota of the independence of this Kingdom, resulted in his elevation to power, in the fullest confidence of the King and the Hawaiian nation, who are the parties most nearly in interest. Is it likely, then, that this Administration, so constituted, would betray the trust reposed in it by King and country? Surely the Bulletin imagined that its Opposition friends were again in power, and that negotiations for the sale of the Kingdom, with considerations personal to themselves, had been resumed at the point where Mr. Gibson’s intelligent patriotism broke them off. In a word, there is not the least foundation in fact for the story in the London Times. It all grew out of a paragraph in the ADVERTISER on the day Mr. Daggett sailed, to the effect that the ex-Minister had been entrusted with a mission to the United States Government. We did not state its object, but this omission was very soon supplied by the imaginative brains of San Francisco reporters, and their invention was accepted as a fact by the unimaginative gentleman who furnishes stale American gossip to the London Times. It is sufficient to state that Mr. Daggett has been entrusted with a matter of business which will probably be put into the hands of the Hawaiian Minister at Washington to complete on his return from his holiday trip to Germany. So much for the secret mission and sale of the Kingdom. With regard to the dubiousness of employing foreigners in the public service of Hawaii, the practice follows well established precedents, caused, no doubt, by the paucity of gentlemen qualified for such appointments from which to choose: For example, one of the first Commissioners of the United States to this Kingdom, Mr. Allen, became Chief Justice of the Kingdom, and ultimately the King’s Embassador at Washington, in which exalted position he died. Mr. Pierce, another American Minister to Hawaii, traveled in such capacity with the King to promote the Reciprocity Treaty, and was afterwards made Minister of Foreign Affairs. Mr. W. L. Green, the first Premier of Hawaii and Foreign Minister, had previously been British Consul and Acting British Commissioner. Mr. Varigny, at one time Chancellor of the French Consulate here, became Hawaiian Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs. And the present Administration, following precedent, has a German and an American by birth among its members. But it is none the less resolute in its policy of maintaining the independence of the Hawaiian nation, the policy of which has been twice affirmed by the Legislative Assembly, at critical times, upon resolutions moved by His Excellency Mr. Gibson, who is now at the head of the Government. Source: “The Independence of Hawaii,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 28 July 1885, in An American Time Capsule, Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/.

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Document 2.6 The Dawes Act, 1887 Henry Laurens Dawes (1816–1903) considered himself an advocate for American Indians. A long-serving representative and senator from Massachusetts, he served as chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee. In 1887, he was the architect of the act that bears his name. The Dawes Act provided for the distribution of land among American Indians living on federal reservations. This seemingly innocuous act of land management had profound implications for Indians. First, the federal government invalidated long-standing Indian rules of landownership. Second, this process extended the federal government’s authority over Indians living on the newly created reservation system. In 1893, Dawes chaired a special committee that investigated why some Indians opposed the implementation of the Dawes Act. That commission also designated a set of tribal names for Indians, in many cases ignoring older village or clan relationships. Many of the newer tribal identities remain in place to this day. In 1898, Congress extended the principles of the Dawes Act by formally eliminating tribal authority over reservation land, replacing it with the absolute authority of the federal government.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That in all cases where any tribe or band of Indians has been, or shall hereafter be, located upon any reservation created for their use, either by treaty stipulation or by virtue of an act of Congress or executive order setting apart the same for their use, the President of the United States be, and he hereby is, authorized, whenever in his opinion any reservation or any part thereof of such Indians is advantageous for agricultural and grazing purposes, to cause said reservation, or any part thereof, to be surveyed, or resurveyed if necessary, and to allot the lands in said reservation in severalty to any Indian located thereon in quantities as follows: To each head of a family, one-quarter of a section; To each single person over eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; To each orphan child under eighteen years of age, one-eighth of a section; and To each other single person under eighteen years now living, or who may be born prior to the date of the order of the President directing an allotment of the lands embraced in any reservation, one-sixteenth of a section: Provided, That in case there is not sufficient land in any of said reservations to allot lands to each individual of the classes above named in quantities as above provided, the lands embraced in such reservation or reservations shall be allotted to each individual of each of said classes pro rata in accordance with the provisions of this act: And provided further, That where the treaty or act of Congress setting apart such reservation provides the allotment of lands in severalty in quantities in excess of those herein provided, the President, in making allotments upon such reservation, shall allot the lands to each individual Indian belonging thereon in quantity as specified in such treaty or act: And provided further, That when the lands allotted are only valuable for grazing purposes, an additional allotment of such grazing lands, in quantities as above provided, shall be made to each individual.

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SEC. 2. That all allotments set apart under the provisions of this act shall be selected by the Indians, heads of families selecting for their minor children, and the agents shall select for each orphan child, and in such manner as to embrace the improvements of the Indians making the selection. Where the improvements of two or more Indians have been made on the same legal subdivision of land, unless they shall otherwise agree, a provisional line may be run dividing said lands between them, and the amount to which each is entitled shall be equalized in the assignment of the remainder of the land to which they are entitled under his act: Provided, That if any one entitled to an allotment shall fail to make a selection within four years after the President shall direct that allotments may be made on a particular reservation, the Secretary of the Interior may direct the agent of such tribe or band, if such there be, and if there be no agent, then a special agent appointed for that purpose, to make a selection for such Indian, which selection shall be allotted as in cases where selections are made by the Indians, and patents shall issue in like manner. SEC. 3. That the allotments provided for in this act shall be made by special agents appointed by the President for such purpose, and the agents in charge of the respective reservations on which the allotments are directed to be made, under such rules and regulations as the Secretary of the Interior may from time to time prescribe, and shall be certified by such agents to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, in duplicate, one copy to be retained in the Indian Office and the other to be transmitted to the Secretary of the Interior for his action, and to be deposited in the General Land Office. SEC. 4. That where any Indian not residing upon a reservation, or for whose tribe no reservation has been provided by treaty, act of Congress, or executive order, shall make settlement upon any surveyed or unsurveyed lands of the United States not otherwise appropriated, he or she shall be entitled, upon application to the local land-office for the district in which the lands arc located, to have the same allotted to him or her, and to his or her children, in quantities and manner as provided in this act for Indians residing upon reservations; and when such settlement is made upon unsurveyed lands, the grant to such Indians shall be adjusted upon the survey of the lands so as to conform thereto; and patents shall be issued to them for such lands in the manner and with the restrictions as herein provided. And the fees to which the officers of such local land-office would have been entitled had such lands been entered under the general laws for the disposition of the public lands shall be paid to them, from any moneys in the Treasury of the United States not otherwise appropriated, upon a statement of an account in their behalf for such fees by the Commissioner of the General Land Office, and a certification of such account to the Secretary of the Treasury by the Secretary of the Interior. SEC. 5. That upon the approval of the allotments provided for in this act by the Secretary of the Interior, he shall cause patents to issue therefor in the name of the allottees, which patents shall be of the legal effect, and declare that the United States does and will hold the land thus allotted, for the period of twenty-five years, in trust for the sole use and benefit of the Indian to whom such allotment shall have been made, or, in case of his decease, of his heirs according to the laws of the State or Territory where such land is located, and that at the expiration of said period the United States will convey the same by patent to said Indian, or his heirs as aforesaid, in fee, discharged of said trust and free of all charge or incumbrance

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whatsoever: Provided, That the President of the United States may in any case in his discretion extend the period. And if any conveyance shall be made of the lands set apart and allotted as herein provided, or any contract made touching the same, before the expiration of the time above mentioned, such conveyance or contract shall be absolutely null and void: Provided, That the law of descent and partition in force in the State or Territory where such lands are situate shall apply thereto after patents therefor have been executed and delivered, except as herein otherwise provided; and the laws of the State of Kansas regulating the descent and partition of real estate shall, so far as practicable, apply to all lands in the Indian Territory which may be allotted in severalty under the provisions of this act: And provided further, That at any time after lands have been allotted to all the Indians of any tribe as herein provided, or sooner if in the opinion of the President it shall be for the best interests of said tribe, it shall be lawful for the Secretary of the Interior to negotiate with such Indian tribe for the purchase and release by said tribe, in conformity with the treaty or statute under which such reservation is held, of such portions of its reservation not allotted as such tribe shall, from time to time, consent to sell, on such terms and conditions as shall be considered just and equitable between the United States and said tribe of Indians, which purchase shall not be complete until ratified by Congress, and the form and manner of executing such release shall also be prescribed by Congress: Provided however, That all lands adapted to agriculture, with or without irrigation so sold or released to the United States by any Indian tribe shall be held by the United States for the sale purpose of securing homes to actual settlers and shall be disposed of by the United States to actual and bona fide settlers only tracts not exceeding one hundred and sixty acres to any one person, on such terms as Congress shall prescribe, subject to grants which Congress may make in aid of education: And provided further, That no patents shall issue therefor except to the person so taking the same as and homestead, or his heirs, and after the expiration of five years occupancy thereof as such homestead; and any conveyance of said lands taken as a homestead, or any contract touching the same, or lieu thereon, created prior to the date of such patent, shall be null and void. And the sums agreed to be paid by the United States as purchase money for any portion of any such reservation shall be held in the Treasury of the United States for the sole use of the tribe or tribes Indians; to whom such reservations belonged; and the same, with interest thereon at three per cent per annum, shall be at all times subject to appropriation by Congress for the education and civilization of such tribe or tribes of Indians or the members thereof. The patents aforesaid shall be recorded in the General Land Office, and afterward delivered, free of charge, to the allottee entitled thereto. And if any religious society or other organization is now occupying any of the public lands to which this act is applicable, for religious or educational work among the Indians, the Secretary of the Interior is hereby authorized to confirm such occupation to such society or organization, in quantity not exceeding one hundred and sixty acres in any one tract, so long as the same shall be so occupied, on such terms as he shall deem just; but nothing herein contained shall change or alter any claim of such society for religious or educational purposes heretofore granted by law. And hereafter in the employment of Indian police, or any other employees in the public service among any of the Indian tribes or bands affected by this act, and where Indians can perform the duties required, those Indians who have availed themselves of the provisions of this act and become citizens of the United States shall be preferred.

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SEC. 6. That upon the completion of said allotments and the patenting of the lands to said allottees, each and every number of the respective bands or tribes of Indians to whom allotments have been made shall have the benefit of and be subject to the laws, both civil and criminal, of the State or Territory in which they may reside; and no Territory shall pass or enforce any law denying any such Indian within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law. And every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States to whom allotments shall have been made under the provisions of this act, or under any law or treaty, and every Indian born within the territorial limits of the United States who has voluntarily taken up, within said limits, his residence separate and apart from any tribe of Indians therein, and has adopted the habits of civilized life, is hereby declared to be a citizen of the United States, and is entitled to all the rights, privileges, and immunities of such citizens, whether said Indian has been or not, by birth or otherwise, a member of any tribe of Indians within the territorial limits of the United States without in any manner affecting the right of any such Indian to tribal or other property. SEC. 7. That in cases where the use of water for irrigation is necessary to render the lands within any Indian reservation available for agricultural purposes, the Secretary of the Interior be, and he is hereby, authorized to prescribe such rules and regulations as he may deem necessary to secure a just and equal distribution thereof among the Indians residing upon any such reservation; and no other appropriation or grant of water by any riparian proprietor shall permitted to the damage of any other riparian proprietor. SEC. 8. That the provisions of this act shall not extend to the territory occupied by the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, and Osage, Miamies and Peorias, and Sacs and Foxes, in the Indian Territory, nor to any of the reservations of the Seneca Nation of New York Indians in the State of New York, nor to that strip of territory in the State of Nebraska adjoining the Sioux Nation on the south added by executive order. SEC. 9. That for the purpose of making the surveys and resurveys mentioned in section two of this act, there be, and hereby is, appropriated, out of any moneys in the Treasury not otherwise appropriated, the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, to be repaid proportionately out of the proceeds of the sales of such land as may be acquired from the Indians under the provisions of this act. SEC. 10. That nothing in this act contained shall be so construed to affect the right and power of Congress to grant the right of way through any lands granted to an Indian, or a tribe of Indians, for railroads or other highways, or telegraph lines, for the public use, or condemn such lands to public uses, upon making just compensation. SEC. 11. That nothing in this act shall be so construed as to prevent the removal of the Southern Ute Indians from their present reservation in Southwestern Colorado to a new reservation by and with consent of a majority of the adult male members of said tribe. Approved, February, 8, 1887. Source: The Statutes of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1887), vol. 24, 388–391.

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Document 2.7 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 1893 In 1893, the American Historical Association held a special meeting to coincide with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The exposition showcased the technological achievements of the industrial age, and the meeting of the AHA was supposed to set those developments in historical context. Turner began his own paper by considering the tremendous population increase of the United States, and particularly the growth of population and development in the western United States. These excerpts from the published version of his speech contain Turner’s own efforts to situate the frontier within the nation’s broader history as he conceived of the region as a series of places and as a concept.

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully— growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government into complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating

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American character. The true point of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von Holst, occupies its important place in American history because of its relation to westward expansion. In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected. The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt including the Indian country and the outer margin of the “settled area” of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which arise in connection with it. . . . The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American . . . In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was advanced up the Atlantic river courses . . . In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely: the “fall line;” the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars . . . Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political history; the evolution of each into a higher stage has worked political transformations. But what constitutional historian has made any adequate attempt to interpret political facts by the light of these social areas and changes?. . .

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The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. From the close of the seventeenth century various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with Indians and establish common measures of defense. Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action . . . The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement. In this connection mention should also be made of the government military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of settlement. But all the more important expeditions were greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian guides, the traders and trappers, and the French voyageurs, who were inevitable parts of governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and Clark. Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in western advance . . . The farmer’s advance came in a distinct series of waves. In Peck’s New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837, occurs this suggestive passage: Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the “range,” and the proceeds of hunting . . . The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, school-houses, court-houses, etc., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life. Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn. The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broad-cloths, silks, leghorns, crepes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on . . . The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the West. Hundreds of men can be found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners.

Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself, we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for. First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people . . . In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England . . . The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement, as subsidiary to the

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slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident. In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the Civil War slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance. But this does not justify Dr. von Holst (to take an example) in treating our constitutional history in its formative period down to 1828 in a single volume, giving six volumes chiefly to the history of slavery from 1828 to 1861, under the title “Constitutional History of the United States.” The growth of nationalism and the evolution of American political institutions were dependent on the advance of the frontier. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes, in his “History of the United States since the Compromise of 1850,” has treated the legislation called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery struggle . . . The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the government. The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless States, and of the Ordinance of 1787, need no discussion. Administratively the frontier called out some of the highest and most vitalizing activities of the general government. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. Lamar explained: “In 1789 the States were the creators of the Federal Government; in 1861 the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority of the States.” . . . It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed the democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe and the democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the War of 1812, the West of Clay, and Benton and Harrison, and Andrew Jackson, shut off by the Middle States and the mountains from the coast sections, had a solidarity of its own with national tendencies. On the tide of the Father of Waters, North and South met and mingled into a nation. Interstate migration went steadily on— a process of crossfertilization of ideas and institutions. The fierce struggle of the sections over slavery on the western frontier does not diminish the truth of this statement; it proves the truth of it. Slavery was a sectional trait that would not down, but in the West it could not remain sectional. It was the greatest of frontiersmen who declared: “I believe this Government can not endure permanently half slave and half free. It will become all of one thing or all of the other.” Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The effect reached back from the frontier and affected profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World. But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an able article, has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was

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sometimes confused with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has from the beginning promoted democracy. The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions, and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older States whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of the franchise became essential. It was western New York that forced an extension of suffrage in the constitutional convention of that State in 1821; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide-water region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution framed in 1830, and to give to the frontier region a more nearly proportionate representation with the tide-water aristocracy. The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison, and it meant the triumph of the frontier—with all of its good and with all of its evil elements. An interesting illustration of the tone of frontier democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates in the Virginia convention already referred to. A representative from western Virginia declared: But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West which this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants. They are regenerated, politically I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians, and the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician is immense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But at home, or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the plow. This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican principles pure and uncontaminated.

So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists, and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as its benefits . . . From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which

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has not only been open but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and, unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. Source: Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1894), 199–227.

Document 2.8 The Blount Report, 1893 On January 17, 1893, a cohort of Americans deposed Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii. This move concluded a decade of mounting conflict between the Hawaiian monarchy and Anglo-American leaders who had played an increasingly prominent role in Hawaiian affairs. In the midst of the conflict, marines from the USS Boston, an American warship anchored in Honolulu, came ashore to support the American takeover. The U.S. House of Representatives responded by ordering an official inquiry under the leadership of James Blount. In his report to Congress, Blount was highly critical of American involvement by both private citizens and the government. He questioned the activities of the Committee of Safety, the group of Americans that seized power in Hawaii. Likewise, he charged that the marines had inappropriately supported the coup. At the same time, Blount’s comments were loaded with the sort of racial attitudes that validated the coup in the first place. In his own review of Hawaiian history, Blount celebrated the arrival of Anglo-American civilization. Honolulu, H.I., July 17, 1893.

Sir: On the 11th of March, 1893, I was appointed by the President of the United States as special commissioner to the Hawaiian Islands. At the same time the following instructions were given to me by you . . .

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You will investigate and fully report to the President all the facts you can learn respecting the condition of affairs in the Hawaiian Islands, the causes of the revolution by which the Queen’s Government was overthrown, the sentiment of the people towards existing authority, and, in general, all that can fully enlighten the President touching the subjects of your mission . . . Historical precedents, and the general course of the United States, authorize the employment of its armed force in foreign territory for the security of the lives and property of American citizens and for the repression of lawless and tumultuous acts threatening them; and the powers conferred to that end upon the representatives of the United States are both necessary and proper, subject always to the exercise of a sound discretion in their application . . . Should it be necessary to land an armed force upon Hawaiian territory on occasions of popular disturbance, when the local authority may be unable to give adequate protection to the life and property of citizens of the United States, the assent of such authority should first be obtained if it can be done without prejudice to the interests involved . . . While the United States claim no right to interfere in the political or domestic affairs or in the internal conflicts of the Hawaiian Islands otherwise than as herein stated, or for the purpose of maintaining any treaty or other rights which they possess, this Government will adhere to its consistent and established policy in relation to them, and it will not acquiesce in domestic interference by other powers. The foregoing general exposition of the President’s views will indicate the safe courses within which your action should be shaped and mark the limits of your discretion in calling upon the naval commander for cooperation . . . I am, sir, your obedient servant, W. Q. Gresham [Secretary of State] On the 29th of the same month I reached the city of Honolulu. The American minister, Hon. John L. Stevens, accompanied by a committee from the Annexation Club, came on board the vessel which had brought me. He informed me that this club had rented an elegant house, well furnished, and provided servants and a carriage and horses for my use; that I could pay for this accommodation just what I chose, from nothing up? He urged me very earnestly to accept the offer. I declined it, and informed him that I should go to a hotel. The committee soon after this renewed the offer, which I again declined. Soon afterwards the ex-Queen, through her chamberlain, tendered her carriage to convey me to my hotel. This I courteously declined. I located myself at the Hawaiian Hotel. For several days I was engaged receiving calls from persons of all classes and of various political views. I soon became conscious of the fact that all minds were quietly and anxiously looking to see what action the Government of the United States would take . . . The American minister called on me with a Mr. Walter G. Smith, who, he said, desired to make an important communication to me, and whom he knew to be very intelligent and reliable. Thereupon Mr. Smith, with intense gravity, informed me that he knew beyond doubt that it had been arranged between the Queen and the Japanese

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commissioner that if the American flag and troops were removed the troops from the Japanese man-of-war Naniwa would land and reinstate the Queen. Mr. Smith was the editor of the Hawaiian Star, established by the Annexation Club for the purpose of advocating annexation. The American minister expressed his belief in the statement of Mr. Smith and urged the importance of the American troops remaining on shore until I could communicate with you and you could have the opportunity to communicate with the Japanese Government and obtain from it assurances that Japanese troops would not be landed to enforce any policy on the Government or people of the Hawaiian Islands. I was not impressed much with these statements . . . [Blount offered the following review of recent Hawaiian history.] From 1820 to 1866 missionaries of various nationalities, especially American, with unselfishness, toil, patience, and piety, had devoted themselves to the improvement of the native. They gave them a language, a religion, and an immense movement on the lines of civilization. In process of time the descendants of these good men grew up in secular pursuits. Superior by nature, education, and other opportunities, they acquired wealth. They sought to succeed to the political control exercised by their fathers. The revered missionary disappeared. In his stead there came the Anglo-Saxon in the person of his son, ambitions to acquire wealth and to continue that political control reverently conceded to his pious ancestor. Hence, in satire, the native designated him a “missionary,” which has become a campaign phrase of wonderful potency. Other white foreigners came into the country, especially Americans, English, and Germans. These, as a rule, did not become naturalized and participate in the voting franchise. Business and race affiliation occasioned sympathy and cooperation between these two classes of persons of foreign extraction . . . Does this narration of facts portray a situation in a government in whole or in part representative favorable to the ambition of a leader who will espouse the native cause? Would it be strange for him to stir the native heart by picturing a system of political control under which the foreigner had wickedly become possessed of the soil, degraded free labor by an uncivilized system of coolie labor, prostituted society by injecting into it a people hostile to Christianity and the civilization of the nineteenth century, exposed their own daughters to the evil influence of an overwhelming male population of a degraded type, implanted Japanese and Chinese women almost insensible to feelings of chastity, and then loudly boasted of their Christianity? On the other hand, was it not natural for the white race to vaunt their wealth and intelligence, their Christian success in rescuing the native from barbarism, their gift of a Government regal in name but containing many of the principles of freedom; to find in the natives defective intelligence, tendencies to idolatry, to race prejudice, and a disposition under the influence of white and half-white leaders to exercise political domination; to speak of their thriftlessness in private life and susceptibility to bribes in legislative action; to proclaim the unchasteness of native women, and to take at all hazards the direction of public affairs from the native? Source: The Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Third Session of the Fifty-Third Congress, 1894–95 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1895) 567–569, 572–579.

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Document 2.9 Grover Cleveland Addresses Hawaii, December 18, 1893 James Blount delivered his report to President Grover Cleveland in July 1893. Cleveland subsequently ordered the provisional government of Hawaii to disband and return power to Queen Lili’uokalani. He received a flat refusal from Sanford Dole, an American who had advised the Hawaiian rulers prior to orchestrating the 1893 coup. Born in Hawaii to an American missionary family, Dole’s cousin built a fortune raising pineapples in Hawaii. Incensed by Dole’s refusal to surrender power, Cleveland issued the following statement. Rejecting annexation by the United States and repudiating the takeover, Cleveland seemed to support the restoration of the Hawaiian monarchy. But support in the United States was limited.

On Saturday, January 14, 1893, the Queen of Hawaii, who had been contemplating the proclamation of a new constitution, had, in deference to the wishes and remonstrances of her cabinet, renounced the project for the present at least. Taking this relinquished purpose as a basis of action, citizens of Honolulu numbering from fifty to one hundred, mostly resident aliens, met in a private office and selected a so-called committee of safety, composed of thirteen persons, seven of whom were foreign subjects, and consisted of five Americans, one Englishman, and one German. This committee, though its designs were not revealed, had in view nothing less than annexation to the United States, and between Saturday, the 14th, and the following Monday, the 16th of January, though exactly what action was taken may not be clearly disclosed they were certainly in communication with the United States minister. On Monday morning the Queen and her cabinet made a public proclamation, with a notice which was specially served upon the representatives of all foreign governments, that any changes in the constitution would be sought only in the methods provided by that instrument. Nevertheless, at the call and under the auspices of the committee of safety, a mass meeting of citizens was held on that day to protest against the Queen’s alleged illegal and unlawful proceedings and purposes. Even at this meeting the committee of safety continued to disguise their real purpose and contented themselves with procuring the passage of a resolution denouncing the Queen and empowering the committee to devise ways and means “to secure the permanent maintenance of law and order and the protection of life, liberty, and property in Hawaii.” This meeting adjourned between 3 and 4 o’clock in the afternoon. On the same day, and immediately after such adjournment, the committee, unwilling to take further steps without the cooperation of the United States minister, addressed him a note representing that the public safety was menaced and that lives and property were in danger, and concluded as follows: “We are unable to protect ourselves without aid, and therefore pray for the protection of the United States forces.” Whatever may be thought of the other contents of this note, the absolute truth of this latter statement is incontestable. When the note was written and delivered the committee, so far as it appears, had neither a man nor a gun at their command, and after its delivery

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they became so panic-stricken at their position that they sent some of their number to interview the minister and request him not to land the United States forces till the next morning. But he replied that the troops had been ordered and whether the committee were ready or not the landing should take place. And so it happened that on the 16th day of January, 1893, between 4 and 5 o’clock in the afternoon, a detachment of marines from the United States steamer Boston, with two pieces of artillery, landed at Honolulu. The men, upward of 160 in all, were supplied with double cartridge belts filled with ammunition and with haversacks and canteens, and were accompanied by a hospital corps with stretchers and medical supplies. This military demonstration upon the soil of Honolulu was of itself an act of war, unless made either with the consent of the Government of Hawaii or for the bonafide purpose of protecting the imperiled lives and property of citizens of the United States. But there is no pretense of any such consent on the part of the Government of the Queen, which at that time was undisputed and was both the defacto and the de jure Government. In point of fact the existing Government, instead of requesting the presence of an armed force, protested against it. There is as little basis for the pretense that such forces were landed for the security of American life and property. If so, they would have been stationed in the vicinity of such property and so as to protect it, instead of at a distance and so as to command the Hawaiian Government building and palace. Admiral Skerrett, the officer in command of our naval force on the Pacific station, has frankly stated that in his opinion the location of the troops was inadvisable if they were landed for the protection of American citizens, whose residences and places of business, as well as the legation and consulate, were in a distant part of the city; but the location selected was a wise one if the forces were landed for the purpose of supporting the Provisional Government. If any peril to life and property calling for any such martial array had existed, Great Britain and other foreign powers interested would not have been behind the United States in activity to protect their citizens. But they made no sign in that direction. When these armed men were landed the city of Honolulu was in its customary orderly and peaceful condition. There was no symptom of riot or disturbance in any quarter. Men, women, and children were about the streets as usual, and nothing varied the ordinary routine or disturbed the ordinary tranquillity except the landing of the Boston’s marines and their march through the town to the quarters assigned them. Indeed, the fact that after having called for the landing of the United States forces on the plea of danger to life and property the committee of safety themselves requested the minister to postpone action exposed the untruthfulness of their representations of present peril to life and property. The peril they saw was an anticipation growing out of guilty intentions on their part and something which, though not then existing, they knew would certainly follow their attempt to overthrow the Government of the Queen without the aid of the United States forces. Thus it appears that Hawaii was taken possession of by the United States forces without the consent or wish of the Government of the islands, or of anybody else so far as shown except the United States minister. Therefore the military occupation of Honolulu by the United States on the day mentioned was wholly without justification, either as an occupation by consent or as an occupation necessitated by dangers threatening American

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life and property. It must be accounted for in some other way and on some other ground, and its real motive and purpose are neither obscure nor far to seek . . . In this state of things, if the Queen could have dealt with the insurgents alone, her course would have been plain and the result unmistakable. But the United States had allied itself with her enemies, had recognized them as the true Government of Hawaii, and had put her and her adherents in the position of opposition against lawful authority. She knew that she could not withstand the power of the United States, but she believed that she might safely trust to its justice. Accordingly, some hours after the recognition of the Provisional Government by the United States minister, the palace, the barracks, and the police station, with all the military resources of the country, were delivered up by the Queen upon the representation made to her that her cause would thereafter be reviewed at Washington, and while protesting that she surrendered to the superior force of the United States, whose minister had caused United States troops to be landed at Honolulu and declared that he would support the Provisional Government, and that she yielded her authority to prevent collision of armed forces and loss of life, and only until such time as the United States, upon the facts being presented to it, should undo the action of its representative and reinstate her in the authority she claimed as the constitutional sovereign of the Haw’aiian Islands . . . While naturally sympathizing with every effort to establish a republican form of government, it has been the settled policy of the United States to concede to people of foreign countries the same freedom and independence in the management of their domestic affairs that we have always claimed for ourselves, and it has been our practice to recognize revolutionary governments as soon as it became apparent that they were supported by the people . . . Source: A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896–1899), vol. 9, 465–469.

Document 2.10 The Morgan Report, 1894 After the Blount Report issued a stinging rebuke of American actions in Hawaii, the Senate ordered its own investigation by a committee chaired by Sen. Tyler Morgan of Alabama. The result was a massive tome that totaled more than 800 pages when it was republished in 1901. Much of that material consisted of private letters and official reports, all interpreted with a covering report. Indeed, the Morgan Report helped mark the beginning of the official reporting system through which House and Senate committees issued lengthy, detailed accounts of major public events. The Morgan Report refuted the details and, more important, the conclusions of the Blount Report. Where the Blount Report claimed that American citizens had staged a coup with the inappropriate assistance of the U.S. government, the Morgan Report concluded that the United States had behaved appropriately in Hawaii. The report never denied that American citizens and American officials had been involved in an overthrow of the Hawaiian government. Instead, the report claimed that Hawaii’s monarchy was fundamentally corrupt. Meanwhile, an “American” government was already in place in the form of Anglo-American advisers.

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In the numerous documents that accompanied the committee’s findings, the Morgan Report drew the larger point that the United States had both a right and a responsibility to “civilize” the Hawaiian people. In making this point, the Morgan Report reproduced the same claims that Anglo-Americans had long made about Indians who lived on the foreign territory acquired by the United States. Mr. Morgan submitted the following report from the Committee on Foreign Relations: . . . The resolutions include an inquiry only into the intercourse between the two governments, and regard the conduct of the officers of the United States as a matter for domestic consideration in which Hawaii is not concerned, unless it be that their conduct had some unjust and improper influence upon the action of the people or Government of that country in relation to the revolution. The future policy of the two governments as to annexation, or in respect of any other matter, is excluded by the resolutions from the consideration of the committee, and such matters are alluded to only as being incidental to the investigation which was ordered by the Senate. The inquiry as to irregularities that may have occurred in our diplomatic or other intercourse with Hawaii must relate, first, to the conduct of the Government as shown in its official acts and correspondence; and, second, the conduct of its civil and military officers while they were engaged in the discharge of their public duties and functions . . . Hawaii is an American state, and is embraced in the American commercial and military system. This fact has been frequently and firmly stated by our Government, and is the ground on which is rested that peculiar and far-reaching declaration so often and so earnestly made, that the United States will not admit the right of any foreign government to acquire any interest or control in the Hawaiian Islands that is in any way prejudicial or even threatening toward the interests of the United States or her people. This is at least a moral suzerainty over Hawaii. In this attitude of the two Governments, Hawaii must be entitled to demand of the United States an indulgent consideration, if not an active sympathy, when she is endeavoring to accomplish what every other American state has achieved—the release of her people from the odious antirepublican regime which denies to the people the right to govern themselves, and subordinates them to the supposed divine right of a monarch, whose title to such divinity originated in the most slavish conditions of pagan barbarity. The point at which it is alleged that there was a questionable interference by our minister and our Navy with the affairs of Hawaii was the landing of troops from the ship Boston in Honolulu on the 16th day of January, 1893, at 5 o’clock in the afternoon . . . Whatever we may conclude were the real causes of the situation then present in Honolulu, the fact is that there was a complete paralysis of executive government in Hawaii. The action of the Queen in an effort to overturn the constitution of 1887, to which she had sworn obedience and support, had been accepted and treated by a large and powerful body of the people as a violation of her constitutional obligations, revolutionary in its character and purposes and that it amounted to an act of abdication on her part, so far as her powers and the rights of the people under the constitution of 1887 were concerned. This state of opinion and this condition of the executive head of

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the Hawaiian Government neutralized its power to protect American citizens and other foreigners in their treaty rights, and also their rights under the laws of Hawaii . . . It will appear hereafter in this report that there is well-settled authority for the position that at the moment when the Queen made public her decision to absolve herself from her oath to support the constitution of 1887 her abdication was complete, if the people chose so to regard it. That constitution and the Queen’s oath to support it was the only foundation for her regal authority and, when she announced that her oath was annulled in its effect upon her own conscience, she could no longer rightfully hold office under that constitution. In such matters the word of the Queen, once sedately uttered, fixes a condition that is irrevocable unless by the consent of those whose condition or rights would be injuriously affected by its subsequent withdrawal; as in the case of a voluntary abdication in favor of a named successor; or of a pardon granted to person accused or, convicted of crime; or the signature to a legislative act, or declaration of war. The official act of the chief executive of a nation is uniformly regarded as creating a condition or status which can not be altered or revoked at pleasure. Indeed, in every case, the word of the king that works a change in existing conditions is the final act of the king. In the crime of treason and the misprision of treason, the word that is spoken by the culprit, though quickly repented of or recalled, has completed the crime and placed the offender beyond the reach of all mercy except that of the sovereign power. In this instance the sovereign power to pardon or condone the Queen’s offense resided in the people, and they have so far decided and have adhered to the decision that her abdication was complete. The recantation was two days later than the completed crime and was temporary and conditional, and, in the meantime, popular sovereignty had risen to the assertion of its rights, an indignant resentment had aroused the people, and a large body of citizens claiming to represent them had inaugurated a government of the people and for the people. Whether the people opposing the Queen were strengthened in their purpose to accept and act upon this abandonment by the Queen of her obligations to keep her oath to support and obey the constitution by the presence of the troops of the United States, or whether the Queen was dismayed by their presence and was deterred from supporting her criminal act by the employment of her household soldiery, did not alter the fact that she had openly renounced the constitution of 1887 before the troops were landed or any preparation was made or any order was issued to land them, and the people were preparing to substitute the monarchy, which was still existing in the constitution, by a ruler of their own choice before any troops left the Boston. Whether the people would permit the restoration of the Queen, or whether they would constitute a new executive head of the Government of Hawaii, was a matter then undetermined, and as to that the Government of the United States had but one concern, and that was that the interregnum should be ended, the executive head of the Government should be supplied, and the laws of Hawaii and the treaty rights of American citizens should have full effect, peacefully, in the protection of their rights and interests. When the Queen found that her Government was opposed by a strong body of the people she did not attempt to reassemble the Legislature, but left the public safety in charge of a committee of thirteen men, organized by those who were endeavoring to

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preserve the peace and to restore the Government to its full constitutional powers by choosing an executive head. This condition of things continued from Saturday until the succeeding Tuesday, during all of which time the citizens of the United States residing in Honolulu had no protection of law, except such as was guarantied to them by the presence of the Boston in the bay of Honolulu, or the moral influence of the American legation and consulate. When the Kamehameha dynasty ended, the monarchy in Hawaii was doomed to a necessary dissolution. The five kings of that family, assisted by their premiers, who were Kanaka women, and by such missionaries as Judd, Bingham, Chamberlain, Coan, Goodrich, and Damon maintained the progress of civilization and prosperity, but when Kalakaua was elected king, the most surprising and disgraceful corruptions infected the Government. Without detailing in this report the constant decline from bad to worse, which the evidence discloses, without contradiction or explanation, when Liliuokalani was enthroned the monarchy was a mere shell and was in condition to crumble on the slightest touch of firm opposition. Under her brief rule, it was kept alive by the care and forbearing tolerance of the conservative white people, who owned $50,000,000 of the property in Hawaii, until they saw that the Queen and her party had determined to grasp absolute power and destroy the constitution and the rights of the white people. When they were compelled to act in self-defense the monarchy disappeared. It required nothing but the determined action of what was called the missionary party to prostrate the monarchy, and that action had been taken before the troops from the Boston landed. There was then no executive head of the Government of Hawaii; it had perished. In landing the troops from the Boston there was no demonstration of actual hostilities, and their conduct was as quiet and as respectful as it had been on many previous occasions when they were landed for the purpose of drill and practice. In passing the palace on their way to the point at which they were halted, the Queen appeared upon the balcony and the troops respectfully saluted her by presenting arms and dipping the flag, and made no demonstration of any hostile intent. Her attitude at that time was that of helplessness, because she found no active or courageous support in her isolated position, which was self-imposed and was regretted by few of her former subjects. In this condition of Hawaii the laws for the protection of life and property were, in fact, suspended so far as the executive power was concerned, and the citizens of the United States in Honolulu and all the islands, and their property rights, were virtually outlawed. The citizens of Honolulu were not held amenable to the civil authorities, but were treated by the Queen, as well as by the people, as if the country was in a state of war. A policeman was shot down on the streets by a person who was conducting a wagon loaded with arms to the place of rendezvous where the people had assembled, and no action was taken for the purpose of arresting or putting on trial the man who did the shooting. In a country where there is no power of the law to protect the citizens of the United States there can be no law of nations nor any rule of comity that can rightfully prevent our flag from giving shelter to them under the protection of our arms, and this without

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reference to any distress it may give to the Queen who generated the confusion, or any advantage it might give to the people who are disputing her right to resume or to hold her regal powers. In every country where there is no effective chief executive authority, whether it is a newly-discovered island where only savage government prevails, or one where the government is paralyzed by internal feuds, it is the right, claimed and exercised by all civilized nations, to enter such a country with sovereign authority to assert and protect the rights of its citizens and their property, and to remain there without the invitation of anybody until civil government shall have been established that is adequate, in a satisfactory sense, for their protection. The committee agree that such was the condition of the Hawaiian Government at the time that the troops were landed in Honolulu from the steam warship Boston; that there was then an interregnum in Hawaii as respects the executive office; that there was no executive power to enforce the laws of Hawaii, and that it was the right of the United States to land troops upon those islands at any place where it was necessary in the opinion of our minister to protect our citizens. Source: Compilation of Reports of Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 1789–1901 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901), 363–368.

Document 2.11 The Queen of Hawaii Criticizes the American Empire, 1898 Queen Lili’uokalani ascended to the Hawaiian throne in 1891 following the death of her brother, King Kala–kaua. In the Blount and Morgan reports, the United States investigated the complicity of American citizens and federal forces. In his December 1893 statement, President Grover Cleveland renounced the coup. Yet Americans remained in power. In 1895, Lili’uokalani attempted unsuccessfully to depose the government created by the Hawaiian constitution of 1894. She was forced to abdicate, and the Hawaiian monarchy was eliminated. In 1898, Lili’uokalani published Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. In it, she presented not only a scathing critique of events in Hawaii, but an astute analysis of the collusion that had occurred between American business interests and the U.S. government. In 1898, the United States annexed Hawaii, creating a territorial government in 1900 and appointing coup leader Sanford Dole as the first territorial governor. A gifted musician, Lili’uokalani was a prolific composer. One of her songs, “Aloha ‘Oe,” written in 1878, eventually became the unofficial anthem of Hawaii. Lili’uokalani also continued to protest the American annexation of Hawaii, seeking both political power for native Hawaiians and financial reimbursement for herself. She died in 1917.

“The Bayonet Constitution” For many years our sovereigns had welcomed the advice of, and given full representations in their government and councils to, American residents who had cast in their lot with

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our people, and established industries on the Islands. As they became wealthy, and acquired titles to lands through the simplicity of our people and their ignorance of values and of the new land laws, their greed and their love of power proportionately increased; and schemes for aggrandizing themselves still further, or for avoiding the obligations which they had incurred to us, began to occupy their minds. So the mercantile element, as embodied in the Chamber of Commerce, the sugar planters, and the proprietors of the “missionary” stores, formed a distinct political party, called the “down-town” party, whose purpose was to minimize or entirely subvert other interests, and especially the prerogatives of the crown, which, based upon ancient custom and the authority of the island chiefs, were the sole guaranty of our nationality. Although settled among us, and drawing their wealth from our resources, they were alien to us in their customs and ideas respecting government, and desired above all things the extension of their power, and to carry out their own special plans of advancement, and to secure their own personal benefit. It may be true that they really believed us unfit to be trusted to administer the growing wealth of the Islands in a safe and proper way. But if we manifested any incompetency, it was in not foreseeing that they would be bound by no obligations, by honor, or by oath of allegiance, should an opportunity arise for seizing our country, and bringing it under the authority of the United States. Kalakaua valued the commercial and industrial prosperity of his kingdom highly. He sought honestly to secure it for every class of people, alien or native, in his dominions, making it second only to the advancement of morals and education. If he believed in the divine right of kings, and the distinctions of hereditary nobility, it was not alone from the prejudices of birth and native custom, but because he was able to perceive that even the most enlightened nations of the earth have not as yet been able to replace them with a ruling class equally able, patriotic, or disinterested. I say this with all reverence for the form of government and the social order existing in the United States, whose workings have, for more than a century, excited the interest of the world . . . For years the “missionary party” had, by means of controlling the cabinets appointed by the king, kept itself in power. Its leaders were constantly intriguing to make the ministry their tool, or to have in its organization a power for carrying out their own special plans, and securing their own personal benefit. And now, without any provocation on the part of the king, having matured their plans in secret, the men of foreign birth rose one day en masse, called a public meeting, and forced the king, without any appeal to the suffrages of the people, to sign a constitution of their own preparation, a document which deprived the sovereign of all power, made him a mere tool in their hands, and practically took away the franchise from the Hawaiian race. This constitution was never in any way ratified, either by the people, or by their representatives, even after violence had procured the king’s signature to it. Contrary entirely to the intent of the prior constitution drawn by a Hawaiian monarch (under which for twenty-three years the nation had been conducted to prosperity), this draft of 1887 took all power from the ruler, and meant that from that day the “missionary party” took the law into its own hands . . . It has been known ever since that day as “The Bayonet Constitution,” and the name is well chosen; for the cruel treatment received by the king from the military companies,

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which had been organized by his enemies under other pretences, but really to give them the power of coercion, was the chief measure used to enforce his submission . . . [In this section, Lili’uokalani shifts her discussion from the Bayonet Constitution to the 1893 coup.] At this time, nearly a month after the revolution and change of constitution, everything seemed to settle down into quiet again; but appearances are deceptive, and “the devil never sleeps.” So, having achieved so much of their desires, the conspirators worked day and night to keep the city in a ferment. Plans were made, and committees were formed; the extreme views of some of the members caused others, more scrupulous, to retire, and to say that they could not willingly consent to be tools in the hands of wicked men, instruments of evil to their fellows. So these committees were organized over and over again, without fixed purpose, without stability, until finally all other elements had withdrawn from connection with the conspirators, save a small number of agitators whose sole rallying-point was annexation to the United States . . . . . . And yet I cannot help calling attention to the difference in the treatment accorded to the two parties, and their reference to the United States. Three days were given to Mr. Dole to consider Mr. Cleveland’s decision, as announced by Mr. Willis. The documents were placed in his hands to study over; and were he disposed he could call together his associates, compare their opinions, and then return a carefully written and diplomatic answer. This he did, under the date of the 23rd of December, at midnight, when he himself delivered his response to Mr. Willis. In contrast, I, a lone woman, was sent an order to go to the residence of a gentleman until that moment a stranger to me. Without the least warning of the nature of the communication to be made to me, and without a moment’s deliberation or consultation with friendly counsellors, I was urged to give my opinion as to matters which in any government should be decided only after careful consideration; and then my first immature impressions of the claims of my people and of justice were telegraphed broadcast, while my official and subsequent proclamation of the entire amnesty was hardly noticed. And yet, all this time, by Mr. Willis’s own words, I was recognized by the United States as the constitutional sovereign of the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian people almost worship the name of President Cleveland; for he has tried to do what was right, and it was only because he was not supported by Congress that his efforts were not successful. Mr. Dole’s answer, as could have been predicted by any who know the men composing the missionary party, was a refusal to comply with the request of President Cleveland. But, none the less, my grateful people will always remember that, in his message to Congress and in his official acts, Mr. Cleveland showed the greatest anxiety to do that which was just, and that which was for the honor of the nation over which he had been elected chief ruler. He has always had from me the utmost respect and esteem . . . [In this section, Lili’uokalani discusses Hawaiian autonomy.]

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It has been suggested to me that the American general reader is not well informed regarding the social and political conditions which have come about in the Sandwich Islands, and that it would be well here to give some expression to my own observation of them. Space will only permit, however, a mere outline. It has been said that the Hawaiian people under the rule of the chiefs were most degraded, that under the monarchy their condition greatly improved, but that the native government in any form had at last become intolerable to the more enlightened part of the community. This statement has been substantially repeated recently by certain New England and Hawaiian “statesmen” in speeches made at the Home Market Club in Boston. I shall not examine it in detail; but it may serve as a text for the few remarks I feel called upon to make from my own—and that is to say, the native Hawaiian—standpoint. I shall not claim that in the days of Captain Cook our people were civilized. I shall not claim anything more for their progress in civilization and Christian morality than has been already attested by missionary writers. Perhaps I may safely claim even less, admitting the criticism of some intelligent visitors who were not missionaries,—that the habits and prejudices of New England Puritanism were not well adapted to the genius of a tropical people, nor capable of being thoroughly ingrafted upon them. But Christianity in substance they have accepted; and I know of no people who have developed a tenderer Christian conscience, or who have shown themselves more ready to obey its behests. Nor has any people known to history shown a greater reverence and love for their Christian teachers, or filled the measure of a grateful return more overflowingly. And where else in the world’s history is it written that a savage people, pagan for ages, with fixed hereditary customs and beliefs, have made equal progress in civilization and Christianity in the same space of time? And what people has ever been subjected during such an evolution to such a flood of external demoralizing influences? . . . Perhaps there is a kind of right, depending upon the precedents of all ages, and known as the “Right of Conquest,” under which robbers and marauders may establish themselves in possession of whatsoever they are strong enough to ravish from their fellows. I will not pretend to decide how far civilization and Christian enlightenment have outlawed it. But we have known for many years that our Island monarchy has relied upon the protection always extended to us by the policy and the assured friendship of the great American republic. If we have nourished in our bosom those who have sought our ruin, it has been because they were of the people whom we believed to be our dearest friends and allies. If we did not by force resist their final outrage, it was because we could not do so without striking at the military force of the United States. Whatever constraint the executive of this great country may be under to recognize the present government at Honolulu has been forced upon it by no act of ours, but by the unlawful acts of its own agents. Attempts to repudiate those acts are vain. The conspirators, having actually gained possession of the machinery of government, and the recognition of foreign ministers, refused to surrender their conquest. So it happens that, overawed by the power of the United States to the extent that they can neither themselves throw off the usurpers, nor obtain assistance from other friendly

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states, the people of the Islands have no voice in determining their future, but are virtually relegated to the condition of the aborigines of the American continent. It is not for me to consider this matter from the American point of view; although the pending question of annexation involves nothing less than a departure from the established policy of that country, and an ominous change in its foreign relations. It is enough that I am able to say, and with absolute authority, that the native people of Hawaii are entirely faithful to their own chiefs, and are deeply attached to their own customs and mode of government; that they either do not understand, or bitterly oppose, the scheme of annexation. As a native Hawaiian, reared and educated in close intimacy with the present rulers of the Islands and their families, with exceptional opportunities for studying both native and foreign character, it is easy for me to detect the purpose of each line and word in the annexation treaty, and even to distinguish the man originating each portion of it . . . It has been shown that in Hawaii there is an alien element composed of men of energy and determination, well able to carry through what they undertake, but not scrupulous respecting their methods. They doubtless control all the resources and influence of the present ruling power in Honolulu, and will employ them tirelessly in the future, as they have in the past, to secure their ends. This annexationist party might prove to be a dangerous accession even to American politics, both on account of natural abilities, and because of the training of an autocratic life from earliest youth. Many of these men are anything but ideal citizens for a democracy. That custom of freely serving each other without stipulation or reward which exists as a very nature among our people has been even exaggerated in our hospitality to our teachers and advisers. Their children, and the associates they have drawn to themselves, are accustomed to it. They have always been treated with distinction. They would hardly know how to submit to the contradictions, disappointments, and discourtesies of a purely emulative society. It would remain necessary for them to rule in Hawaii, even if the American flag floated over them. And if they found they could be successfully opposed, would they seek no remedy? Where would men, already proved capable of outwitting the conservatism of the United States and defeating its strongest traditions, capable of changing its colonial and foreign policy at a single coup, stop in their schemes? Perhaps I may even venture here upon a final word respecting the American advocates of this annexation of Hawaii. I observe that they have pretty successfully striven to make it a party matter. It is chiefly Republican statesmen and politicians who favor it. But is it really a matter of party interest? Is the American Republic of States to degenerate, and become a colonizer and a land-grabber? And is this prospect satisfactory to a people who rely upon self-government for their liberties, and whose guaranty of liberty and autonomy to the whole western hemisphere, the grand Monroe doctrine, appealing to the respect and the sense of justice of the masses of every nation on earth, has made any attack upon it practically impossible to the statesmen and rulers of armed empires? There is little question but that the United States could become a successful rival of the European nations in the race for conquest, and could create a vast military and naval power, if such is its

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ambition. But is such an ambition laudable? Is such a departure from its established principles patriotic or politic? Here, at least for the present, I rest my pen. During my stay in the capital, I suppose I must have met, by name and by card, at least five thousand callers. From most of these, by word, by grasp of hand, or at least by expression of countenance, I have received a sympathy and encouragement of which I cannot write fully. Let it be understood that I have not failed to notice it, and to be not only flattered by its universality, but further very grateful that I have had the opportunity to know the real American people, quite distinct from those who have assumed this honored name when it suited their selfish ends. But for the Hawaiian people, for the forty thousand of my own race and blood, descendants of those who welcomed the devoted and pious missionaries of seventy years ago,—for them has this mission of mine accomplished anything? Oh, honest Americans, as Christians hear me for my down-trodden people! Their form of government is as dear to them as yours is precious to you. Quite as warmly as you love your country, so they love theirs. With all your goodly possessions, covering a territory so immense that there yet remain parts unexplored, possessing islands that, although near at hand, had to be neutral ground in time of war, do not covet the little vineyard of Naboth’s, so far from your shores, lest the punishment of Ahab fall upon you, if not in your day, in that of your children, for “be not deceived, God is not mocked.” The people to whom your fathers told of the living God, and taught to call “Father,” and whom the sons now seek to despoil and destroy, are crying aloud to Him in their time of trouble; and He will keep His promise, and will listen to the voices of His Hawaiian children lamenting for their homes. It is for them that I would give the last drop of my blood; it is for them that I would spend, nay, am spending, everything belonging to me. Will it be in vain? It is for the American people and their representatives in Congress to answer these questions. As they deal with me and my people, kindly, generously, and justly, so may the Great Ruler of all nations deal with the grand and glorious nation of the United States of America. Source: Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliuokalani (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1898), 177–362.

Document 2.12 The Treaty of Paris, 1898 Just seven months after the United States declared war on Spain, American and Spanish negotiators met in Paris to conclude a peace treaty. The primary goals of the document were to end hostilities, cede Spanish colonial possessions to the United States, and establish provisions for subsequent trade, especially Spanish trading rights in its older colonies. The following excerpt from the treaty includes provisions governing the status of residents in Spanish colonies. Unlike the Louisiana Purchase or the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, this document did not extend U.S. citizenship to any of the residents of the Spanish possessions. Instead, the document established federal sovereignty over those residents and indicated specific legal protections that, if they were consistent with citizenship in general or with the provisions of earlier treaties in particular, nonetheless stopped short of citizenship.

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Treaty of Peace Between the United States and Spain; December 10, 1898 The United States of America and Her Majesty the Queen Regent of Spain, in the name of her August Son Don Alfonso XIII, desiring to end the state of war now existing between the two countries, have for that purpose appointed as Plenipotentiaries: The President of the United States, William R. Day, Cushman K. Davis, William P. Frye, George Gray, and Whitelaw Reid, citizens of the United States; and Her Majesty the Queen Regent of Spain, Don Eugenio Montero Rios, President of the Senate, Don Buenaventura de Abarzuza, Senator of the Kingdom and ex-Minister of the Crown; Don Jose de Garnica, Deputy of the Cortes and Associate Justice of the Supreme Court; Don Wenceslao Ramirez de Villa-Urrutia, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Brussels, and Don Rafael Cerero, General of Division; Who, having assembled in Paris, and having exchanged their full powers, which were found to be in due and proper form, have, after discussion of the matters before them, agreed upon the following articles:

Article I Spain relinquishes all claim of sovereignty over and title to Cuba. And as the island is, upon its evacuation by Spain, to be occupied by the United States, the United States will, so long as such occupation shall last, assume and discharge the obligations that may under international law result from the fact of its occupation, for the protection of life and property.

Article II Spain cedes to the United States the island of Porto Rico and other islands now under Spanish sovereignty in the West Indies, and the island of Guam in the Marianas or Ladrones.

Article III Spain cedes to the United States the archipelago known as the Philippine Islands, and comprehending the islands lying within the following line: A line running from west to east along or near the twentieth parallel of north latitude, and through the middle of the navigable channel of Bachi, from the one hundred and eighteenth (118th) to the one hundred and twenty-seventh (127th) degree meridian of longitude east of Greenwich, thence along the one hundred and twenty seventh (127th) degree meridian of longitude east of Greenwich to the parallel of four degrees and forty five minutes (4° 45’) north latitude, thence along the parallel of four degrees and forty five minutes (4° 45’) north latitude to its intersection with the meridian of longitude one hundred and nineteen degrees

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and thirty five minutes (119° 35’) east of Greenwich, thence along the meridian of longitude one hundred and nineteen degrees and thirty five minutes (119° 35’) east of Greenwich to the parallel of latitude seven degrees and forty minutes (7° 40’) north, thence along the parallel of latitude of seven degrees and forty minutes (7° 40’) north to its intersection with the one hundred and sixteenth (116th) degree meridian of longitude east of Greenwich, thence by a direct line to the intersection of the tenth (10th) degree parallel of north latitude with the one hundred and eighteenth (118th) degree meridian of longitude east of Greenwich, and thence along the one hundred and eighteenth (118th) degree meridian of longitude east of Greenwich to the point of beginning. The United States will pay to Spain the sum of twenty million dollars ($20,000,000) within three months after the exchange of the ratifications of the present treaty.

Article IV The United States will, for the term of ten years from the date of the exchange of the ratifications of the present treaty, admit Spanish ships and merchandise to the ports of the Philippine Islands on the same terms as ships and merchandise of the United States . . .

Article IX Spanish subjects, natives of the Peninsula, residing in the territory over which Spain by the present treaty relinquishes or cedes her sovereignty, may remain in such territory or may remove therefrom, retaining in either event all their rights of property, including the right to sell or dispose of such property or of its proceeds; and they shall also have the right to carry on their industry, commerce and professions, being subject in respect thereof to such laws as are applicable to other foreigners. In case they remain in the territory they may preserve their allegiance to the Crown of Spain by making, before a court of record, within a year from the date of the exchange of ratifications of this treaty, a declaration of their decision to preserve such allegiance; in default of which declaration they shall be held to have renounced it and to have adopted the nationality of the territory in which they may reside. The civil rights and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall be determined by the Congress.

Article X The inhabitants of the territories over which Spain relinquishes or cedes her sovereignty shall be secured in the free exercise of their religion.

Article XI The Spaniards residing in the territories over which Spain by this treaty cedes or relinquishes her sovereignty shall be subject in matters civil as well as criminal to the jurisdiction of the courts of the country wherein they reside, pursuant to the ordinary laws governing the same; and they shall have the right to appear before such courts, and to pursue the same course as citizens of the country to which the courts belong . . .

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Article XIII The rights of property secured by copyrights and patents acquired by Spaniards in the Island of Cuba and in Porto Rico, the Philippines and other ceded territories, at the time of the exchange of the ratifications of this treaty, shall continue to be respected. Spanish scientific, literary and artistic works, not subversive of public order in the territories in question, shall continue to be admitted free of duty into such territories, for the period of ten years, to be reckoned from the date of the exchange of the ratifications of this treaty.

Article XIV Spain will have the power to establish consular officers in the ports and places of the territories, the sovereignty over which has been either relinquished or ceded by the present treaty . . . In faith whereof, we, the respective Plenipotentiaries, have signed this treaty and have hereunto affixed our seals. Done in duplicate at Paris, the tenth day of December, in the year of Our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight. Source: Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949, ed. Charles I. Bevans (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968), vol. 11, Philippines– United Arab Republic, 615–621.

Document 2.13 Emilio Aguinaldo, Empire, and Resistance in the Philippines, 1899 Emilio Aguinaldo was a classic product of empire and revolution. Born to a native Filipino family in 1869, he exploited the limited opportunities available to non-Europeans in the colonial system. In 1895, he joined the Philippine rebellion and soon emerged as a leading political and military figure. He signed the treaty of Biak-na-Bato, through which Spain accepted a path to eventual Philippine independence, but he continued to lead an organized resistance against Spanish rule. When the United States declared war on Spain in 1898, American emissaries offered tacit support to Aguinaldo. Aguinaldo in turn exploited the Spanish-American War to secure his own goals: he used the war to help orchestrate a formal declaration of independence in June 1898 and establish himself as president. When the United States refused to acknowledge Philippine independence and open warfare erupted between Philippine and American forces, Aguinaldo issued the following statement in February 1899. The document itself is part of a much longer report (165 pages) by Maj. Gen. E. S. Otis, who commanded U.S. troops in the Philippines and served as military governor for the United States. Aguinaldo’s statement also constituted something new in the American experience. He emerged as the first in a series of revolutionary leaders to decry American governance as little different from European colonialism. And like Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii, he charged the federal government with violating its own commitment to autonomy and self-government.

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General Order To The Philippine Army Nine o’clock p.m., this date, I received from Caloocan station a message communicated to me that the American forces, without prior notification or any just motive, attacked our camp at San Juan del Monte and our forces garrisoning the blockhouses around the outskirts of Manila, causing losses among our soldiers, who in view of this unexpected aggression and of the decided attack of the aggressors, were obliged to defend themselves until the firing became general all along the line. No one can deplore more than I this rupture of hostilities. I have a clear conscience that I have endeavored to avoid it at all costs, using all my efforts to preserve friendship with the army of occupation, even at the cost of not a few humiliations and many sacrificed rights. But it is my unavoidable duty to maintain the integrity of the national honor and that of the army so unjustly attacked by those who, posing as our friends and liberators, attempted to dominate us in place of the Spaniards, as is shown by the grievances enumerated in my manifest of January 8 last; such as the continued outrages and violent exactions committed against the people of Manila, the useless conferences, and all my frustrated efforts in favor of peace and concord. Summoned by this unexpected provocation, urged by the duties imposed upon me by honor and patriotism and for the defense of the nation intrusted to me, calling on God as a witness of my good faith and the uprightness of my intentions— I order and command: 1. Peace and friendly relations between the Philippine forces and the American forces of occupation are broken, and the latter will be treated as enemies, with the limits prescribed by the laws of war. 2. American soldiers who may be captured by the Philippine forces will be treated as prisoners of war. 3. This proclamation shall be communicated to the accredited consuls of Manila, and to congress, in order that it may accord the suspension of the constitutional guaranties and the resulting declaration of war. Given at Malolos February 4, 1899. Emilio Aguinaldo, General-in-Chief.

To The Philippine People By my proclamation of yesterday I have published the outbreak of hostilities between the Philippine forces and the American forces of occupation in Manila, unjustly and unexpectedly provoked by the latter. In my manifest of January 8 last I published the grievances suffered by the Philippine forces at the hands of the army of occupation. The constant outrages and taunts, which have caused the misery of the people of Manila, and, finally, the useless conferences and the contempt shown the Philippine government prove the premeditated transgression of justice and liberty.

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I know that war has always produced great losses; I know that the Philippine people have not yet recovered from past losses and are not in the condition to endure others. But I also know by experience how bitter is slavery, and by experience I know that we should sacrifice all on the altar of our honor and of the national integrity so unjustly attacked. I have tried to avoid, as far as it has been possible for me to do so, armed conflict, in my endeavors to assure our independence by pacific means and to avoid more costly sacrifices. But all my efforts have been useless against the measureless pride of the American Government and of its representatives in these islands, who have treated me as a rebel because I defend the sacred interests of my country and do not make myself an instrument of their dastardly intentions. Past campaigns will have convinced yon that the people are strong when they wish to be so. Without arms we have driven from our beloved country our ancient masters, and without arms we can repulse the foreign invasion as long as we wish to do so. Providence always has means in reserve and prompt help for the weak in order that they may not be annihilated by the strong; that justice may be done and humanity progress. Be not discouraged. Our independence has been watered by the generous blood of our martyrs. Blood which may be shed in the future will strengthen it. Nature has never despised generous sacrifices. But remember that in order that our efforts may not be wasted, that our vows may be listened to, that our ends may be gained, it is indispensable that we adjust our actions to the rules of law and of right, learning to triumph over our enemies and to conquer our own evil passions. Emilio Aguinaldo, President of the Philippine Republic. Source: Report of Major-General E. S. Otis, U.S. Volunteers, on Military Operations and Civil Affairs in the Philippine Islands (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899), 85–86.

Document 2.14 Illustrating Territorial Acquisition, 1899 The cartoon “School Begins” from Puck, a nineteenth-century magazine, satirizes the idea of the United States “instructing” nonwhites in the rules of civilization. The teacher represents the United States, with Cuba, Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico sitting in the front row wearing expressions of fear and resentment. An American Indian is forced into the back of the room, an African American washes the windows, and a Chinese child is excluded altogether. Meanwhile, the white students, who are the states of the Union, study dutifully at their desks. The cartoon illustrates the intersection of race and government. Publications such as Puck and other newspapers and magazines played an increasingly important role in American public life by the 1880s. Competition was fierce for readership, and even legitimate publications resorted to sensationalistic yellow journalism. Indeed, many historians have blamed the Spanish-American War on newspaper stories that sensationalized Spanish depredations against American citizens.

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Source: Puck, January 25, 1899, 8–9.

Document 2.15 Imperialism and Manifest Destiny in Harper’s Weekly, 1899 The following article from Harper’s Weekly was among the more perceptive examples of American journalism during the Spanish-American War, but it was hardly unique. Americans were quick to recognize that the acquiring of noncontiguous jurisdictions to secure commercial expansion—rather than contiguous territories for white settlement—constituted a profound change in the way they conceived of themselves and their role in the world. At the same time, however, many Americans recognized direct connections to the territorial expansion of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The question was how to interpret these connections. The author of this article came from a family that had long considered America’s role in the world. Charles Francis Adams Jr. (1835–1915) was the grandson of one president (John Quincy Adams) and the great-grandson of another (John Adams). His own father had served as a member of Congress and as minister to Great Britain. Charles Adams Jr. became a general during the Civil War and served as president of the Union Pacific Railroad, all the while joining in the family tradition of writing for the public. In this article from Harper’s, Adams not only addressed imperialism but demonstrated the habit of New England intellectuals to situate their own region at the center of American history. It was exactly this sort of worldview that Frederick Jackson Turner rejected in his vision of the frontier. At the same time, however, both Adams and Turner imagined that the United States could create a model of democracy for the rest of the world. The question was whether the United States could extend that model through the acquisition of a global empire.

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Addressing ourselves, therefore, to the subject in hand, the question at once suggests itself, what year in recent times has been in a large way more noteworthy and impressive, when looked at from the purely historical point of view, than this year of which we are now observing the close? . . . So far as I personally am concerned, a matter needless to say of very trifling consequence, this verdict was rendered a year ago . . . Speaking largely, but still with all necessary historical accuracy, America has been peopled, and its development, up to the present time, worked out through two great stocks of the European family, the Spanish-speaking stock, and the English-speaking stock. In their development these two have pursued lines, clearly marked, but curiously divergent. Leaving the Spanish-speaking branch out of the discussion, as unnecessary to it, it may without exaggeration be said of the English-speaking branch that, from the beginning down to this year now ending, its development has been one long protest against, and divergence from, Old World methods and ideals. In the case of those descended from the Forefathers,—as we always designate the Plymouth colony,—this has been most distinctly marked, ethnically, politically, industrially. America was the sphere where the European, as a colonist, a settler, first came on a large scale in contact with another race. Heretofore, in the Old World, when one stock had overrun another,—and history presented many examples of it,—the invading stock, after subduing, and to a great extent driving out, the stock which had preceded in the occupancy of a region, settled gradually down into a common possession, and, in the slow process of years, an amalgamation of stocks, more or less complete, took place. In America, with the Anglo-Saxon, and especially those of the New England type, this was not the case . . . The next cardinal principle in our policy as a race—that instinctive policy I have already referred to as divergent from Old World methods and ideals—was most clearly enunciated by Washington in his Farewell Address, that “the great rule for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible;” that it was “unwise in us to implicate ourselves by artificial ties in the ordinary vicissitudes of [Old World] policies, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her friendships or enmities. Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. . . . Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporar y alliances for extraordinary emergencies.” Accepting this as firm ground from which to act, we afterwards put forth what is known as the Monroe Doctrine . . . On these principles of government and of foreign policy we have as a people now acted for more than seventy years . . . Ethnically, we have avowed our desire to have as little contact as possible with less developed races, lamenting the presence of the African, and severely excluding the Asiatic. These facts, whether we as individuals and citizens wholly approve—or do not approve at all—of the course pursued and the results reached, admit

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of no dispute. Neither can it be denied that our attitude, whether it in all respects commanded the respect of foreign nations, or failed to command it, was accepted, and has prevailed . . . Such were our standing, our traditional policy, and our record at the beginning of the year now ending. No proposition advanced admits, it is believed, of dispute historically. Into the events of the year 1898 it is not necessary to enter in any detail. They are in the minds of all. It is sufficient to say that the primary object for which we entered upon the late war with Spain was to bring to an end the long and altogether bad record of Spanish rule in America. In taking the steps deemed necessary to effect this result, Congress went out of its way, and publicly and formally put upon record its disclaimer of any intention to enter upon a war of conquest, asserting its determination, when Spanish domination was ended, to leave the government of Cuba, and presumably of any other islands similarly acquired, to the people thereof. As an incident to our naval operations on the Pacific, the island of Hawaii was then annexed to the United States as an extra-territorial possession, or coaling station, this being effected by a joint resolution of the two Houses of Congress, under the precedent of 1845 established in the case of Texas,—a method of procedure the constitutionality of which was at the time formally called in question by the State of Massachusetts, and against which Mr. Webster made vigorous protest in the Senate. In thus possessing ourselves of Hawaii, the consent of the native inhabitants was not considered necessary; we dealt wholly with an oligarchical de facto government, representing the foreign element, mainly American, there resident. Shortly after the acquisition of Hawaii, we, as the result of brilliant naval operations and successes, acquired possession of the harbor of Manila, in the Philippine archipelago, and finally the city and some adjacent territory were surrendered to us. A treaty was then negotiated, the power of Spain being completely broken, under which she abandoned all claims of sovereignty, not only over the island of Cuba, the original cause of war, but over various other islands in the Philippine, as well as in the West Indian archipelagoes. These islands, in all said to be some 1,200 to 1,500 in number, are moreover not only inhabited by both natives and foreigners to the estimated number of ten to twelve million of souls, but they contain large cities and communities speaking different tongues, living under other laws, and having customs, manners, and traditions wholly unlike our own, and which, in the case of the Philippines, do not admit of assimilation. Situated in the tropics also, they cannot gradually become colonized by Americans, with or without the disappearance of the native population. The American can only go there for temporary residence. A wholly new problem was thus suddenly presented to the people of the United States. On the one hand, it is asserted that, by destroying Spanish government in these islands, the United States has assumed responsibility for them, both to the inhabitants and to the world. This is a moral obligation. On the other hand, trade and commercial inducements are held out which would lead us to treat these islands simply as a commencement—the first installment—in a system of unlimited extra-territorial dependencies and imperial expansion. With these responsibilities and obligations we here this evening have nothing to do, any more than we have to do with the expediency or probable results of the policy of colonial expansion, when once fairly adopted and finally entered upon. These hereafter

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will be, but are not yet, historical questions; and we are merely historical inquirers. We, therefore, no matter what others may do, must try to confine ourselves to our own proper business and functions. My purpose, therefore, is not to argue for or against what is now proposed, but simply to test historically some of the arguments I have heard most commonly advanced in favor of the proposed policy of expansion, and thus see to what they apparently lead in the sequence of human, and more especially of American, events. Do they indicate an historic continuity? Or do they result in what is geologically known as a “fault,”—a movement, as the result of force, through which a stratum, once continuous, becomes disconnected? In the first place, then, as respects the inhabitants of the vastly greater number of the dependencies already acquired, and, under the policy of imperialistic expansion, hereafter to be acquired. It is argued that we, as a people at once dominant and Christian, are under an obligation to avail ourselves of the opportunity the Almighty, in his infinite wisdom, has thrust upon us—some say the plain call he has uttered to us,— to go forth and impart to the barbarian and the heathen the blessings of liberty and the Bible. A mission is proposed upon us . . . So far as the American is concerned, as I have already pointed out, the historic precedents are not encouraging. Whatever his theories, ethnical, political, or religious, his practice has been as pronounced as it was masterful. From the earliest days at Wessagusset and in the Pequot war, down to the very last election held in North Carolina, from 1623 to 1898, the knife and the shotgun have been far more potent and active instruments in his dealings with the inferior races than the code of liberty or the output of the Bible Society. The record speaks for itself . . . It remains to consider the Asiatic. The racial antipathy of the American towards him has been more intense than towards any other species of the human race. This, as an historical fact, has been recently imbedded in our statute-book, having previously been illustrated in a series of outrages and massacres, with the sickening details of some of which it was at one time my misfortune to be officially familiar . . . Next as regards our fundamental principles of equality of human rights, and the consent of the governed as the only just basis of all government. The presence of the inferior races on our own soil, and our new problems connected with them in our dependencies, have led to much questioning of the correctness of those principles, which, for its outspoken frankness, at least, is greatly to be commended. It is argued that these, as principles, in the light of modern knowledge and conditions, are of doubtful general truth and limited application. True, when confined and carefully applied to citizens of the same blood and nationality; questionable, when applied to human beings of different race in one nationality; manifestly false, in the case of races less developed, and in other, especially tropical, countries. As fundamental principles, it is admitted, they were excellent for a young people struggling into recognition and limiting its attention narrowly to what only concerned itself; but have we not manifestly outgrown them, now that we ourselves have developed into a great World Power? For such there was and necessarily always will be, as between the superior and the inferior races, a manifest common sense foundation in caste, and in the rule of might when it presents itself in the form of what we are pleased to call Manifest Destiny. As to government being conditioned on the consent of the governed, it is obviously the bounden duty of the

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superior race to hold the inferior race in peaceful tutelage, and protect it against itself; and, furthermore, when it comes to deciding the momentous question of what races are superior and what inferior, what dominant and what subject, that is of necessity a question to be settled between the superior race and its own conscience; and one in regard to the correct settlement of which it indicates a tendency at once unpatriotic and “pessimistic,” to assume that America could by any chance decide otherwise than correctly. Upon that score we must put implicit confidence in the sound instincts and Christian spirit of the dominant, that is, the stronger race . . . What these advocates of Imperialism say is unquestionably true: The political methods now in vogue in American cities are not adapted to the government of dependencies. The very word “Imperial” is, indeed, borrowed from the Old World . . . Thus, curiously enough, whichever way we turn and however we regard it, at the close of more than a century of independent existence we find ourselves, historically speaking, involved in a mesh of contradictions with our past. Under a sense of obligation, impelled by circumstances, perhaps to a degree influenced by ambition and commercial greed, we have one by one abandoned our distinctive national tenets, and accepted in their place, though in some modified forms, the old-time European tenets and policies, which we supposed the world, actuated largely by our example, was about forever to discard. Our whole record as a people is, of course, then ransacked and subjected to microscopic investigation, and every petty disregard of principle, any wrong heretofore silently, perhaps sadly, ignored, each unobserved or disregarded innovation of the past, is magnified into a precedent justifying anything and everything in the future . . . What is now proposed, therefore, examined in connection with our principles and traditional policy as a nation, does apparently indicate a break in continuity,—historically, it will probably constitute what is known in geology as a “fault.” Source: Charles Francis Adams, “Imperialism” and “The Tracks of Our Forefathers”: A Paper (Boston: D. Estes & Co., 1899), 5–19, 25–26.

Document 2.16 The Foraker Act, 1900 As soon as Spain formally ceded ownership of its island possessions through the Treaty of Paris of 1898, Congress set to work creating governments for the Spanish possessions. The sponsor for Puerto Rico’s organic law was Ohio senator Joseph B. Foraker, for whom the act that passed in April 1912 was later named. The Foraker Act followed many of the standards established by the territorial system, but with crucial differences. First and foremost, Puerto Rico was not declared a federal territory, implying no path to eventual statehood. Second, the residents of Puerto Rico did not become unquestioned citizens of the United States. Instead, they formed the “People of Puerto Rico,” even though Puerto Rico itself was not an independent polity but rather a dominion under the clear authority of the United States. This excerpt focuses on the governmental structures in Puerto Rico and on Section 2, which concerned imports and exports in revealing ways. In addition to coffee (a major export from Cuba), Section 2 allowed the movement of Puerto Rico’s cultural production (books, newspapers, pamphlets)

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but imposed clear limitations designed to prevent any organization against U.S. rule. This regulation and others like it became increasingly controversial during the twentieth century as Puerto Rico became home to movements demanding either independence or statehood. An Act Temporarily to provide revenues and a civil government for Porto Rico, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the provisions of this Act shall apply to the island of Porto Rico and to the adjacent islands and waters of the islands lying east of the seventy-fourth meridian of longitude west of Greenwich, which were ceded to the United States by the Government of Spain by treaty entered into on the tenth day of December, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight; and the name Porto Rico, as used in this Act, shall be held to include not only the island of that name, but all the adjacent islands as aforesaid. SEC. 2. That on and after the passage of this Act the same tariffs, customs, and duties shall be levied, collected, and paid upon all articles imported into Porto Rico from ports other than those of the United States which are required by law to be collected upon articles imported into the United States from foreign countries: Provided, That on all coffee in the bean or ground imported into Porto Rico there shall be levied and collected a duty of five cents per pound, any law or part of law to the contrary notwithstanding: And Provided further, That all Spanish scientific, literary, and artistic works, not subversive of public order in Porto Rico, shall be admitted free of duty into Porto Rico for a period of ten years, reckoning from the eleventh day of April, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, as provided in said treaty of peace between the United States and Spain: And provided further, That all books and pamphlets printed in the English language shall be admitted into Porto Rico free of duty when imported from the United States . . .

General Provisions. SEC. 6. That the capital of Porto Rico shall be at the city of San Juan and the seat of government shall be maintained there. SEC. 7. That all inhabitants continuing to reside therein who were Spanish subjects on the eleventh day of April, eighteen hundred ninety-nine, and then resided in Porto Rico, and their children born subsequent thereto, shall be deemed and held to be citizens of Porto Rico, and as such entitled to the protection of the United States, except such as shall have elected to preserve their allegiance to the Crown of Spain on or before the eleventh day of April, nineteen hundred, in accordance with the provisions of the treaty of peace between the United States and Spain entered into on the eleventh day of April, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine; and they, together with such citizens of the United States as may reside in Porto Rico, shall constitute a body politic under the name of The People of Porto Rico, with governmental powers as hereinafter conferred, and with power to sue and be sued as such.

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SEC. 8. That the laws and ordinances of Porto Rico now in force shall continue in full force and effect, except as altered, amended, or modified hereinafter, or as altered or modified by military orders and decrees in force when this Act shall take effect, and so far as the same are not inconsistent or in conflict with the statutory laws of the United States not locally inapplicable, or the provisions hereof, until altered, amended, or repealed by the legislative authority hereinafter provided for Porto Rico or by Act of Congress of the United States: Provided, That so much of the law which was in force at the time of cession, April eleventh, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, forbidding the marriage of priests, ministers, or followers of any faith because of vows they may have taken, being paragraph four, article eighty-three, chapter three, civil code, and which was continued by the order of the secretary of justice of Porto Rico, dated March seventeenth, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, and promulgated by Major-General Guy V. Henry, United States Volunteers, is hereby repealed and annulled, and all persons lawfully married in Porto Rico shall have all the rights and remedies conferred by law upon parties to either civil or religious marriages: And provided further, That paragraph one, article one hundred and five, section four, divorce, civil code, and paragraph two, section nineteen, of the order of the minister of justice of Porto Rico, dated March seventeenth, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, and promulgated by Major-General Guy V. Henry, United States Volunteers, be, and the same hereby are, so amended as to read: “Adultery on the part of either the husband or the wife. . . .” SEC. 10. That quarantine stations shall be established at such places in Porto Rico as the Supervising Surgeon-General of the Marine-Hospital Service of the United States shall direct, and the quarantine regulations relating to the importation of diseases from other countries shall be under the control of the Government of the United States. SEC. 11. That for the purpose of retiring the Porto Rican coins now in circulation in Porto Rico and substituting therefor the coins, of the United States, the Secretary of the Treasury is hereby authorized to redeem, on presentation in Porto Rico, all the silver coins of Porto Rico known as the peso and all other silver and copper Porto Rican coins now in circulation in Porto Rico, not including any such coins that may be imported into Porto Rico after the first day of February, nineteen hundred, at the present established rate of sixty cents in the coins of the United States for one peso of Porto Rican coin, and for all minor or subsidiary coins the same rate of exchange shall be applied . . . SEC. 12. That all expenses that may be incurred on account of the government of Porto Rico for salaries of officials and the conduct of their offices and departments, and all expenses and obligations contracted for the internal improvement or development of the island, not, however, including defenses, barracks, harbors, light-houses, buoys, and other works undertaken by the United States, shall be paid by the treasurer of Porto Rico out of the revenues in his custody . . . SEC. 14. That the statutory laws of the United States not locally inapplicable, except as hereinbefore or hereinafter otherwise provided, shall have the same force and effect in Porto Rico as in the United States, except the internal-revenue laws, which, in view of the provisions of section three, shall not have force and effect in Porto Rico.

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SEC. 15. That the legislative authority hereinafter provided shall have power by due enactment to amend, alter, modify, or repeal any law or ordinance, civil or criminal, continued in force by this Act, as it may from time to time see fit. SEC. 16. That all judicial process shall run in the name of “United States of America, ss: the President of the United States,” and all criminal or penal prosecutions in the local courts shall be conducted in the name and by the authority of “The people of Porto Rico;” and all officials authorized by this Act shall before entering upon the duties of their respective offices take an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the laws of Porto Rico.

The Governor. SEC. 17. That the official title of the chief executive officer shall be “The Governor of Porto Rico.” He shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate; he shall hold his office for a term of four years and until his successor is chosen and qualified unless sooner removed by the President; he shall reside in Porto Rico during his official incumbency, and shall maintain his office at the seat of government; he may grant pardons and reprieves, and remit files and forfeitures for offenses against the laws of Porto Rico, and respites for offenses against the laws of the United States, until the decision of the President can be ascertained; he shall commission all officers that he may be authorized to appoint, and may veto any legislation enacted, as hereinafter provided; he shall be the commander in chief of the militia, and shall at all times faithfully execute the laws, and he shall in that behalf have all the powers of governors of the Territories of the United States that are not locally inapplicable; and he shall annually, and at such other times as he may be required, make official report of the transactions of the government in Porto Rico, through the Secretary of State, to the President of the United States: Provided, That the President may, in his discretion, delegate and assign to him such executive duties and functions as may in pursuance with law be so delegated and assigned.

The Executive Council. SEC. 18. That there shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, for the period of four years, unless sooner removed by the President, a secretary, an attorney-general, a treasurer, an auditor, a commissioner of the interior, and a commissioner of education, each of whom shall reside in Porto Rico during his official incumbency and have the powers and duties hereinafter provided for them, respectively, and who, together with five other persons of good repute, to be also appointed by the President for a like term of four years, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall constitute an executive council, at least five of whom shall be native inhabitants of Porto Rico, and, in addition to the legislative duties hereinafter imposed upon them as a body, shall exercise such powers and perform such duties as are hereinafter provided for them, respectively, and who shall have power to employ all

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necessary deputies and assistants for the proper discharge of their duties as such officials and as such executive council . . .

House Of Delegates. SEC. 27. That all local legislative powers hereby granted shall be vested in a legislative assembly which shall consist of two houses; one council and house of the executive council, as hereinbefore constituted, and the other a house of delegates, to consist of thirty-five members elected biennially by the qualified voters as hereinafter provided; and the two thus constituted shall be designated: “The legislative assembly of Porto Rico.” SEC. 28. That for the purposes of such elections Porto Rico shall be divided by the executive council into seven districts, composed of contiguous territory and as nearly equal as may be in population, and each district shall be entitled to five members of the house of delegates.

Election Of Delegates. SEC. 29. That the first election for delegates shall be held on such date and under such regulations as to ballots and voting as the executive council may prescribe . . . SEC. 30. That the house of delegates shall be the sole judge of the returns, and qualifications of its members, and shall have and exercise all the powers with respect to the conduct of its proceedings that usually appertain to parliamentary legislative bodies. No person shall be eligible to membership in the house of delegates who is not twentyfive years of age and able to read and write either the Spanish or the English language, or who is not possessed in his own right of taxable property, real or personal, situated in Porto Rico. SEC. 31. That all bills may originate in either house, but no bill shall become a law unless it be passed in each house by a majority vote of all the members belonging to such house and be approved by the governor within ten days thereafter. If, when a bill that has been passed is presented to the governor for signature, he approves the same, he shall sign it, or if not he shall return it, with his objections, to that house in which it originated, which house shall enter his objections at large on its journal, and proceed to reconsider the bill. If, after such reconsideration, two-thirds of that house shall agree to pass the bill, it shall be sent, together with the objections, to the other house, by which it shall likewise be considered, and if approved by two-thirds of that house it shall become a law. But in all such cases the votes of both houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered upon the journal of each house, respectively. If any bill shall not be returned by the governor within ten days (Sundays excepted) after it shall have been presented to him, the same shall be a law in like manner as if he had signed it, unless the legislative assembly by adjournment prevent its return, in which case it shall not be a law: Provided, however, That all laws enacted by the legislative assembly shall be reported to the Congress of the United States, which hereby reserves the power and authority, if deemed advisable, to annul the same.

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The Judiciary. SEC. 33. That the judicial power shall be vested in the courts and tribunals of Porto Rico as already established and now in operation, including municipal courts, under and by virtue of General Orders, Numbered One hundred and eighteen, as promulgated by Brigadier-General Davis, United States Volunteers . . . Provided, however, That the appointment of the chief justice and associate justices of the supreme court and the marshal thereof shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and the judges of the district courts shall be appointed by the governor, by and with the advice and consent of the executive council, and all other officials and attachés of all the other courts shall be chosen as may be directed by the legislative assembly, which shall have authority to legislate from time to time as it sees fit with respect to said courts, and any others they may deem it advisable to establish, their organization, the number of judges and officials and attachés for each, their jurisdiction, their procedure, and all other matters affecting them. SEC. 34. That Porto Rico shall constitute a judicial district to be called “the district of Porto Rico.” The President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint a district judge, a district attorney, and a marshal for said district, each for a term of four years, unless sooner removed by the President. The district court for said district shall be called the district court of the United States for Porto Rico . . . SEC. 35. That writs of error and appeals from the final decisions of the supreme court of Porto Rico and the district court of the United States shall be allowed and may be taken to the Supreme Court of the United States in the same manner and under the same regulations and in the same cases as from the supreme courts of the Territories of the United States . . . SEC. 36. That the salaries of all officials of Porto Rico not appointed by the President, including deputies, assistants, and other help, shall be such, and be so paid out of the revenues of Porto Rico, as the executive council shall from time to time determine . . . The annual salaries of the officials appointed by the President, and so to be paid, shall be as follows: The governor, eight thousand dollars; in addition thereto he shall be entitled to the occupancy of the buildings heretofore used by the chief executive of Porto Rico, with the furniture and effects therein, free of rental. The secretary, four thousand dollars. The attorney-general, four thousand dollars. The treasurer, five thousand dollars. The auditor, four thousand dollars. The commissioner of the interior, four thousand dollars. The commissioner of education, three thousand dollars. The chief justice of the supreme court, five thousand dollars. The associate justices of the supreme court (each), four thousand five hundred dollars. The marshal of the supreme court, three thousand dollars. The United States district judge, five thousand dollars. The United States district attorney, four thousand dollars.

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The United States district marshal, three thousand five hundred dollars . . . SEC. 39. That the qualified voters of Porto Rico shall, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November, anno Domini nineteen hundred, and every two years thereafter, choose a resident commissioner to the United States, who shall be entitled to official recognition as such by all Departments, upon presentation to the Department of State of a certificate of election of the governor of Porto Rico, and who shall be entitled to a salary, payable monthly by the United States, at the rate of five thousand dollars per annum: Provided, That no person shall be eligible to such election who is not a bona fide citizen of Porto Rico, who is not thirty years of age, and who does not read and write the English language . . . SEC. 41. That this Act shall take effect and be in force from and after the first day of May, nineteen hundred. Approved, April 12, 1900. Source: The Statutes of the United States of America (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1899–1901), vol. 31, 77–86.

Document 2.17 Teddy Roosevelt Explains Expansion, 1900 In 1900, Governor Theodore Roosevelt of New York was one of the leading figures of the Republican Party. In September, the party gathered in Philadelphia for its annual convention, where Roosevelt’s address to the convention focused primarily on the deficiencies of the Democratic candidates. Although he devoted most of his attention to domestic affairs, he touched on world affairs. At home and abroad, Roosevelt believed the United States needed to take bold action. As he did throughout his life, Roosevelt found himself able to discuss complex matters of government in the more direct language of gender, specifically manhood, emphasizing that national weakness was little different from personal weakness. Roosevelt also discussed governing foreign people and foreign territory in grand terms, connecting the experience on the North American continent to the new challenges facing the United States in the Pacific and the Caribbean.

If it is militarism to be in the Philippines, then it is militarism to be in Hawaii and Alaska. If it is militarism to put down the Tagal banditti, then it is militarism to put down an Apache outbreak. Anti-imperialism is the name by which they seek to disguise their policy of contraction. For, mind you, we have already expanded, and we are in the Philippines by the same moral and legal right that we are in New Mexico and Idaho. The Nation has not sought its new responsibilities, but the Nation does not shrink from them. As a strong man faces his work when it comes and does each task allotted to him without flinching, so this great Nation, the greatest Republic upon which the sun has ever shone, stands now at the opening of a new century, not seeking in unmanly fashion how to avoid its work, but facing its responsibilities in a calm, a sober, and a resolute spirit. The task that now confronts us is but as child’s play compared to the task that confronted the generation that fought to a finish the great civil war. It calls for but a fraction of this Nation’s giant strength, and we appeal to every American jealous of the

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country’s good name and proud beyond measure of the honor and renown of American citizenship to stand with us now, and to declare in unmistakable terms that we are a Nation of men and not a Nation of weaklings, and that we as little fear to face our duty in the far Islands of the eastern seas as we fear to face our duties at home. . . . Source: New York Times, September 6, 1900.

NOTES 1. New York Times, September 9, 1900. 2. Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); Pekka Hèamèalèainen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). 3. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York: Wiley, 1978); David Morris Potter and Don Edward Fehrenbacher, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). 4. Reconstruction remains among the most actively researched subjects in U.S. history. For a general outline that includes a particular focus on the issues of citizenship, race, and policy, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988). 5. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998). 6. Anne S. Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 7. William Tecumseh Sherman to John Sherman, 23 September 1868, in The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891, ed. Rachel Sherman Thorndike (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 321. 8. William Earl Weeks, John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992). 9. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963). 10. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 11. Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); John Mack Faragher, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New York: H. Holt, 1994). 12. Theodore Roosevelt, “Pocket Diary,” Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm052.html, accessed January 24, 2009. 13. Roosevelt to William Wingate Sewall, 4 May 1898, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting Elmore Morison et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), vol. 2, 823. 14. Roosevelt to George Dewey and Roosevelt to Brooks Brothers, 2 May 1898, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, vol. 2, 822. 15. Eric Tyrone Lowery Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 16. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Pub. Co., 1972 [1959]).

CHAPTER

3

Empire Among Empires, 1900–1945

European imperial structures that had always guided American notions of empire 3 gave way to a new imperial order emerging from the revolutionary changes of the modern world. Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union—empires spawned

W

oodrow Wilson lived in the shadow of Theodore Roosevelt, and not just politically. Both men were also accomplished writers. Wilson had been a leading figure in the first generation of modern professional academics, a contemporary of Frederick Jackson Turner who, like Turner, received a doctoral degree from Johns Hopkins University. He published various books on American government, and some of them sold well to the general public. But somehow Wilson’s efforts never matched the popularity of Roosevelt’s writings. Theodore Roosevelt knew how to excite readers, in large part by writing of bold leadership, great conflicts, and powerful ideas. Whether he was chronicling the naval War of John T. McCutcheon’s 1918 cartoon, “Interrupting the Ceremony,” 1812 or the winning of the West, depicted the U.S. Senate’s fight against U.S. participation in the League Roosevelt described American of Nations. Source: The Granger Collection, New York history in the most dramatic of terms. For his part, Wilson wrote as an academic. He believed that history was best studied with scientific detachment and best understood in measured terms. The tendencies evident in these presidents’ writings applied just as well to their styles of political leadership. Roosevelt was able to enact ambitious foreign and domestic policies in no small part through his capacity to mobilize citizens using a passionate oratorical style. Wilson, in contrast, spoke like the minister’s son and the political science professor he had once been. Roosevelt sought to inspire. Wilson sought to educate. Wilson’s style was on display in Paris in February 1919. In the aftermath of World War I, with most of Europe and many of its colonial holdings devastated by four years of 154

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warfare, Wilson had arrived to shape what he considered a rational peace. As world leaders gathered in the Versailles palace, Wilson took charge of the committee that drafted the plan for a League of Nations. Article XIX of the League’s covenant proclaimed that the “well-being and development of [colonized] peoples form a sacred trust of civilization . . . The best method of giving practical effect to this principle is that the tutelage of such people should be entrusted to advanced nations . . .”1 When Wilson delivered the report, however, he knew he would need to explain this passage. Before he could even recite Article XIX, Wilson stated “that before being embodied in this document it was the subject matter of very careful discussion.” Careful indeed, for Wilson knew such a statement would generate opposition, in no small part because Wilson himself had criticized the empires of the world. He knew as well that people throughout the colonized world had high hopes that Wilson would support a grand movement for colonial independence. Yet Wilson himself was president of a country with its own imperial holdings, and Wilson hoped to govern those territories in the manner embodied by Article XIX of the charter of the League of Nations. As Wilson’s own comments suggest, his ascent to the presidency came in a period of dramatic change for the United States and dizzying, potentially confusing developments in the American struggle with empire. When Americans think about their nation’s involvement with foreign peoples and places from 1900 through 1945, they often rely on two conflicting stories. One narrative marks this as the period of America’s arrival as a global superpower. At the same time, this was also a period that Americans now associate with isolationism. Restrictions on immigration, reluctance to involve the United States in overseas conflicts, and a generally inward-looking culture suggest that many Americans wanted nothing to do with governing other countries. It is easy to imagine the United States as a pendulum swinging back and forth between intervention and isolationism. Although that metaphor is somewhat accurate, it obscures key continuities in the first half of the twentieth century. First and foremost, the United States was both internationalist and isolationist throughout much of this period. The American public and American policymakers remained strongly opposed to seeing their nation dragged into destructive conflicts between other nations. At the same time, the federal leadership concluded that the United States could and should take an active role in global affairs. That engagement took its most powerful form during the two world wars, but the United States engaged itself in less obvious ways at other times. Much of the American attitude toward global affairs and global engagement emerged from the ways in which Americans conceived of empires. Americans saw both World War I and World War II as imperial conflicts. Furthermore, when the United States eventually entered these wars, Americans proclaimed that military victory would enable the United States to eliminate the worst elements of empire. Equally important, during these years the United States assumed its most aggressive involvement on the world stage in an effort to preserve its own imperial possessions. The United States also showed little hesitancy to use military force to assert imperial authority over weaker governments within its own sphere of influence. But if American attitudes toward empire remained the same, the empires that Americans saw around them were fundamentally different. In the twentieth century, old

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European imperial structures that had always guided American notions of empire gave way to a new imperial order emerging from the revolutionary changes of the modern world. Germany, Japan, Italy, and the Soviet Union—empires spawned from modern ideologies and modern technologies—all provided new models for Americans to examine as they considered their own place in the world. Throughout these years, many Americans concluded that they should reject Woodrow Wilson’s call for internationalism. Try as they might, however, Americans continued to govern foreign people and foreign territory; and, like Wilson, they did so from a timehonored perspective that connected Americans of the twentieth century to Americans of the eighteenth century. By the end of World War II, the United States had transformed itself and was actively involved in governing people and territory around the globe. At first glance, this may seem like a complete break from the nation’s history and its ideals. It may seem to be a result of World War II itself, a conflict so large and so transforming that it thrust the United States into a role it might otherwise have never assumed. But the American outlook on empire in 1945 was less different from its past attitudes than it might appear.

AMERICA

IN

1900

Understanding the nation and the world that Woodrow Wilson addressed at Versailles requires a review of the changes that had occurred in the United States during the preceding decades. When Woodrow Wilson secured the Democratic Party’s nomination for president in 1912 the United States would have been almost unrecognizable to Americans of 1856, when Wilson was born. Although the geographic reach, demographic size, and political culture of the United States had undergone enormous change in the century after independence, the daily lives of most Americans remained unchanged. Most Americans engaged in agricultural pursuits, using the techniques and technologies that had emerged slowly over the preceding centuries. That predictable pace stood in marked contrast to the world that took shape during Woodrow Wilson’s lifetime. By 1900, the majority of Americans lived in cities, and those cities had become showcases of industrialization. Magnificent skyscrapers and dismal factories, streets crowded by day and illuminated by night, new household conveniences and squalid tenements combined to convince many Americans that the city showed all the possibilities and pitfalls of the modern age. The first automobiles, telephones, and electrical service that appeared in those cities likewise suggested the dawn of a new era. Equally dramatic were changes in the U.S. population. In 1860, the first census after Wilson’s birth, the United States had a population of 31,443,321. In 1900, the population was 62,979,766, almost exactly twice what it had been a mere a forty years earlier. Much of this growth was the result of a massive wave of immigration. The last great migration had been in the 1840s, with immigrants coming mostly from northern Europe, especially Germany and Ireland. From 1880 to 1920, the immigration wave from Europe shifted east as Italians, Greeks, Jews, Russians, Poles, Gypsies, and numerous other ethnic groups flooded the United States. Many of them entered through the major cities of the East Coast, further contributing to the nation’s urban growth. Meanwhile, federal policy actively promoted immigration from Mexico in an effort to create a larger labor pool in the West.

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These developments were more than a mere backdrop for the ongoing American struggle with empire. Immigration and governance combined in mutually reinforcing ways. Although the newest European immigrants were foreign people just like Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, American immigration policy sought a process of naturalization that would transform them into Americans, as long as they were white. Nonwhite immigrants continued to face powerful obstacles to citizenship. During the nineteenth century the United States had converted foreign land into American states via the territorial system. In the twentieth century, however, the United States governed its territorial acquisitions as foreign territories. Those lands with nonwhite majorities found themselves facing a plight similar to that of the nonwhite inhabitants of the nineteenth century American West.

TR TAKES CHARGE Theodore Roosevelt served the shortest of tenures as vice president. On September 7, 1901, a year after Roosevelt delivered his speech to the Republican National Convention emphasizing the need for American leadership overseas, President William McKinley was shot by an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz. The president died a week later. A month shy of his forty-third birthday, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president in U.S. history, a title he holds to this day. Roosevelt neither hesitated in assuming the reins of power nor considered his authority in any way diminished by the fact that he had inherited the presidency rather than achieved it by election in his own right. To the contrary, Roosevelt immediately launched an ambitious agenda. His domestic goals remain most famous. Roosevelt sought to root out corruption in all its forms. He tackled business monopolies and urban political machines. He sought to expand the national parks and national forests. He did all of this operating from an outlook typical of Progressives like himself, assuming that enlightened leadership by well-educated, civic-minded Americans was far better than the chaos associated with traditional party politics. Roosevelt approached foreign policy in similar terms. He hoped to build on the global initiatives he had begun as assistant secretary of the navy. He continued to believe that a great nation needed to assert great power on the world stage, and he hoped to build on recent American successes against Spain in Cuba and the Philippines. But the challenges of empire unleashed by the Spanish-American War were just beginning. In the Caribbean and the Pacific, conflicts emerged as the practices Americans had developed to govern foreign people and foreign territory collided with new realities. Throughout the nineteenth century, the territorial system had worked according to a series of simple rules guided by both the American commitment to political liberty and the practice of securing white supremacy. Territorial rule was supposed to establish a temporary system of government until the number of white residents was sufficiently high to permit self-governance. Along the way, the federal leadership would extend increasing political opportunities to the local population. The racial dimensions of this policy were absolutely essential. Nonwhites were entirely excluded. In fact, a mark of success in territorial rule was the preservation of African American enslavement in

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southern territories before the Civil War and the elimination of Native American autonomy throughout North America. The territorial system was still very much in place at the turn of the century with much of the Southwest as well as Alaska and Hawaii remaining under territorial rule. In the most crass terms, this system had worked. The United States had successfully extended both white political opportunity and racial conquest on an unprecedented scale. The problem facing the Roosevelt administration was the simple fact that this approach would not work in the Caribbean and the Pacific. In Hawaii, as well as in the territories the United States had acquired through the Spanish-American War, nonwhite residents made up the vast majority of the population. These demographic realities, combined with the new comfort with empire among American policymakers, conveniently justified a policy of long-term occupancy without formal political incorporation. Only Hawaii enjoyed the status of a federal territory, and even there no plans existed for permitting statehood in the immediate future. Territorial offices remained under the tight control of the community of white residents, many of whom had helped overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy in the 1890s. The United States had exploited the numerous local revolts against Spanish authority as a partial justification for war in 1898. American military leaders likewise found ready allies in these independence movements, which proved crucial to securing the quick American victory in the war. With the end of hostilities between the United States and Spain, however, the indigenous revolutionaries placed demands on the U.S. government. They expected independence or, at least, full incorporation into the United States along the model applied to previous territorial acquisitions. They received neither. For example, the Foraker Act (Document 2.16) imposed a system of governance onto Puerto Rico that was very similar to the territorial system. It created an appointed governor and an elected legislature. But the act specifically stated that the residents of Puerto Rico were not U.S. citizens. At the same time, they were not independent either. Instead, they lived somewhere in between, as a single “people of Puerto Rico” who nonetheless took their orders from Washington. The most violent and prolonged resistance to U.S. rule came in the Philippines. Filipinos who had opposed Spanish rule saw the United States as merely the latest foreign power to rule them. In 1899, Emilio Aguinaldo, who had participated in the revolt against Spain, demanded that the United States acknowledge Philippine independence. When the United States refused, Aguinaldo called for an all-out war of resistance. Other Filipinos were already resisting the United States for their own reasons and needed no inspiration from Aguinaldo.2 A new kind of warfare ensued; it was of a type that became increasingly common in the twentieth century. Filipinos formed small, secretive military units that engaged in guerrilla warfare against the large units of uniformed, organized American troops. The war spread into the mountains and jungles of the Philippines, where the brutal climate and dense vegetation made American military operations increasingly difficult. When the fighting moved to villages and cities, American troops struggled to separate rebels from innocent civilians. Desperate to find some way of infiltrating the Philippine resistance forces, American leaders relied on increasingly brutal forms of interrogation. Among these was waterboarding, a process of simulated drowning that had been around for

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centuries but that exploded into controversy in the United States after its application against suspected terrorists in the early twenty-first century. In other words, the situation in the Philippines resembled the guerrilla wars of more recent times, eliciting an early form of anti-insurgency by the United States.3 At the time, however, nobody had the clairvoyance to make such connections. Instead, they looked backward to find ready comparisons. The Philippines war seemed eerily like the wars against Native Americans during the late nineteenth century, in no small part because the officers commanding in the Philippines included veterans of the U.S. Army’s western campaigns. Once again, a population that American whites considered inferior was effectively resisting the weight of the federal government. The United States responded as it always had. There would be no effort to co-opt the local residents. Instead, the United States would crush the movement and kill its leaders. Even as the army sought to eliminate resistance, the United States was already hard at work developing a civil government for the Philippines. In 1900, President McKinley assigned the task to William Howard Taft, a well-connected attorney from Ohio whose grandfather had served as President Ulysses S. Grant’s secretary of war. Taft then became the obvious choice to serve as the first governor-general of the Philippines. Taft struggled to superimpose American political institutions onto the Philippines, replacing the older Spanish institutions while ignoring many of the plans proposed by Filipinos. Taft also faced opposition from military commanders who believed that civilian control would prevent them from completing the conquest of the Philippines. Chief among these critics was Major General Arthur MacArthur, the army’s commander in the Philippines who was also a veteran of the Civil War and the wars against Native Americans. MacArthur and Taft were regularly at odds, with MacArthur advocating a hard line and Taft struggling to build political alliances with Filipinos. But both men were also eager to proclaim victory in the Philippines. Although Filipinos continued to decry American rule, the arrival of a civilian government under Taft and the reduction in armed militancy enabled the United States to claim that it had pacified the islands. It was in these final stages of the conflict that MacArthur was joined by his own son, Douglas MacArthur, who had just graduated from West Point. That experience for the young officer began a relationship with the Philippines that continued as Douglas MacArthur emerged as one of the leading military figures of the twentieth century. Theodore Roosevelt was particularly eager to announce a victory in the Philippines. He admired both the commanding general and the governor-general, and in 1904 he recalled Taft to serve as secretary of war. In Washington, Taft collaborated with Roosevelt and the rest of the cabinet in pursuing a cohesive policy that would connect the new Pacific possessions of the Philippines, Hawaii, and Guam to the other island holdings the United States had acquired in the Caribbean. Taft soon learned that for all the importance he associated with the Philippines, it was the Caribbean that was of greater concern in Washington. The geographic and economic proximity of Puerto Rico and Cuba to the United States gave them a higher priority within the Roosevelt administration. In Puerto Rico, resistance to U.S. rule faded quickly as Puerto Ricans divided into numerous distinct political parties. Not only were these parties engaged in direct

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competition with each other, but they proposed differing visions for future relations with the United States. The primary disagreement emerged between those Puerto Ricans who advocated a closer relationship that would lead to U.S. citizenship and, eventually, statehood, and those Puerto Ricans who sought full independence. The advocates of statehood knew that the United States had previously acquired territory and converted it into states, often to the benefit of those residents who could secure U.S. citizenship. The advocates of independence were equally aware of this tradition. They argued that the United States claimed to support both liberty and self-determination, and it would be hypocritical for the U.S. government to deny those rights to the people of Puerto Rico. The Roosevelt administration rejected both sides. Instead, American policymakers decided that Puerto Rico would remain under U.S. authority, but its residents would not become U.S. citizens. The island was too important to give up, but policymakers immediately rejected any plan to extend citizenship to the island’s inhabitants. This policy echoed the trend of U.S. immigration law. Europeans who could prove their whiteness had secured citizenship and some degree of inclusion within American society. Nonwhites faced social exclusion and sometimes, for people such as Chinese immigrants, for example, legal prohibitions to citizenship. In Cuba, the Roosevelt administration chose a different path that was nonetheless related to the policies in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. In 1901, the Platt Amendment (Document 3.1) established a timetable for the removal of U.S. troops from Cuba and, most important, the acknowledgement of Cuban independence. But the legislation also granted the president clear authority to “exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty.” Furthermore, the legislation provided the logistical means to do so, preserving as U.S. property a small spit of land on the southeastern coastline. The United States soon built a permanent military establishment, Guantánamo Bay, that would be at the center of debate over U.S. policy a century later. When the United States formally acknowledged Cuban independence in 1903, Congress and the Roosevelt administration made certain to include language that preserved the specifics as well as the spirit of the Platt Amendment (Document 3.3). These developments in the Pacific and the Caribbean constituted a novel response to the challenges unleashed by the Spanish-American War. Defeating the Spanish military had been relatively easy, as were the negotiations through which Spain ceded its few remaining overseas possessions. But managing the territories obtained returned the United States to the age-old challenge of empire and to a familiar question: Could the United States, a country that had long condemned empires, acquire foreign territory and foreign people without itself descending into the pitfalls of empire? In the nineteenth century, the United States had developed the territorial system to resolve the problem. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States developed a complex and, at times, convoluted system of governance that preserved U.S. authority without fully incorporating new territories. Theodore Roosevelt was eager to situate the recent developments in the Caribbean and the Pacific into a broader foreign policy. Throughout his presidency, Roosevelt remained unshakable in his belief that the United States should be a great power on the global stage.

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He revealed his attitude toward the United States, its new possessions, and the other great empires of the world in a letter to William Wingate Sewall. “As to the Boer War,” he wrote of the recent struggle between Britain and settlers in South Africa, “the British behaved so well to us during the Spanish War that I have no patience with these people who keep howling against them.” Roosevelt then connected the British and American imperial missions. “I was mighty glad to see them conquer the Madhi [sic] for the same reason that I think we should conquer Aguinaldo. The Soudan and Matabeleland will be better off under English rule just as the Philippines will be under our rule.”4 Roosevelt articulated his vision of American greatness—and its involvement in foreign territory—in his December 1904 annual message. Now called the Roosevelt Corollary (Document 3.6), the “corollary” referred to was the Monroe Doctrine. In 1823, President James Monroe had proclaimed that European countries could no longer establish colonies in the Americas or directly interfere with the independent governments taking form in the Americas. In 1823 the United States of course did not possess the means to enforce this policy. European colonialism remained a reality in the Caribbean, and European countries hatched various colonization schemes in Central and South America during the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the Monroe Doctrine established the belief that Americans should oppose European imperial projects and should likewise assume a leadership role in the western hemisphere. Through his corollary, Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed that the United States had the right to intervene in neighboring countries in order to promote economic prosperity and political stability. Perhaps most important, by 1904, the United States possessed the muscle to do so. In Puerto Rico and Cuba, the United States had already suppressed local independence movements. As an emerging industrial giant, it had become a vital source of trade and raw materials for Europe. As president, Roosevelt had successfully secured authorization and funding for a dramatic increase in the size of the United States Navy. The new American fleet cruised around the world showcasing American power. In the same year that he proclaimed this new role for the United States, Roosevelt traveled to St. Louis for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Now known as the 1904 World’s Fair, the real name is important. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition commemorated the centennial anniversary of that American territorial acquisition and celebrated how the United States had preserved political equality and economic opportunity even as it grew (Document 3.4). The World’s Fair sent this message in various ways. Each state of the union built a house that represented its history or regional architecture. Houses from New York and Pennsylvania sat next to houses from Louisiana, California, and Oregon, all equal within an American union that, unlike European empires, did not discriminate between the old center and the newly acquired periphery. Even as the fair celebrated how the United States had avoided the pitfalls of colonialism, it also showcased the racial dimensions of empire. Native Americans and Philippine villagers were put on public display in an effort to showcase a world that was on the brink of extinction. The exhibits combined a sadness at the passing of these “primitive” peoples with a celebration of the American capacity to conquer savagery (Document 3.5). Native Americans and Filipinos remained foreign peoples who nonetheless lived under the control of the United States. Their circumstances stood in

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A 1940 cartoon, “Just So There’ll Be No Misunderstanding,” depicts Uncle Sam reminding Hitler and Mussolini about the Monroe Doctrine and warning them not to seize those New World colonies orphaned by Axis occupation of their parent countries in Europe. Source: The Granger Collection, New York

marked contrast to the thousands of white immigrants who attended the World’s Fair. As the circumstances of Filipinos and Native Americans had shown, the capacity to transform from foreign into American worked in very different ways, with race often serving as the primary factor (Document 3.12).

THEORY

AND

PRACTICE

The principles articulated in the Roosevelt Corollary soon became standard practice for the federal leadership. Although an aggressive policy fit with Roosevelt’s personality, such a policy was not limited to the Roosevelt administration. The United States began consistently using diplomatic, economic, and military force to intercede directly in neighboring countries. These actions fueled anti-imperialist criticism that had first exploded in response to the Spanish-American War. Yet even as anti-imperialism remained a potent concept, it was never sufficiently powerful to dissuade American policymakers from choosing to govern both foreign people and foreign territory. The challenge instead was to develop a means of doing so without acquiring formal ownership of that territory. Americans made their own sentiments clear in the elections that followed. Roosevelt easily won reelection in 1904, and in 1908 his handpicked successor, William Howard

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Taft, became president after a campaign that emphasized his work in the Philippines. Taft shared Roosevelt’s commitment to an aggressive foreign policy, and he was fully prepared to implement the Roosevelt Corollary. He had begun that work as secretary of war: when a domestic revolt erupted in Cuba in 1906, the United States preserved the political status quo by invoking the Platt Amendment to assert a role in negotiating an end to the uprising. Taft served as the American representative for the negotiations. In 1909, similar internal disputes in Nicaragua convinced the newly elected Taft administration to dispatch U.S. warships to pressure the Nicaraguan government. In 1912, Taft launched a full-scale occupation of Nicaragua. But Roosevelt soon became convinced that Taft had strayed from the Progressives’ reformist agenda in domestic policy. Other Progressives felt as Roosevelt did, and the movement quickly fragmented. Some Progressives remained committed to Taft and the Republicans. Others bolted to the Democratic Party. Heading into the 1912 election, Roosevelt gave up on both parties, came out of retirement, and sought a third presidential term as leader of the newly established Progressive Party, which soon became known as the Bull Moose Party after Roosevelt described himself as “fit as a bull moose.” The Progressive Party fared poorly in the general election, but it split the Republican vote to the degree that Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected the twenty-eighth president of the United States. Wilson shared Taft’s and Roosevelt’s commitment to Progressive reform and enlightened leadership. Like his predecessors, Wilson struggled to develop a cohesive policy for the new territorial acquisitions of the United States. In March 1917, Wilson signed the Jones-Shafroth Act (Document 3.9), which granted U.S. citizenship to the residents of Puerto Rico. Although this act normalized the status of Puerto Ricans, it nonetheless preserved the idiosyncratic system in which the United States extended its authority over foreign territory while it precluded any plans to incorporate those places through the territorial system. The residents of Puerto Rico might be citizens, but the federal government had made clear that Puerto Rico itself was not to become a state. Wilson also believed in the Roosevelt Corollary, and though he was never as dramatic as Roosevelt in his demands for American greatness he nonetheless joined with Taft and Roosevelt in pursuing an aggressive policy of intervention in foreign counties. In 1915, the Wilson administration dispatched troops to Haiti. In 1916, the United States forced Nicaragua to accept the Chamorro-Bryan Treaty, which granted the United States broad powers in the Nicaraguan government. In both cases, as in Cuba in 1906, American policymakers claimed they were acting to end local unrest. They added that the Roosevelt Corollary impelled them to act in the pursuit of hemispheric peace and order. In neither Nicaragua nor Haiti did the United States establish formal sovereignty. Instead, the United States helped to install governments friendly to it. This was an easy task in both cases. Although Haiti had secured its independence from France in 1804 and Nicaragua had established its own independence from Mexico in 1821, both countries still suffered from political instability. Public institutions were weak, and governments often collapsed of their own accord through violent revolt or from coups d’état led by competing elite factions. As a result, having a new government take power was not unusual for either country. Meanwhile, the U.S.-supported regimes in Haiti and

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Nicaragua gained enormous advantages in the fractured politics of their respective home countries.5 In practical terms, intervening in Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua posed few logistical or military challenges for the United States. Thus, the question is not so much how the United States was able to establish itself in Haiti and Nicaragua, but rather why the Wilson administration would do so and what the American public would do as they situated these events within their own understanding of their nation’s history. The Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations remained aggressively interventionist for largely pragmatic reasons. The late-nineteenth-century argument that the United States needed to secure overseas resources and markets had become a commonplace assumption by the early twentieth century. Meanwhile, the easy victory in the SpanishAmerican War validated an aggressive foreign policy of the type that Roosevelt advocated. Finally, the presence of American businesses in Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua made intervention appear all the more necessary. Political instability, foreign intervention, or the rise of a new regime antagonistic to the United States all threatened the regional commercial system American leaders hoped to create among the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Indeed, in every case, the federal government justified American interventionism by claiming that American businesses and property were threatened by political instability or local revolt. This does not mean that the federal leadership was acting entirely at the behest of American business interests. Rather, American policymakers and business leaders agreed that the United States should protect those interests. As a result, business leaders rarely needed to apply pressure in Washington. Instead, members of the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations immediately concluded that any danger to American businesses in the region endangered the American economy and the nation’s power overseas.

WILSON’S WORLD This sort of practical discussion within Washington does not fully explain how the federal leadership justified these actions, either to itself or to the American public. Interventionism in the Caribbean and in Nicaragua also emerged as the logical extension of a broad philosophical discussion among Americans about their role in the world and their relationship to foreign territory and foreign people. That role reflected not only the passionate realism of Theodore Roosevelt but also the rational idealism of Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson was born in 1856 in Staunton, a small city (by mid-nineteenthcentury standards) in central Virginia. His first memories were of the Civil War and Reconstruction. A bookish child, Wilson was a restless student. As an undergraduate, he transferred from Davidson College to Princeton. He briefly studied law, only to abandon the law to begin graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in 1883. For one year, the graduate careers of Wilson and Frederick Jackson Turner overlapped at Johns Hopkins. But while Turner studied history—a long-established discipline struggling to modernize itself—Wilson studied political science, a newfangled discipline. Wilson completed his doctorate, took a series of academic jobs, and by 1890 he was back at Princeton as a

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professor (Document 3.2). In 1902, he became the president of Princeton. Two years later, he made the leap to politics, winning election as governor of New Jersey. Like most southern whites, Wilson spent his life as a Democrat. Yet Wilson was also a Progressive, and he shared the Progressives’ commitment to reform. Hardly a charismatic speaker and without a commanding personality, Wilson nonetheless rose quickly in party circles. When Progressive Republicans became frustrated with Taft, Wilson was ready to make the case that Progressives could find a new home as Democrats. In 1912, the party chose him as their presidential nominee. Because the Republicans were divided by the Bull Moose Party, Wilson handily defeated the incumbent Taft. Wilson, though new to elected office, was no novice when it came to American political principles. His academic career had focused on the institutions of democratic governance. If Wilson disputed Frederick Jackson Turner’s belief in the frontier’s ability to shape American culture, he shared Turner’s conviction that the United States provided the model of representative government for the rest of the world (Document 3.7). Wilson also had few qualms about the federal policy of equality for whites and conquest for nonwhites. To the contrary, these racial practices made perfect sense to Wilson. A product of southern racial supremacy, Wilson had been an apologist for the Ku Klux Klan and, as president of Princeton University, had sought to maintain a whites-only student body. Wilson was a vigorous defender of segregation nationwide, and as president he resisted efforts to eliminate segregation in the federal workforce. Wilson also shared the ideals of Roosevelt and other Americans who advocated American interventionism overseas. Americans situated their own political tradition in opposition to two others that lay worlds apart: those of imperial powers and colonized peoples. Even as Americans claimed the United States should acquire its own empire, they remained steadfast in their criticism of European empires. Roosevelt was unusual in his professed admiration for the British Empire. Many Americans saw European empires as despotic, corrupt holdovers of the old world. In his own academic studies, Wilson was an advocate of the modernizing quality of political science and of democratic politics on an American model. In stark contrast to the elected offices and distributed power the United States had created at home, Wilson saw in western Europe a collection of kings, aristocrats, and bureaucratic cronies controlling the governments.6 If Americans like Wilson were critical of European empires, they were more ambivalent toward the colonies those empires had acquired. Many Americans opposed colonialism. Throughout the nineteenth century, the condemnation of colonial inequality was a standard refrain in American classrooms. It was for this reason that the United States avoided the title “colony” for the possessions it had acquired during the SpanishAmerican War. It also helps to explain why the United States opted for intervention— rather than territorial acquisition—in places like Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua during the 1910s. Throughout that era, Americans continued to deny that they were, in fact, an empire. William Appleman Williams, a historian of American foreign relations whose work shaped the way a generation of scholars conceived of foreign and domestic policy, astutely referred to this system as “imperial anti-colonialism.”7 Nonetheless, Americans had only limited sympathy for the independence movements that emerged from European colonies at the turn of the twentieth century. The reason

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was simple. Most Americans considered colonial subjects unprepared for or incapable of self-government. Many Americans agreed with European leaders that the nonwhite populations of Africa, South Asia, the Pacific, and the Caribbean were fundamentally uncivilized. Americans had repeatedly said as much about Spanish colonial possessions both before and after the Spanish-American War. Europeans had proclaimed that they had a “civilizing mission” in their colonies. Woodrow Wilson embraced this outlook for the United States. Like other Americans, he doubted that it was the Europeans who had the best civilization to give. Wilson believed that the United States could provide a civilizing model to both the underdeveloped peoples of the world as well as the empires that ruled them.8 This outlook has long earned Wilson a reputation as an idealist who was out of touch with the pragmatic realities of world affairs. But Wilson showed remarkable pragmatism when he supported U.S. intervention in Haiti, Cuba, and Nicaragua. Emerging from this experience, Wilson—like most Americans—found World War I confusing, occasionally overwhelming, but ultimately an event that confirmed America’s role in the world as well as the American vision of empire. When war erupted in Europe in 1914, most Americans—including Woodrow Wilson—sought strict neutrality for the United States. Although some Americans advocated direct involvement on moral, ethnic, or geopolitical grounds, the majority were terrified at the prospect of seeing the United States sucked into a conflict that was killing millions. Some Americans also saw the conflict as an example of the worst instincts of empires. These critics discerned that the tensions that had fueled the war in the first place emerged from the elaborate competition among empires for control of Europe, Africa, and Asia (Document 3.8). For three years, the United States stayed out of the Great War. Wilson’s support for the Allies became increasingly strong, but public opinion was clearly against direct involvement. When President Wilson won reelection in 1916, much of his support stemmed from Americans who believed “he kept us out of war.” Although Wilson clearly supported an Allied victory over the Central Powers, it took direct provocation by Germany to erode the American commitment to neutrality. Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare sank American ships and killed American citizens. American code breakers also intercepted plans for a German alliance with Mexico that promised to return to Mexico the territory seized by the United States during the U.S. Mexican War. On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany and its allies. With Britain and France drawing on their last manpower reserves and with Russia removed from the conflict by the Revolution of 1917, the U.S. arrival could not have come at a better time for the beleaguered Allies. The Central Powers were also reaching the limits of their warfighting capacity. The sudden influx of fresh troops, ships, and supplies from the United States proved enormously valuable to the Allied cause. When Germany surrendered in November 1918 and European leaders gathered for a peace conference in Paris, Wilson crossed the Atlantic to join the negotiations. It was an unprecedented moment, for no other American president had ever traveled to Europe while in office or directly participated in treaty negotiations. Wilson’s arrival at the

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gleaming palace of Versailles marked the arrival of the United States as a world power on par with Europe. After a generation in which Americans—especially academics like Wilson—had developed elaborate theories to explain why the United States had developed the most democratic, egalitarian government on Earth, Wilson hoped to dictate terms to all of the parties. Most important, he proclaimed a “peace without victors.” Rather than treat the Central Powers as conquered foes, Wilson argued that they should be reintegrated into a new Europe founded on mutual respect rather than imperial competition. Wilson advocated a League of Nations in which individual states would each have a voice and no one nation could dictate to another. In doing so, he drew on the American experience of federalism and expansion. After all, the United States was composed of individual member states, many of which had been created through a territorial system that preserved equality and unity.9 The victorious Allies, however, would have no part of an amicable resolution. Members of Congress also did not support Wilson’s proposal that the United States should establish the terms of peace in Europe, and in 1919 the United States refused to join the League of Nations that the American president had helped create. Countries like Britain, France, and Belgium had endured such catastrophic losses that their leaders knew the public would never accept anything short of clear victory. As such, the Allies treated the Central Powers not only as defeated peoples but also as the parties responsible for the war. They demanded both disarmament and reparations. The victorious Allies were also completely unwilling to surrender any of their imperial power. To the contrary, the victors believed that they should gain new colonial possessions from the vanquished. The Allies immediately dismantled the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. Rather than gain independence, however, the colonies of the defeated empires simply found new rulers, primarily Great Britain, France, and Belgium. Wilson became increasingly frustrated with these developments in the aftermath of World War I, and his apparent condemnation of European imperial policies proved enormously popular throughout the colonial world. To people who had long chafed at European imperial rule, 1918 seemed to be a moment of enormous opportunity. Colonial residents hoped that the defeat of the Central Powers would immediately bring an end to colonialism in the lands they controlled. Wilson himself had emphasized the paramount importance of “self-determination.” To the people of the colonized world, Wilson briefly occupied a heroic status. Throughout Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, independence movements mobilized to end imperial rule.10 Wilson’s notion of self-determination and its limits emerged from his own knowledge of American history. The proposal for a League of Nations embodied those principles. In the final version of the League’s charter, Wilson’s less charitable approach to colonies as explained at Versailles in 1919 remained almost completely intact, becoming Article 22. The Wilson administration continued to express its commitment to self-determination and its criticism of empires, but neither Wilson nor his cabinet connected self-determination to the independence movements that were emerging in European colonies (Document 3.11). People in the colonized world responded accordingly. Wilson’s status quickly declined. To Wilson, that response might have been surprising. He had intended to civilize the people of the colonized world, not necessarily liberate them.

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NEW EMPIRES When Woodrow Wilson left the presidency in 1921, he was a shattered man. Although European nations formed the League of Nations, the United States never joined, and the organization was never especially effective. Meanwhile, a stroke in 1919 left Wilson so physically disabled that he withdrew from public appearances. Although he remained in office until 1921, Wilson never fully recovered and maintained contact within the government through his wife and a few trusted associates. By the time Wilson died in 1924, the United States seemed to be heading on a different course. Most Americans now learn that the 1920s was a period of reactionary isolationism during which the United States abandoned the sort of international outlook embraced by Roosevelt and Wilson. This image is only partly correct. In comparison with the territorial acquisitions and international engagement that had marked both domestic and foreign policy since the 1890s, the United States was indeed more reserved during the 1920s. Yet it is easy to exaggerate the notion of American isolationism in that period. Much of that portrait emerged after World War II, when people in the United States and Europe concluded that a more aggressive foreign policy toward an economically struggling postwar Germany could have prevented the rise of Adolf Hitler and the outbreak of war. This narrative of American isolationism loses sight of the fact that throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the United States continued governing foreign territory and continued trying to redefine how empires should work. Americans did so not only in opposition to the pre–World War I European empires, but also to the new empires like Germany and Japan that emerged in the 1920s and 1930s. Wilson’s own vision of a war without victors forced the United States into unprecedented forms of overseas involvement during the 1920s. Although the other victorious allies had proclaimed Germany a defeated nation that was to be held responsible for the war, they were not opposed to outside reconstruction efforts. In fact, numerous European nations joined with the United States in a massive humanitarian effort to prevent Germany from descending into starvation, economic collapse, and social chaos. The man who took charge of these efforts was a former mining engineer named Herbert Hoover. Hoover argued that the Allies would need to make a long-term commitment to Germany and that they had a compelling reason to do so. He worried not only about the suffering within the German population but also about the prospects for regional political instability. Like other Americans, Hoover had seen how economic and political forces had combined to generate support for communism in tsarist Russia. Americans worried that Germany faced even worse material circumstances and that German citizens could easily look to the Soviet Union as a model. When Hoover became secretary of commerce in 1921, he turned that minor cabinet post into a major policymaking office by focusing his attention on American trade with western Europe. He did so partly to promote domestic prosperity but also to continue his own efforts to use economic development as a means for the United States to promote the reconstruction of Europe. Hoover was not alone in these efforts. Throughout the 1920s, American policymakers eagerly sought a role for the United States in European affairs. The American

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public might have grown tired of the internationalism that had marked the Roosevelt and Wilson administrations, but the federal leadership still saw an important role for the United States. These efforts in Europe during the 1920s never amounted to the sort of direct intervention that characterized American activities in the Pacific, the Caribbean, and Latin America, but it was a pivotal period nonetheless. Since 1776, U.S. foreign policy had been reactionary, with European decisions shaping American actions while the United States struggled to develop real leverage with the great powers of Europe. In Germany during the late 1910s and early 1920s the United States engaged itself in European governance on an unprecedented level. American involvement in postwar reconstruction suggested the capacity of American economic power to shape both international relations and the domestic governance of foreign countries.11 Few Americans remember Hoover for his role in European reconstruction after World War I (Document 3.10). Instead, they know him as the president at the start of the Great Depression. Overwhelmed by the domestic crisis and unable to build any real electoral constituency, Hoover and the Republicans in 1932 suffered overwhelming losses to the Democrats and their presidential nominee, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The new president had grown up in the shadow of his cousin, Theodore Roosevelt, and had modeled his own political career accordingly. Like Theodore Roosevelt, he had served as assistant secretary of the navy and governor of New York. Although he built his political career as a Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt shared many of his cousin’s ideas about Progressive reform. Roosevelt also inherited a set of overseas dependencies that still worked on principles established by Teddy Roosevelt. Throughout the 1930s, FDR governed those possessions in a manner that sought to establish self-determination without surrendering U.S. power (Document 3.13). In 1932, Hoover began removing troops from Haiti, a decision that Roosevelt endorsed. In 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act initiated a protracted process for establishing Philippine independence (Document 3.15). To Americans, the withdrawal from Haiti and independence for the Philippines suggested just how much the United States differed from traditional empires. Rather than establish colonies to exist in perpetuity to enrich the imperial center, the United States had established temporary rule in ways that would be mutually beneficial to all. Perhaps most important, the United States would endorse independence and equality to foreign territory, just as it had to its own territory. The realities of government in Haiti and the Philippines, however, suggested the limitations of American generosity. The Tydings-McDuffie Act provided for a ten-year period before independence, during which the United States could involve itself in Philippine governance and preserve army and navy bases on the islands. Such language echoed legislation for Puerto Rico and Cuba that preserved the right of the federal government to intercede in local politics in a manner unacceptable in a U.S. state, let alone a foreign country. Meanwhile, the governments taking shape in Haiti and Nicaragua suggested the tacit ways in which the United States preserved its power. The Philippines, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Cuba had all become home to intense disputes among numerous political parties. In the wake of the Spanish-American War, the United States took credit for helping establish

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party politics in its new possessions. But the U.S. government was also careful to align itself with the local faction most supportive of the United States and then provide both direct and indirect support. The U.S. occupation had indeed brought benefits to Haiti. After decades marked by violent conflict, the iron fist of U.S. rule had brought an unprecedented level of stability. But the Americans who governed Haiti took no steps to develop a sustainable democratic government. After U.S. troops withdrew, the United States helped install a series of increasingly brutal dictatorships in Haiti, supporting them so long as the Haitian government continued to support U.S. goals in the Caribbean. Similar developments were under way in Nicaragua. U.S. troops left in January 1933, and the Roosevelt administration soon forged a comfortable relationship with the regime of Anastasio Somoza, who installed a U.S.-friendly dictatorship that lasted more than forty years (Document 3.14). Had he been less ambitious, Franklin Roosevelt might have been merely a caretaker of the empire the United States had acquired since 1898. During his first two terms, Roosevelt’s policies in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Pacific had refined but hardly transformed the ways Americans responded to the challenge of empire in the twentieth century. But Roosevelt’s decision to pursue an unprecedented third term meant that he was still in office as the United States confronted a new set of empires. During the 1930s, three new, emerging empires seemed to confirm everything Americans believed about the intersection of empire and tyranny. The regimes of Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and totalitarian Japan all rose to power unapologetically proclaiming that they would limit individual rights at home. Equally important—and more troubling—to the United States, all three of them hoped to extend their power beyond their geographical borders. Italy began this process by invading Ethiopia in 1935. Germany annexed Austria and the Sudetenland (a contested borderland between Germany and Czechoslovakia). Finally, Japan seized the Chinese province of Manchuria and, in 1937, launched a full-scale war against China, eventually consolidating control over the Korean Peninsula, Indochina (now Vietnam), and portions of eastern China (Document 3.16). Unlike the United States (which denied any imperial ambitions), Italy, Germany, and Japan proudly proclaimed their imperial glory. The three governments even competed on the matter. When Germany moved into eastern Europe, for example, Italian leader Benito Mussolini ordered that Italy annex Armenia. Leaders in Germany, Italy, and Japan all believed in the inherent greatness of their nations. They believed that great nations deserved great empires. Likewise, they usually considered the residents of their newfound colonies to be lesser peoples, deserving both jurisdictional and individual inequality. These new colonial possessions served the familiar purposes for empires. They provided resources, raw materials, and land where citizens of the imperial center could emigrate. It was the acquisition of these new empires that sparked World War II. The German invasion of Poland in 1939 convinced Britain and France to declare war. In 1940, German forces moved in all directions in pursuit of Hitler’s goal of securing a grand German empire that would bring all of Europe under his control. In 1941, the Japanese government unleashed a far-flung offensive in the Pacific, focusing on the possessions of

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Great Britain and the United States. While Japanese troops moved overland against the British colonies of Singapore, Malaya, and India, amphibious assaults were launched on U.S. holdings, including the Philippines and Guam. To prevent a U.S. counterstrike and to force the United States to accept this new state of affairs, Japan attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. The rise of the Axis powers confirmed Americans’ conceptions of empires. Since 1776, Americans had proclaimed that they were not, and should not become, an empire as they understood it. Even as the United States acquired foreign territory and foreign peoples, Americans remained steadfast in this belief. In the late nineteenth century, Americans came as close as they ever would to embracing the notion of empire, though with strong limitations. By 1941, many Americans believed that the nation’s governance of foreign territory and foreign people confirmed a set of core beliefs that dated back to the Founders. First and foremost among these was the belief that individual and jurisdictional equality were sacrosanct. Second was the belief that when the United States governed others it should always be with the intent to incorporate them into the nation or, if not, to govern in a way that served the interest of the local population. Even when the United States controlled territory to serve its own interests (for example, in Haiti in the 1920s), Americans proclaimed they would still provide for the local population. In the person of Adolf Hitler, Americans saw how the acquisition of empire could be nothing more than the lunatic desire of an insane leader. Hitler’s empire soon came to define tyranny for many Americans. Japan’s actions further convinced Americans that their nation was not an empire. Where the United States had set the Philippines on a path to peaceful independence, Japan installed a dictatorial regime that made clear that the function of the Philippines was to serve Japan. Even before the United States entered the war, the Roosevelt administration justified its preference for the Allied powers along the lines of national self-determination that Wilson had articulated a generation before and that Americans now applied to the danger posed by the Axis (Document 3.17). The strategic history of World War II further reminded Americans of the workings of empire. The Allies moved from the periphery, first liberating the imperial holdings of the Axis powers before attacking the imperial nations themselves. In the Pacific, that meant the United States defended and then recaptured many of its own possessions. American forces began by reinforcing the defenses of Hawaii. The first victories came in Alaska, where the United States repelled Japanese forces who had established a weak foothold. Then came Guam and Wake Island. Finally, American troops landed in the Philippines. The Axis empires of World War II left a deep impression on American politics, society, and culture. They defined how Americans conceived of themselves and the world. The atrocities of the Axis powers seemed to confirm the conclusion of many Americans that although the United States might govern foreign territory and foreign people it was always with an eye toward promoting independence rather than preserving colonialism (Document 3.19). The Axis empires were also fresh in the memories of American policymakers as they contemplated the future in 1945. By the time the Axis surrendered, it was clear that the United States would soon be governing far more territory than it had controlled in 1941. In some circumstances,

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these new additions were almost accidental. For logistical and strategic reasons the United States had established outposts on numerous islands and atolls in the Pacific. But the United States was also now in the business of military occupation. In Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria, U.S. troops governed the lands of their former enemies. It was clear to American policymakers and the American public alike that the United States would be governing foreign territory and foreign people for the indefinite future (Document 3.18).

Document 3.1 The Platt Amendment, 1901 In 1901, the United States was still consolidating its hold on the territories it had acquired in the Spanish-American War. The federal government had made vague guarantees of independence or autonomy to its new Caribbean possessions, but the federal leadership was absolutely committed to preserving those islands as strategic outposts as well as locations for American business investment. The following legislation stated in direct terms that the United States preserved a right to shape the future of the Caribbean. The wording itself was buried as a rider to the Army Appropriations Bill of 1901, and it was approved as part of the Appropriations Bill on March 2, 1901. The amendment was named for Orville Platt, a powerful senator from Connecticut but hardly a leading figure in American foreign policy. Referring specifically to Cuba, the Platt Amendment had obvious implications for the other territories the United States had acquired from Spain.

Provided further, That in fulfillment of the declaration contained in the joint resolution approved April twentieth, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, entitled, “For the recognition of the independence of the people of Cuba, demanding that the Government of Spain relinquish its authority and government in the island of Cuba, and to withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters, and directing the President of the United States to use the land and naval forces of the United States to carry these resolutions into effect,” the President is hereby authorized to “ leave the government and control of the island of Cuba to its people” so soon as a government shall have been established in said island under a constitution which, either as a part thereof or in an ordinance appended thereto, shall define the future relations of the United States with Cuba, substantially as follows:

I. That the government of Cuba shall never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power or powers which will impair or tend to impair the independence of Cuba, nor in any manner authorize or permit any foreign power or powers to obtain by colonization or for military or naval purposes or otherwise, lodgment in or control over any portion of said island.

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II. That said government shall not assume or contract any public debt to pay the interest upon which, and to make reasonable sinking fund provision for the ultimate discharge of which, the ordinary revenues of the island, after defraying the current expenses of government shall be inadequate.

III. That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.

IV. That all Acts of the United States in Cuba during its military occupancy thereof are ratified and validated, and all lawful rights acquired thereunder shall be maintained and protected.

V. That the government of Cuba will execute, and as far as necessary extend, the plans already devised or other plans to be mutually agreed upon, for the sanitation of the cities of the island, to the end that a recurrence of epidemic and infectious diseases may be prevented, thereby assuring protection to the people and commerce of Cuba, as well as to the commerce of the southern ports of the United States and the people residing therein.

VI. That the Isle of Pines shall be omitted from the proposed constitutional boundaries of Cuba, the title thereto being left to future adjustment by treaty.

VII. That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling of naval stations at certain specified points, to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.

VIII. That by way of further assurance the government of Cuba will embody the foregoing provisions in a permanent treaty with the United States.

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Approved, March 2, 1901 Source: Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949, compilation directed by Charles I. Bevans, vol. 6, Canada-Czechoslovakia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 1116–1117.

Document 3.2 Woodrow Wilson Comments on the American Struggle with Empire, 1902 In 1902, Woodrow Wilson was president of Princeton University. He was also an active writer and public speaker. The following article, published by the Atlantic Monthly in 1902, was among Wilson’s many efforts to connect the theoretical principles he had explored in his academic writings to the contemporary situation in American foreign and domestic affairs. Wilson’s most widely read book (in both academic and popular circles) was Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics. First published in 1885, soon after Wilson completed the doctoral dissertation on which it was based, this book advocated broad-based reforms in American government. But it also celebrated American government. Wilson joined a chorus of Americans who proclaimed that principles of representative government may have originated in Europe but that the unique experiences of U.S. history had enabled Americans to improve upon those principles. In the essay that follows, Wilson explained how Americans had moved beyond their British forebears and how the residents of territory the United States had acquired from Spain would be better off as a result of U.S. governance.

The Ideals of America by Woodrow Wilson We do not think or speak of the War for Independence as if we were aged men who, amidst alien scenes of change, comfort themselves with talk of great things done in days long gone by, the like of which they may never hope to see again. The spirit of the old days is not dead. If it were, who amongst us would care for its memory and distant, ghostly voice? It is the distinguishing mark, nay the very principle of life in a nation alive and quick in every fibre, as ours is, that all its days are great days,—are to its thought single and of a piece. Its past it feels to have been but the prelude and earnest of its present. It is from its memories of days old and new that it gets its sense of identity, takes its spirit of action, assures itself of its power and its capacity, and knows its place in the world. Old colony days, and those sudden days of revolution when debate turned to action and heady winds as if of destiny blew with mighty breath the long continent through, were our own days, the days of our childhood and our headstrong youth. We have not forgotten. Our memories make no effort to recall the time. The battle of Trenton is as real to us as the battle of San Juan hill . . . . . . Our life is so broad and various now, and was so simple then; the thoughts of those first days seem crude to us now and unreal. We smile upon the simple dreams of our youth a bit incredulously, and seem cut off from them by a great space. And yet it was by

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those dreams we were formed. The lineage of our thoughts is unbroken. The nation that was making then was the nation which yesterday intervened in the affairs of Cuba, and to-day troubles the trade and the diplomacy of the world . . . The census takers of 1890 informed us, when their task was done, that they could no longer find any frontier upon this continent; that they must draw their maps as if the mighty process of settlement that had gone on, ceaseless, dramatic, the century through, were now ended and complete, the nation made from sea to sea. We had not pondered their report a single decade before we made new frontiers for ourselves beyond the seas, accounting the seven thousand miles of ocean that lie between us and the Philippine Islands no more than the three thousand which once lay between us and the coasts of the Pacific. No doubt there is here a great revolution in our lives. No war ever transformed us quite as the war with Spain transformed us. No previous years ever ran with so swift a change as the years since 1898. We have witnessed a new revolution. We have seen the transformation of America completed. That little group of states, which one hundred and twenty-five years ago cast the sovereignty of Britain off, is now grown into a mighty power. That little confederation has now massed and organized its energies. A confederacy is transformed into a nation. The battle of Trenton was not more significant than the battle of Manila. The nation that was one hundred and twenty-five years in the making has now stepped forth into the open arena of the world. I ask you to stand with me at this new turning-point of our life, that we may look before and after, and judge ourselves alike in the light of that old battle fought here in these streets, and in the light of all the mighty processes of our history that have followed. We cannot too often give ourselves such challenge of self-examination. It will hearten, it will steady, it will moralize us to reassess our hopes, restate our ideals, and make manifest to ourselves again the principles and the purposes upon which we act. We are else without chart upon a novel voyage. What are our thoughts now, as we look back from this altered age to the Revolution which to-day we celebrate? How do we think of its principles and of its example? Do they seem remote and of a time not our own, or do they still seem stuff of our thinking, principles near and intimate, and woven into the very texture of our institutions? What say we now of liberty and of self-government, its embodiment? What lessons have we read of it on our journey hither to this high point of outlook at the beginning of a new century? Do those old conceptions seem to us now an ideal modified, of altered face, and of a mien not shown in the simple days when the government was formed? . . . . . . We fought but the other day to give Cuba self-government. It is a point of conscience with us that the Philippines shall have it, too, when our work there is done and they are ready. But when will our work there be done, and how shall we know when they are ready? How, when our hand is withdrawn from her capitals and site plays her game of destiny apart and for herself, shall we be sure that Cuba has this blessing of liberty and self-government, for which battles are justly fought and revolutions righteously set afoot? If we be apostles of liberty and of self-government, surely we know what they are, in their essence and without disguise of form, and shall not be deceived in

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the principles of their application by mere differences between this race and that. We have given pledges to the world and must redeem them as we can. Some nice tests of theory are before us,—are even now at hand. There are those amongst us who have spoken of the Filipinos as standing where we stood when we were in the throes of that great war which was turned from fear to hope again in that battle here in the streets of Trenton which we are met to speak of, and who have called Aguinaldo, the winning, subtle youth now a prisoner in our hands at Manila, a second Washington. Have they, then, forgot that tragic contrast upon which the world gazed in the days when our Washington was President on the one side of the sea, in America, an ordered government, a people busy with the tasks of mart and home, a group of commonwealths bound together by strong cords of their own weaving, institutions sealed and confirmed by debate and the suffrages of free men, but not by the pouring out of blood in civil strife,—on the other, in France, a nation frenzied, distempered, seeking it knew not what, a nation which poured its best blood out in a vain sacrifice, which cried of liberty and self-government until the heavens rang and yet ran straight and swift to anarchy, to give itself at last, with an almost glad relief, to the masterful tyranny of a soldier? “I should suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France,” said Burke, the master who had known our liberty for what it was, and knew this set up in France to be spurious,—“I should suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with social and civil manners.” Has it not taken France a century to effect the combination; and are all men sure that she has found it even now? And yet were not these things combined with liberty amongst us from the very first? How interesting a light shines upon the matter of our thought out of that sentence of Burke’s! How liberty had been combined with government! Is there here a difficulty, then? Are the two things not kindly disposed toward one another? Does it require any nice art and adjustment to unite and reconcile them? Is there here some cardinal test which those amiable persons have overlooked, who have dared to cheer the Filipino rebels on in their stubborn resistance to the very government they themselves live under and owe fealty to? Think of Washington’s passion for order, for authority, for some righteous public force which should teach individuals their place under government, for the solidity of property, for morality and sober counsel. It was plain that he cared not a whit for liberty without these things to sustain and give it dignity. “You talk, my good sir,” he exclaimed, writing to Henry Lee in Congress, “you talk of employing influence to appease the present tumults in Massachusetts. I know not where that influence is to be found, or, if attainable, that it would be a proper remedy for the disorders. Influence is no government. Let us have one by which our lives, liberties, and properties will be secured, or let us know the worst at once.” In brief, the fact is this, that liberty is the privilege of maturity, of self-control, of self-mastery and a thoughtful care for righteous dealings,—that some peoples may have it, therefore, and others may not. We look back to the great men who made our government as to a generation, not of revolutionists, but of statesmen. They fought, not to pull down, but to preserve,—not for

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some fair and far-off thing they wished for, but for a familiar thing they had and meant to keep. Ask any candid student of the history of English liberty, and he will tell you that these men were of the lineage of Pym and Hampden, of Pitt and Fox; that they were men who consecrated their lives to the preservation intact of what had been wrought out in blood and sweat by the countless generations of sturdy freemen who had gone before them . . . In America, and in America alone, did self-government mean an organization selforiginated, and of the stuff of the people themselves. America had gone a step beyond her mother country . . . In America the whole constitution of society was democratic, inevitably and of course. Men lay close to their simple governments, and the new life brought to a new expression the immemorial English principle, that the intimate affairs of local administration and the common interests that were to be served in the making of laws should be committed to laymen, who would look at the government critically and from without, and not to the king’s agents, who would look at it professionally and from within. England had had self-government time out of mind; but in America English selfgovernment had become popular self-government . . . . . . This is what Burke meant by combining government with liberty,—the spirit of obedience with the spirit of free election. Liberty is not itself government. In the wrong hands,—in hands unpracticed, undisciplined,—it is incompatible with government. Discipline must precede it,—if necessary, the discipline of being under masters. Then will self-control make it a thing of life and not a thing of tumult, a tonic, not an insurgent madness in the blood. Shall we doubt, then, what the conditions precedent to liberty and self-government are, and what their invariable support and accompaniment must be, in the countries whose administration we have taken over in trust, and particularly in those far Philippine Islands whose government is our chief anxiety? We cannot give them any quittance of the debt ourselves have paid. They can have liberty no cheaper than we got it. They must first take the discipline of law, must first love order and instinctively yield to it. It is the heathen, not the free citizen of a self-governed country, who “in his blindness bows down to wood and stone, and don’t obey no orders unless they is his own.” We are old in this learning and must be their tutors. But we may set them upon the way with an advantage we did not have until our hard journey was more than half made. We can see to it that the law which teaches them obedience is just law and even-handed. We can see to it that justice be free and unpurchasable among them. We can make order lovely by making it the friend of every man and not merely the shield of some. We can teach them by our fairness in administration that there may be a power in government which, though imperative and irresistible by those who would cross or thwart it, does not act for its own aggrandizement, but is the guarantee that all shall fare alike. That will infinitely shorten their painful tutelage. Our pride, our conscience will not suffer us to give them less. And, if we are indeed bent upon service and not mastery, we shall give them more. We shall take them into our confidence and suffer them to teach us, as our critics . . . . . . The whole solution lies less in our methods than in our temper. We must govern as those who learn and they must obey as those who are in tutelage. They are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice. If we have not learned the substance of these things, no nation is ever likely to learn it, for it is taken from life, and not

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from books. But though children must be foolish, impulsive, headstrong, unreasonable, men may be arbitrary, self-opinionated, impervious, impossible, as the English were in their Oriental colonies until they learned. We should be inexcusable to repeat their blunders and wait as long as they waited to learn how to serve the peoples whom we govern. It is plain we shall have a great deal to learn: it is to be hoped we shall learn it fast. There are, unhappily, some indications that we have ourselves yet to learn the things we would teach. You have but to think of the large number of persons of your own kith and acquaintance who have for the past two years been demanding, in print and out of it, with moderation and the air of reason and without it, that we give the Philippines independence and self-government now, at once, out of hand. It were easy enough to give them independence, if by independence you mean only disconnection with any government outside the islands, the independence of a rudderless boat adrift. But selfgovernment? How is that “given”? Can it be given? Is it not gained, earned, graduated into from the hard school of life? We have reason to think so. I have just now been trying to give the reasons we have for thinking so . . . Do not leave the mirror before you see another. You cannot call a miscellaneous people, unknit, scattered, diverse of race and speech and habit, a nation, a community. That, at least, we got by serving under kings: we got the feeling and the organic structure of a community. No people can form a community or be wisely subjected to common forms of government who are as diverse and as heterogeneous as the people of the Philippine Islands. They are in no wise knit together. They are of many races, of many stages of development, economically, socially, politically disintegrate, without community of feeling because without community of life, contrasted alike in experience and in habit, having nothing in common except that they have lived for hundreds of years together under a government which held them always where they were when it first arrested their development. You may imagine the problem of self-government and of growth for such a people,—if so be you have an imagination and are no doctrinaire. If there is difficulty in our own government here at home because the several sections of our own country are disparate and at different stages of development, what shall we expect, and what patience shall we not demand of ourselves, with regard to our belated wards beyond the Pacific? We have here among ourselves hardly sufficient equality of social and economic conditions to breed full community of feeling. We have learned of our own experience what the problem of self-government is in such a case . . . It is by the widening of vision that nations, as men, grow and are made great. We need not fear the expanding scene. It was plain destiny that we should come to this, and if we have kept our ideals clean, unmarred, commanding through the great century and the moving scenes that made us a nation, we may keep them also through the century that shall see us a great power in the world. Let us put our leading characters at the front; let us pray that vision may come with power; let us ponder our duties like men of conscience and temper our ambitions like men who seek to serve, not to subdue, the world; let us lift our thoughts to the level of the great tasks that await us, and bring a great age in with the coming of our day of strength. Source: Atlantic Monthly, December 1902, 721–734.

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Document 3.3 Cuba Receives Its Independence, with Strings Attached, 1903 In 1903, the United States and Cuba signed a treaty that formally announced Cuban independence. Often referred to simply as the Cuban-American Treaty, the agreement came after almost four years of U.S. occupation. During that time, the United States established an administrative system similar to those of Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines and also to the territorial structure of the nineteenth century. While Anglo-American appointees controlled most of the instruments of government, Cubans organized themselves into a series of political parties. In 1901 and 1902, Cubans voted in a series of elections to choose local officials, a legislature, and a president. It was Tomás Estrada Palma, the victor in the presidential election, who signed this treaty recognizing Cuban independence. Although the Cuban-American Treaty formally ended U.S. rule, it also preserved U.S. authority in no uncertain terms. The agreement preserved the wording of the Platt Amendment, upheld the U.S. claim to Guantánamo Bay, and guaranteed that the United States could intervene both nationally and regionally as it saw fit. Since Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the Cuban government has maintained that the treaty was not a legitimate agreement between nations, charging that the United States used coercive means to impose the treaty on Cuba.

Whereas the Congress of the United States of America, by an Act approved March 2, 1901, provided as follows: Provided further, That in fulfillment of the declaration contained in the joint resolution approved April twentieth, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, entitled, “For the recognition of the independence of the people of Cuba, demanding that the Government of Spain relinquish its authority and government in the island of Cuba, and to withdraw its land and naval forces from Cuba and Cuban waters, and directing the President of the United States to use the land and naval forces of the United States to carry these resolutions into effect,” the President is hereby authorized to “leave the government and control of the island of Cuba to its people” so soon as a government shall have been established in said island under a constitution which, either as a part thereof or in an ordinance appended thereto, shall define the future relations of the United States with Cuba, substantially as follows: “I.-That the government of Cuba shall never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power or powers which will impair or tend to impair the independence of Cuba, nor in any manner authorize or permit any foreign power or powers to obtain by colonization or for military or naval purposes or otherwise, lodgement in or control over any portion of said island.” “II.-That said government shall not assume or contract any public debt, to pay the interest upon which, and to make reasonable sinking fund provision for the ultimate discharge of which, the ordinary revenues of the island, after defraying the current expenses of government shall be inadequate.” “III.-That the government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a

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government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the government of Cuba.” “IV.-That all Acts of the United States in Cuba during its military occupancy thereof are ratified and validated, and all lawful rights acquired thereunder shall be maintained and protected.” “V.-That the government of Cuba will execute, and as far as necessary extend, the plans already devised or other plans to be mutually agreed upon, for the sanitation of the cities of the island, to the end that a recurrence of epidemic and infectious diseases may be prevented thereby assuring protection to the people and commerce of Cuba, as well as to the commerce of the southern ports of the United States and the people residing therein.” “VI.-That the Isle of Pines shall be omitted from the proposed constitutional boundaries of Cuba, the title thereto being left to future adjustment by treaty.” “VII.-That to enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations at certain specified points to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.” “VIII.-That by way of further assurance the government of Cuba will embody the foregoing provisions in a permanent treaty with the United States.” Whereas the Constitutional Convention of Cuba, on June twelfth, 1901, adopted a Resolution adding to the Constitution of the Republic of Cuba which was adopted on the twenty-first of February 1901, an appendix in the words and letters of the eight enumerated articles of the above cited act of the Congress of The United States; And whereas, by the establishment of the independent and sovereign government of the Republic of Cuba, under the constitution promulgated on the 20th of May, 1902, which embraced the foregoing conditions, and by the withdrawal of the Government of the United States as an intervening power, on the same date, it becomes necessary to embody the above cited provisions in a permanent treaty between the United States of America and the Republic of Cuba; The United States of America and the Republic of Cuba, being desirous to carry out the foregoing conditions, have for that purpose appointed as their plenipotentiaries to conclude a treaty to that end, The President of the United States of America, Herbert G. Squiers, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at Havana, And the President of the Republic of Cuba, Carlos de Zaldo y Beurmann, Secretary of State and Justice,—who after communicating to each other their full powers found in good and due form, have agreed upon the following articles:

Article I The Government of Cuba shall never enter into any treaty or other compact with any foreign power or powers which will impair or tend to impair the independence of Cuba, nor in any manner authorize or permit any foreign power or powers to obtain by

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colonization or for military or naval purposes, or otherwise, lodgement in or control over any portion of said island.

Article II The Government of Cuba shall not assume or contract any public debt to pay the interest upon which, and to make reasonable sinking-fund provision for the ultimate discharge of which, the ordinary revenues of the Island of Cuba, after defraying the current expenses of the Government, shall be inadequate.

Article III The Government of Cuba consents that the United States may exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty, and for discharging the obligations with respect to Cuba imposed by the Treaty of Paris on the United States, now to be assumed and undertaken by the Government of Cuba.

Article IV All acts of the United States in Cuba during its military occupancy thereof are ratified and validated, and all lawful rights acquired thereunder shall be maintained and protected.

Article V The Government of Cuba will execute, and, as far as necessary, extend the plans already devised, or other plans to be mutually agreed upon, for the sanitation of the cities of the island, to the end that a recurrence of epidemic and infectious diseases may be prevented, thereby assuring protection to the people and commerce of Cuba, as well as to the commerce of the Southern ports of the United States and the people residing therein.

Article VI The Island of Pines shall be omitted from the boundaries of Cuba specified in the Constitution, the title thereto being left to future adjustment by treaty.

Article VII To enable the United States to maintain the independence of Cuba, and to protect the people thereof, as well as for its own defense, the Government of Cuba will sell or lease to the United States lands necessary for coaling or naval stations, at certain specified points, to be agreed upon with the President of the United States.

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Article VIII The present Convention shall be ratified by each party in conformity with the respective Constitutions of the two countries, and the ratifications shall be exchanged in the City of Washington within eight months from this date. In witness whereof, we the respective Plenipotentiaries, have signed the same in duplicate, in English and Spanish, and have affixed our respective seals at Havana, Cuba, this twenty-second day of May, in the year nineteen hundred and three. H. G. Squiers Carlos De Zaldo Source: Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949, compilation directed by Charles I. Bevans, vol. 6, Canada–Czechoslovakia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 1116–1119.

Document 3.4 Connecting the Western Past to a Global History, 1904 The Louisiana Purchase Exposition (now more commonly called the World’s Fair of 1904) was more than a demonstration of the future; it was also an attempt to capture the past. Many of the leading figures in planning the event were St. Louis boosters, members of the city’s founding families as well as leaders of its newest businesses. They hoped to celebrate St. Louis as a triumphant symbol of American democracy, attracting both attention and business opportunities along the way. The following excerpt comes from a promotional booklet published in 1903, the year before the World’s Fair opened. The author, Charles M. Kurtz, held a doctoral degree and served as the principal assistant to the exposition’s department of art. In his discussion of the background to the exposition, Kurtz sought to explain the importance of American continental expansion. As he described the numerous exhibits, he detailed how the World’s Fair would showcase America’s newest territorial acquisitions alongside other exotic places. All of these territories might be under federal authority, but the continental spaces were “American” while the extraterritorial jurisdictions remained distinctly “foreign.”

Until the present time there never has been an International Exposition projected on such magnificent scale as the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904. It will be greater in extent, more comprehensive in its scope and it promises to be more beautiful from the purely spectacular standpoint than any Exposition which has preceded it. To those who visited the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago and remember the wonderful vistas of architecture, sculpture and landscape gardening which contributed to that splendid ensemble, it seems almost effrontery to predict that this is to be surpassed at St. Louis in 1904. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition will lack the great expanse of water-front which added so much to the attractiveness of the Chicago Fair, yet, within the grounds, the grouping of the buildings and the arrangement of the lagoons and waterways, with the magnificent scheme of cascades along the side of the hill which

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dominates the picture—all enriched by sculpture and brightened by the color effects of an elaborate system of landscape gardening—promise to present a composition actually far more beautiful than that afforded by the wonderful “Court of Honor” at Chicago.

The Event to be Celebrated The Louisiana Purchase Exposition will celebrate the centennial of one of the most important events in American history—the purchase from France of the vast Louisiana Territory—a territory greater in extent and in natural resources than that of the original thirteen States. This purchase, which insured to the United States the control forever of the Mississippi River—the greatest natural waterway on earth—was an event which was second only in importance to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The Louisiana Territory roughly may be described as that great tract of land lying between the Mississippi River and the crest of the Rocky Mountains. It is more than one million square miles in extent—greater than the combined areas of France, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy and Spain. The entire Mississippi Valley originally belonged to France by right of discovery and exploration. In 1767 France transferred her rights west of the Mississippi, including the city and island of New Orleans, to Spain, which held the same until the year 1800. The territory east of the Mississippi, in the same year, 1767, was ceded to Great Britain. Napoleon, in the year 1800 was First Consul of France, and by the secret treaty of St. lldefonso re-acquired from Spain the old French territory west of the Mississippi. The United States, by the Revolutionary War, had won sovereignty over the territory between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mississippi. Although actually owned by France, Spanish officials were still in authority at New Orleans, and the hostile attitude of these personages towards Americans navigating the Mississippi resulted in agitation which led President Jefferson to undertake the purchase of the city and island of New Orleans, in order to control the mouth of the Mississippi River. Robert R. Livingston, United States Minister to France, and James Monroe, afterward President of the United States (and the far-seeing author of the “Monroe Doctrine”), were commissioned to conduct the negotiations for this transfer. Instead of the transfer alone of the island of New Orleans, Napoleon—no doubt with the idea of getting rid of a territory which at the time yielded no revenue, and which it would be embarassing to defend, as well as by reason of great need of funds for the equipment of his armies— proposed the sale of the entire Louisiana Territory for fifteen million dollars—which, at that time, seemed a much larger amount than it would be regarded today. The representatives of the United States did not hesitate to accept the proposition of Napoleon. The treaty was signed at Paris, April 30, 1803. The formal transfer of the Territory was made at New Orleans, December 20, 1803, and, for Upper Louisiana, at St. Louis, March 10, 1804. The holding of this Exposition, therefore, forcibly brings to our attention and appreciation the wonderful foresight with which the majority of our legislators of a hundred years ago were imbued. And yet, at that period, there were many who questioned the wisdom of this purchase, many who bitterly opposed it, and many who ridiculed it.

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The transfer of the Louisiana Territory at New Orleans was made in the historic structure known as “The Old Cabildo”—the seat of the local government at the time. This building—which is to the Louisiana Territory what Independence Hall is to Pennsylvania and Faneuil Hall to Massachusetts—is to be reproduced at St. Louis to serve as the Louisiana State Building.

Results of the Acquisition It is a fact that the present greatness of the United States would not have been possible without this territory. By this purchase the extent of our country was more than doubled, and after this the way was made easier for the many additional acquisitions of territory which have given the United States a broad, unbroken expanse from the Atlantic to the Pacific and have made it possible for this country to become one of the great World Powers. From the mere commercial standpoint, the purchase of the Louisiana Territory was a wonderful “bargain.” This great central western region is to-day the most intrinsically valuable portion of the United States. Its agricultural resources and mineral wealth are equalled in no equivalent extent of territory on the globe. Its population has increased from less than one hundred thousand at the period of the transfer, to more than fifteen millions to-day! It has 17,000 post-offices, and 60,000 miles of railways and has developed in wealth and importance with a degree of rapidity and to an extent unparalleled in history. The states and territories of the Purchase produced 264,000,000 bushels of wheat in 1900, valued at $152,000,000—more than one-half of the wheat crop of the whole United States; 1,013,000,000 bushels of corn, valued at $314,000,000, or forty-eight per cent of the country’s product; 311,000,000 bushels, or thirty-eight per cent of the country’s oats. The wheat, corn, oats, rye, barley, cotton, hay and potatoes produced in this region in 1900 brought $755,000,000 and its farm animals were valued at $825,000,000, thirty-eight per cent of the value of those of the whole country . . . Nearly all the States of the Union and thirty-eight foreign governments and dependencies have taken favorable action looking to adequate representation of their products and resources, and evidences of their intellectual, moral and material advancement. Exhibit space has been assigned to many countries and sites have been allotted for State and foreign buildings. The construction of the Exposition is well under way and is advancing rapidly. Several of the great exhibit palaces practically are completed, and the decorative arrangement of the grounds is being advanced very rapidly. To-day views in various parts of the Exposition grounds give impressive effect to the promise that has been made—that this Exposition will surpass, in the splendor, dignity and beauty of its palaces, grounds and vistas, any other Exposition which has been held thus far in the history of the world! And it is promised that all will be completed when the gates are opened, April 30, 1904 . . .

Some Exposition Comparisons Up to this time, the greatest exposition of which there is historical record was the World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago, in 1893. There were in the

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Chicago Exposition grounds—including the Midway—633 acres. The grounds of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition include 1240 acres, constituting a great parallelogram over one mile wide and two miles long—nearly double the area of the grounds at Chicago. The areas under roof at various expositions of the past were as follows: In London, in 1851, 21 acres were covered; In Paris, in 1867, 37 acres were covered; In Philadelphia, in 1876, 56 acres were covered; In Paris, in 1889, 75 acres were covered; In Chicago, in 1893, 200 acres were covered; In Paris, in 1900, 125 acres were covered; In St. Louis, in 1904, over 250 acres will be covered with buildings. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition will cover more ground than the Columbian Exposition, the last Paris Exposition and the Pan-American Exposition combined! Two rows of the exhibit buildings—four in each row—extend for one mile on either side of one of the main avenues! Twenty-five acres of ground are devoted to live-stock pavilions. There will be several hundred acres devoted to agricultural, arboricultural, horticultural and mineralogical exhibits outside the exhibit palaces. The Philippine exhibit will cover over forty acres and will cost over half a million dollars; and there will be extensive exhibits from Alaska, Porto Rico, Hawaii, Tutuila and Guam, requiring many acres of space. There will be more than two hundred and fifty original groups of sculpture in the grounds, comprising about one thousand figures. One hundred miles of wooden conduit have been provided for the electric lines. There will be more than one thousand miles of electric wires and over five hundred thousand electric lights. The intramural railroad will be over nine miles long. These are only a few selections from a mass of statistics of almost apalling magnitude . . .

The Object of the Exposition Primarily, the object of an Exposition may be assumed to be educational. By assembling together productions of various kinds from all portions of the globe, opportunity is afforded for study and comparison . . . The United States Government and the Exposition authorities have invited all the nations of the world to lend their co-operation in making this Centennial Exposition worthy of the great event which it is to celebrate—worthy of the country in which it is held and to which it is to do honor—in making it characteristic of the highest civilization of this period in the world’s history. And undoubtedly in 1904 there will be brought together in St. Louis people of all nations and races, together with their agricultural, artistic and industrial productions, their fashions and their beliefs. Here all may become better acquainted, the brotherhood of man may be promoted and new commercial relationships may be established . . .

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United States Government Exhibits The United States Government will erect a building in which will be installed exhibits exemplifying many of the functions of the National Government. Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars have been appropriated for the building and $800,000 for the arrangement of the exhibits. The building, designed by Mr. J. Knox Taylor, Government architect, will be 850 feet long and 250 feet wide. A Board of Exhibits Chiefs will have charge of Departments corresponding with the great Governmental Departments in Washington . . . The new Government possessions of the United States will provide extensive exhibits. Forty acres will be devoted to the Philippine exhibit, for which some $600,000 will be expended. There are about sixty distinct tribes in the Philippine Islands, so that there will be no lack of interesting material for village groups. Two sides of the forty-acre plot border upon a small lake, and the water will give an opportunity to show the skill of Filipino natives in fishing, boating and swimming. Some of the tribes build their houses on posts standing in the water, not unlike the ancient lake dwellers of Switzerland. Such domiciles, with many others, will be reproduced with all possible exactness. The important industries of the Filipinos will be carried on in the villages, and visitors may see the materials employed in all stages, from the plant or tree to the finished manufactured product. Most interesting will be natives themselves, 800 in number, affording the visitor an opportunity to become acquainted with their manners and customs, home life and native surroundings. Three native villages, each representing an absolutely different type of islander, will be established on the Philippine reservation. The Moros will have their village of houses built on bamboo stilts in the waters of Arrowhead lake, on its northwestern arm. The tribe of Igorrotes, from the northern part of Luzon, will be established on the southern arm, and the Visayan village will be placed between the two. Back in the eight-acre forest, west of the lake, will be established the tree dwellers and other native tribes. The Hawaiian Islands, Samoa, Tutuila and Guam, will furnish most interesting exhibits, accompanied by natives of these islands. Hawaii has provided a building after the design of an architect of Honolulu . . .

The Geographical Concessions [M]ake, in the Pike [the main street of attractions outside the large exhibition halls], a tour of the world! One of the most important of them is a representation of the Tyrolean Alps which promises to surpass in interest the “Swiss Village” at the Paris Exposition of 1900 . . . A reproduction of characteristic features of the City of Jerusalem has been planned to cover some ten acres of ground. Here will be natives of Palestine, who will pursue their avocations as at home. In many particulars, the life of Jerusalem in Bible times will

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be essentially reproduced, and the student will recognize the settings of many sacred scenes . . . The “Streets of Seville,” showing the life of the famous Spanish city, will offer effects of novelty and charm, and there will be fascinating bits from other picturesque cities—Venice, Constantinople, Fez—the capital of Morocco, and others . . . “The Trans-Siberian Railway” will take the traveler on a train of real Pullman cars through Russia and Siberia, and will give him an insight into the landscape, architecture, life and customs of those remote regions. Dinner will be served on the cars, and, as the landscape rustles by, one will have the impression of traveling at a rapid rate. A Russian town will be reached finally, in which characteristic bits of St. Petersburg and Moscow will be reproduced. A large company of Russians will give national songs and dances. There will be a roof garden where Russian food and drinks will be served, Russian bazaars, etc. An “Irish Village” will occupy an area 350 × 600 feet. The local scenery of the most famous parts of Ireland will be reproduced. Blarney Castle, sixty-four feet high, will form the entrance to the village. Irish jaunting cars will traverse “the rocky road to Dublin.’’ The Cairo Street will be in evidence, and this promises to exceed in original attractions all previous efforts in the same direction. A considerable number of native Egyptians will be connected with the enterprise. “The Bazaars of Stamboul” will reproduce some of the most picturesque sights in Constantinople. There will be a Lapland and Esquimaux Village with numerous inhabitants from the far north, and near-by—bringing extremes together—will be located a South Sea Island colony. This latter, “The Pacific Islanders’ Village,” will occupy several acres, will involve 125 natives of the Polynesian Islands, with their huts, in characteristic landscape. There will be a lake for water carnivals, a realistic volcano, a theater, etc. “Mysterious Asia” will present a village made up of characteristic elements, from India, Ceylon, Burmah and Persia, with streets, bungalows, booths and bazaars. There will be an Asiatic Theater, in which various types of oriental dances may be seen. There will be nautch dances, but no “naughty” dances—according to the terms of this concession. There will be open air entertainments, and dromedaries, elephants, water buffaloes and a sacred ox will be in evidence. There will be a Chinese Village apart from the last named concession, in which Chinese life will be exemplified and in which native plays will be given in a Chinese theater. A concession applied for—“Paris, Ancient and Modern”—would show the Paris of the Revolution, with guillotine and Bastile; the Paris of the grand boulevards, Avenue de l’Opera, Rue de la Paix, Cafe Riche, Moulin Rouge and heights of Montmartre, with a Street Fair on the Boulevard de Clichy, the Mi-Careme Carnival and other episodes of Parisian life.

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The Historical Concessions Old St. Louis will represent the city as it existed in 1803—the year of the Louisiana Purchase. Forts, stockades, school-houses, shops and residences in reduced scale will be literally reproduced. In the churches and larger structures will be relics of the period. Lectures will be given and the amusements of the time will be exemplified by persons in the old-time costumes. In “ Battle Abbey” will be depicted some of the greatest battles ever fought by the United States. The Abbey will be of mediaeval architecture, with moats and draw-bridges. In it will be pictured the battles of York- town (Revolution); New Orleans (War of 1812); Buena Vista (Mexican War); Gettysburg and Manassas (the Rebellion); the Custer Massacre (Indian Warfare); and the Battle of Manila (Spanish-American War). There will be shown also many war-relics and trophies. A Palais de Costume will show the fashions in dress from a remote period in history to the present day. Among the most recent examples will be specimens of the art of Felix, Worth and other noted Parisian “couturiers.” General Grant’s cabin is the actual building of logs erected and occupied by General Ulysses S. Grant in St. Louis County less than fifty years ago. Source: Charles M. Kurtz, The Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904, in Commemoration of the Acquisition of the Louisiana Territory; A Handbook of General Information, Profusely Illustrated (St. Louis: Gottschalk Printing Company, 1903), 11–15, 19–23, 92–93, 111–114.

Document 3.5 Native Americans and Filipinos on Display, 1904 In addition to showcasing modern technologies and national development, the 1904 World’s Fair presented various exhibits about the “uncivilized” peoples of the world. In some cases, these demonstrations were static, consisting of essays, murals, and artifacts. In other cases, as shown here, they were live exhibitions. Native Americans put on daily performances, showing the horse riding and archery that white observers associated with western tribes. Filipinos reconstructed a village, demonstrating to white observers the premodern conditions in the Pacific. Both of these photographs were part of a larger effort within the United States to decide how best to tell the stories of people whose cultures seemed bound for extinction. Wild West shows, still popular in 1904, provided white audiences with reenactments of Native American rituals and major battles between Native Americans and white settlers and U.S. soldiers. Many of the nation’s first museums consigned nonwhites to the subject area of natural history, locating exhibits about Native Americans or Pacific islanders alongside exhibits on animals or the natural environment.

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Chief Yellow Hair and Council of Chippewas from the American Indian exhibit in the Department of Anthropology at the 1904 World’s Fair. Source: Missouri Historical Society

Colony of Samal Moros from the Philippines in a Department of Anthropology exhibit at the 1904 World’s Fair. Source: Missouri Historical Society

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Document 3.6 Roosevelt Corollary, 1904 In December 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt was riding high. Only one month earlier, he had won reelection in a landslide against Democrat Alton Parker. Roosevelt saw the victory as a vindication of his bold actions in both foreign and domestic policy. On December 6, he delivered his annual message to Congress, laying out a broad agenda for the nation’s future. Within that address, he detailed the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, announcing that the United States had a right to intervene in other nations to promote hemispheric independence, stability, and development. But the particular assertion of the Roosevelt Corollary is best understood within the broader messages of the 1904 annual message. Roosevelt discussed territorial administration in Alaska, Indian affairs, and the management of national parks. In all of these circumstances, Roosevelt proclaimed that the experience of governing territory acquired during the nineteenth century validated his assertion that a vigorous federal government could achieve ambitious goals.

The progress of the Indians toward civilization, though not rapid, is perhaps all that could be hoped for in view of the circumstances. Within the past year many tribes have shown, in a degree greater than ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe, is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community for which it is intended. On or near the Indian reservations there is usually very little demand for labor, and if the Indians are to earn their living and when work can not be furnished from outside (which is always preferable), then it must be furnished by the Government . . . I believe it essential to good government in Alaska, and therefore recommend, that the Congress divest the district judges and the clerks of their courts of the administrative or executive functions that they now exercise and cast them upon the governor. This would not be an innovation; it would simply conform the government of Alaska to fundamental principles, making the governorship a real instead of a merely nominal office, and leaving the judges free to give their entire attention to their judicial duties and at the same time removing them from a great deal of the strife that now embarrasses the judicial office in Alaska . . . The Alaskan natives are kindly, intelligent, anxious to learn, and willing to work. Those who have come under the influence of civilization, even for a limited period, have proved their capability of becoming self-supporting, self-respecting citizens, and ask only for the just enforcement of law and intelligent instruction and supervision. Others, living in more remote regions, primitive, simple hunters and fisher folk, who know only the life of the woods and the waters, are daily being confronted with twentieth-century civilization with all of its complexities. Their country is being overrun by strangers, the game slaughtered and driven away, the streams depleted of fish, and hitherto unknown and fatal diseases brought to them, all of which combine to produce a state of abject poverty

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and want which must result in their extinction. Action in their interest is demanded by every consideration of justice and humanity . . . The Alaskan natives should be given the right to acquire, hold, and dispose of property upon the same conditions as given other inhabitants; and the privilege of citizenship should be given to such as may be able to meet certain definite requirements. In Hawaii Congress should give the governor power to remove all the officials appointed under him. The harbor of Honolulu should be dredged. The Marine Hospital Service should be empowered to study leprosy in the islands. I ask special consideration for the report and recommendation of the governor of Porto Rico . . . Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous peace is rare; but both should be shunned. The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right can not be divorced. One of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift that tarries long in the hands of cowards. Neither does it tarry long in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too unintelligent to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty must be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside foes; although of course far more often to guard against our own selfish or thoughtless shortcomings. If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign policy in its larger aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that a nation has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong or weak, than an individual has to do injustice to another individual; that the same moral law applies in one case as in the other. But we must also remember that it is as much the duty of the Nation to guard its own rights and its own interests as it is the duty of the individual so to do . . . A self-respecting, just, and far-seeing nation should on the one hand endeavor by every means to aid in the development of the various movements which tend to provide substitutes for war, which tend to render nations in their actions toward one another, and indeed toward their own peoples, more responsive to the general sentiment of humane and civilized mankind; and on the other hand that it should keep prepared, while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself, to repel any wrong, and in exceptional cases to take action which in a more advanced stage of international relations would come under the head of the exercise of the international police. A great free people owes it to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil. We are in every way endeavoring to help on, with cordial good will, every movement which will tend to bring us into more friendly relations with the rest of mankind. In pursuance of this policy I shall shortly lay before the Senate treaties of arbitration with all powers which are willing to enter into these treaties with us. It is not possible at this period of the world’s development to agree to arbitrate all matters, but there are many matters of possible difference between us and other nations which can be thus arbitrated. Furthermore, at the request of the Interparliamentary Union, an eminent body composed of practical statesmen from all countries, I have asked the Powers to join with this Government in a second Hague conference, at which it is hoped that the work already so happily begun at The Hague may be carried some steps further toward completion. This carries out the desire expressed by the first Hague conference itself.

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It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it. In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large. There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies. Ordinarily it is very much wiser and more useful for us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and material betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our own to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for the general uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions about wrongdoing elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother’s eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be

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justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it is not to be expected that a people like ours, which in spite of certain very obvious shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole shows by its consistent practice its belief in the principles of civil and religious liberty and of orderly freedom, a people among whom even the worst crime, like the crime of lynching, is never more than sporadic, so that individuals and not classes are molested in their fundamental rights—it is inevitable that such a nation should desire eagerly to give expression to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre of the Jews in Kishenef, or when it witnesses such systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression as the cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world. Even where it is not possible to secure in other nations the observance of the principles which we accept as axiomatic, it is necessary for us firmly to insist upon the rights of our own citizens without regard to their creed or race; without regard to whether they were born here or born abroad. It has proved very difficult to secure from Russia the right for our Jewish fellow-citizens to receive passports and travel through Russian territory. Such conduct is not only unjust and irritating toward us, but it is difficult to see its wisdom from Russia’s standpoint. No conceivable good is accomplished by it. If an American Jew or an American Christian misbehaves himself in Russia he can at once be driven out; but the ordinary American Jew, like the ordinary American Christian, would behave just about as he behaves here, that is, behave as any good citizen ought to behave; and where this is the case it is a wrong against which we are entitled to protest to refuse him his passport without regard to his conduct and character, merely on racial and religious grounds. In Turkey our difficulties arise less from the way in which our citizens are sometimes treated than from the indignation inevitably excited in seeing such fearful misrule as has been witnessed both in Armenia and Macedonia. The strong arm of the Government in enforcing respect for its just rights in international matters is the Navy of the United States. I most earnestly recommend that there be no halt in the work of upbuilding the American Navy. There is no more patriotic duty before us a people than to keep the Navy adequate to the needs of this country’s position. We have undertaken to build the Isthmian Canal. We have undertaken to secure for ourselves our just share in the trade of the Orient. We have undertaken to protect our citizens from improper treatment in foreign lands. We continue steadily to insist on the application of the Monroe Doctrine to the Western Hemisphere. Unless our attitude in these and all similar matters is to be a mere boastful sham we can not afford to abandon our naval programme. Our voice is now potent for peace, and is so potent because we are not afraid of war. But our protestations upon behalf of peace would neither receive nor deserve the slightest attention if we were impotent to make them good . . . Within the last three years the United States has set an example in disarmament where disarmament was proper. By law our Army is fixed at a maximum of one hundred thousand and a minimum of sixty thousand men. When there was insurrection in the Philippines we kept the Army at the maximum. Peace came in the Philippines, and now

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our Army has been reduced to the minimum at which it is possible to keep it with due regard to its efficiency. The guns now mounted require twenty-eight thousand men, if the coast fortifications are to be adequately manned. Relatively to the Nation, it is not now so large as the police force of New York or Chicago relatively to the population of either city. We need more officers; there are not enough to perform the regular army work. It is very important that the officers of the Army should be accustomed to handle their men in masses, as it is also important that the National Guard of the several States should be accustomed to actual field maneuvering, especially in connection with the regulars. For this reason we are to be congratulated upon the success of the field maneuvers at Manassas last fall, maneuvers in which a larger number of Regulars and National Guard took part than was ever before assembled together in time of peace. No other civilized nation has, relatively to its population, such a diminutive Army as ours; and while the Army is so small we are not to be excused if we fail to keep it at a very high grade of proficiency. It must be incessantly practiced; the standard for the enlisted men should be kept very high, while at the same time the service should be made as attractive as possible; and the standard for the officers should be kept even higher—which, as regards the upper ranks, can best be done by introducing some system of selection and rejection into the promotions. We should be able, in the event of some sudden emergency, to put into the field one first-class army corps, which should be, as a whole, at least the equal of any body of troops of like number belonging to any other nation. Great progress has been made in protecting our coasts by adequate fortifications with sufficient guns. We should, however, pay much more heed than at present to the development of an extensive system of floating mines for use in all our more important harbors. These mines have been proved to be a most formidable safeguard against hostile fleets . . . . . . In the Philippine Islands there has been during the past year a continuation of the steady progress which has obtained ever since our troops definitely got the upper hand of the insurgents. The Philippine people, or, to speak more accurately, the many tribes, and even races, sundered from one another more or less sharply, who go to make up the people of the Philippine Islands, contain many elements of good, and some elements which we have a right to hope stand for progress. At present they are utterly incapable of existing in independence at all or of building up a civilization of their own. I firmly believe that we can help them to rise higher and higher in the scale of civilization and of capacity for self-government, and I most earnestly hope that in the end they will be able to stand, if not entirely alone, yet in some such relation to the United States as Cuba now stands. This end is not yet in sight, and it may be indefinitely postponed if our people are foolish enough to turn the attention of the Filipinos away from the problems of achieving moral and material prosperity, of working for a stable, orderly, and just government, and toward foolish and dangerous intrigues for a complete independence for which they are as yet totally unfit. On the other hand our people must keep steadily before their minds the fact that the justification for our stay in the Philippines must ultimately rest chiefly upon the good we are able to do in the islands. I do not overlook the fact that in the development of our interests in the Pacific Ocean and along its coasts, the Philippines have played and will play an important part; and that our interests have been served in more than one way by

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the possession of the islands. But our chief reason for continuing to hold them must be that we ought in good faith to try to do our share of the world’s work, and this particular piece of work has been imposed upon us by the results of the war with Spain. The problem presented to us in the Philippine Islands is akin to, but not exactly like, the problems presented to the other great civilized powers which have possessions in the Orient. There are points of resemblance in our work to the work which is being done by the British in India and Egypt, by the French in Algiers, by the Dutch in Java, by the Russians in Turkestan, by the Japanese in Formosa; but more distinctly than any of these powers we are endeavoring to develop the natives themselves so that they shall take an ever-increasing share in their own government, and as far as is prudent we are already admitting their representatives to a governmental equality with our own. There are commissioners, judges, and governors in the islands who are Filipinos and who have exactly the same share in the government of the islands as have their colleagues who are Americans, while in the lower ranks, of course, the great majority of the public servants are Filipinos. Within two years we shall be trying the experiment of an elective lower house in the Philippine legislature. It may be that the Filipinos will misuse this legislature, and they certainly will misuse it if they are misled by foolish persons here at home into starting an agitation for their own independence or into any factious or improper action. In such case they will do themselves no good and will stop for the time being all further effort to advance them and give them a greater share in their own government. But if they act with wisdom and self-restraint, if they show that they are capable of electing a legislature which in its turn is capable of taking a sane and efficient part in the actual work of government, they can rest assured that a full and increasing measure of recognition will be given them. Above all they should remember that their prime needs are moral and industrial, not political. It is a good thing to try the experiment of giving them a legislature; but it is a far better thing to give them schools, good roads, railroads which will enable them to get their products to market, honest courts, an honest and efficient constabulary, and all that tends to produce order, peace, fair dealing as between man and man, and habits of intelligent industry and thrift. If they are safeguarded against oppression, and if their real wants, material and spiritual, are studied intelligently and in a spirit of friendly sympathy, much more good will be done them than by any effort to give them political power, though this effort may in its own proper time and place be proper enough. Meanwhile our own people should remember that there is need for the highest standard of conduct among the Americans sent to the Philippine Islands, not only among the public servants but among the private individuals who go to them. It is because I feel this so deeply that in the administration of these islands I have positively refused to permit any discrimination whatsoever for political reasons and have insisted that in choosing the public servants consideration should be paid solely to the worth of the men chosen and to the needs of the islands. There is no higher body of men in our public service than we have in the Philippine Islands under Governor Wright and his associates. So far as possible these men should be given a free hand, and their suggestions should receive the hearty backing both of the Executive and of the Congress. There is need of a vigilant and disinterested support of our public servants in the Philippines by good citizens here in the

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United States. Unfortunately hitherto those of our people here at home who have specially claimed to be the champions of the Filipinos have in reality been their worst enemies. This will continue to be the case as long as they strive to make the Filipinos independent, and stop all industrial development of the islands by crying out against the laws which would bring it on the ground that capitalists must not “exploit” the islands. Such proceedings are not only unwise, but are most harmful to the Filipinos, who do not need independence at all, but who do need good laws, good public servants, and the industrial development that can only come if the investment of American and foreign capital in the islands is favored in all legitimate ways. Every measure taken concerning the islands should be taken primarily with a view to their advantage. We should certainly give them lower tariff rates on their exports to the United States; if this is not done it will be a wrong to extend our shipping laws to them. I earnestly hope for the immediate enactment into law of the legislation now pending to encourage American capital to seek investment in the islands in railroads, in factories, in plantations, and in lumbering and mining. Source: A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1907, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of National Literature and Art, 1908), vol. 10, 819–838.

Document 3.7 Frederick Jackson Turner Contemplates Modern America, 1911 By 1911, Frederick Jackson Turner had enjoyed almost two decades as one of the preeminent interpreters of the American past. His frontier thesis had made an immense impact ranging from the work of academic historians to the self-image and public policy of Theodore Roosevelt. Turner had trained a generation of graduate students, many of whom would become leading historians in their own right. In 1910, Turner became president of the American Historical Association. In his presidential address at the organization’s annual meeting, Turner stood back to consider how the United States had changed since 1893, when he had first addressed the impact of the frontier on the nation’s history. Although it was published in the American Historical Review and was entitled “Social Forces in American History,” Turner’s essay was more a consideration of the present than the past. Turner focused much of his attention on the impact of industrial development and demographic change. But Turner also sought to evaluate the meaning of the recent territorial acquisitions of the Spanish-American War.

The transformations through which the United States is passing in our own day are so profound, so far-reaching, that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that we are witnessing the birth of a new nation in America. The revolution in the social and economic structure of this country during the past two decades is comparable to what occurred when independence was declared and the Constitution was formed, or to the changes wrought by the era which began half a century ago, the era of Civil War and Reconstruction. These changes have been long in preparation and are, in part, the result of world-wide forces of reorganization incident to the age of steam production and large-scale industry,

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and, in part, the result of the closing of the period of the colonization of the West. They have been prophesied, and the course of the movement partly described, by students of American development; but after all, it is with a shock that the people of the United States are coming to realize that the fundamental forces which have shaped their society up to the present are disappearing. Twenty years ago, as I have before had occasion to point out, the Superintendent of the Census declared that the frontier line, which its maps had depicted for decade after decade of the westward march of the nation, could no longer be described. To-day we must add that the age of free competition of individuals for the unpossessed resources of the nation is nearing its end. It is taking less than a generation to write the chapter which began with the disappearance of the line of the frontier—the last chapter in the history of the colonization of the United States, the conclusion to the annals of its pioneer democracy. It is a wonderful chapter, this final rush of American energy upon the remaining wilderness . . . By 1907 the United States had surpassed Great Britain, Germany, and France combined in the production of pig-iron and steel together, and in the same decade a single great corporation has established its domination over the iron mines and steel manufacture of the United States. It is more than a mere accident that the United States Steel Corporation with its stocks and bonds aggregating $1,400,000,000 was organized at the beginning of the present decade. The former wilderness about Lake Superior has, principally in the past two decades, established its position as overwhelmingly the preponderant source of iron ore, present and prospective, in the United States—a treasury from which Pittsburg has drawn wealth and extended its unparalleled industrial empire in these years. The tremendous energies thus liberated at this centre of industrial power in the United States revolutionized methods of manufacture in general, and in many indirect ways profoundly influenced the life of the nation. Railroad statistics tell the same story of unprecedented development, the formation of a new industrial society . . . Having colonized the Far West, having mastered its internal resources, the nation turned at the conclusion of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century to deal with the Far East, to engage in the world-politics of the Pacific Ocean. Having brought to its logical conclusion its long continued expansion into the lands of the old Spanish empire by the successful outcome of the recent war, the United States became the mistress of the Philippines at the same time that it came into possession of the Hawaiian Islands, and the controlling influence in the Gulf of Mexico. It provided early in the present decade for connecting its Atlantic and Pacific coasts by the Isthmian Canal, and became an imperial republic with dependencies and protectorates admittedly a new world-power, with a voice potential in the problems of Europe, Asia, and Africa. This extension of power and undertaking of grave responsibilities in new fields, this entry into the sisterhood of world-states, was no unrelated event. It was, indeed, in some respects the logical outcome of the nation’s march to the Pacific, the sequence to the era in which it was engaged in occupying the free lands and exploiting the resources of the West. When it had achieved this position among the nations of the earth, the United States found itself confronted, also, with the need of constitutional readjustment, arising

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from the relations of federal government and territorial acquisitions. It was obliged to reconsider questions of the rights of man and traditional American ideals of liberty and democracy, in view of the task of government of other races politically inexperienced and undeveloped. When we turn to consider the effect upon American society and domestic policy in these two decades of transition we are met with palpable evidences of the invasion of the old pioneer democratic order. Obvious among them is the effect of unprecedented immigration to supply the mobile army of cheap labor for the centres of industrial life. In the past ten years, beginning with 1900, over eight million immigrants have arrived. The newcomers of the eight years since 1900 would, according to a writer in 1908, “repopulate all the five older New England States as they stand to-day; or, if properly disseminated over the newer parts of the country they would serve to populate no less than nineteen states of the union as they stand.” In 1907 “there were one and onequarter million arrivals. This number would entirely populate both New Hampshire and Maine, two of our oldest states.” “The arrivals of this one year would found a state with more inhabitants than any one of twenty-one of our other existing commonwealths which could be named.” Source: Frederick Jackson Turner, “Social Forces in American History,” American Historical Review 16 (1911): 217–233.

Document 3.8 Walter Lippmann on Empire, 1915 Walter Lippmann was among the leading editorial-opinion writers of the twentieth century. Indeed, he helped to invent modern opinion writing. A Harvard graduate and a founding editor of the New Republic, he wrote newspaper editorials, magazine essays, and full-length books. In the process, he became one of the models for the sort of well-educated, politically minded, critically oriented writers who continue to play such a large role in the nation’s opinion journalism. Lippmann celebrated the capacity of journalism to instruct, but he also feared that the American public could easily fall prey to charismatic communicators. That ambivalence was the primary concern of his most influential book, Public Opinion, published in 1922. In 1915, Lippmann was only twenty-six years old, but he wrote with brash confidence as he analyzed U.S. foreign relations in a book entitled The Stakes of Diplomacy. Writing at the height of World War I, he was only the latest American struggling to situate the rising power of the United States within the broader history of empires and imperialism around the globe.

What are the factors of this situation [of an empire’s rising power and corruption]? They are what might be called a scab bank, a government desiring increased political power, a class of traders associated with the government and desiring new markets and resources, an agreement with European Powers virtually turning Tripoli over to Italy, a hostile and no doubt inefficient and corrupt Turkish administration, the sinking of much money which

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had to be retrieved, an expanding Italian pride spinning dreams of ancient Rome, a natural Christian contempt for infidels. Given that situation, the Italian enterprise finds itself balked. “The Turks are hampering Italians.” Nothing easier than to regard it as a point of honor. News that Englishmen and Germans may have to replace the bankrupt Italians. Nothing easier than to regard that as a point of honor. A general feeling that to beat the Turks is for the glory of God anyway. Church money risked in a country of unbelievers. Influential and worried shareholders, who perhaps control sympathetic newspapers. Socialist agitation at home which requires the sedative of patriotism. Large numbers of unemployed orators, poets, and officers who feel that a little military glory would help. Perhaps some French and English diplomatic nudging in order to push Italy, which is Germany’s ally, into a war with Turkey, which is also Germany’s ally. The prospect of war contracts, of administrative jobs in the conquered province. The people who have something to gain play upon the national pride of those who think they have nothing to lose. The electric power plant at Benghazi becomes a point in a Holy War, a crusade, a defense of Italian sovereignty, a safeguarding of Christian sufferers, an interest of civilization, of Latin genius, of Papal power, of the Roman eagles, of Caesar, Augustus, Vergil, Dante, of Jesus Christ against Mohammed. Nobody talks about the Banco di Roma. The formula of modern imperialism seems to be that financial groups enter a weak state and create “ national interests,” which then evoke national feeling. The corruption and inefficiency of the weak state “endanger” the interests; patriotism rises to defend them, and political control follows. The prestige of a Power in the councils of the world depends upon the weight of “interests” and the patriotic fervor with which they are “protected.” I am told that it was the State Department at Washington which, in order to secure a diplomatic “foothold,” invited the American financial group to enter China. A government which hesitates very long at intervention, as the United States has done in Mexico, depreciates the value of its diplomatic power everywhere. Out of this complexity of motive there is created a union of various groups on the imperial programme: the diplomatic group is interested primarily in prestige; the military group in an opportunity to act; the bureaucratic in the creation of new positions; the financial groups in safeguarding investments; traders in securing protection and privileges; religious groups in civilizing the heathen; the “intellectuals,” in realizing theories of expansion and carrying out “manifest destinies”; the people generally in adventure and glory and the sense of being great. These interested groups severally control public opinion, and under modern methods of publicity public opinion is easily “educated.” Who should intervene in backward states, what the intervention shall mean, how the protectorate shall be conducted—this is the bone and sinew of modern diplomacy. The weak spots of the world are the arenas of friction. This friction is increased and made popular by frontier disputes over Alsace-Lorraine or Italia Irredenta, but in my judgment the boundary lines of Europe are not the grand causes of diplomatic struggle. Signor Ferrero confessed recently that the present generation of Italians had all but forgotten Italia Irredenta, and the Revanche has been a decadent French dream until the Entente and the Dual Alliance began to clash in Morocco, in Turkey, in China. Alsace-Lorraine has no doubt kept alive suspicion of Germany, and predisposed French opinion to

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inflicting diplomatic defeats in Morocco. But the arena where the European Powers really measure their strength against each other is in the Balkans, in Africa, and in Asia. Our Monroe Doctrine is part of this worldwide diplomatic contest. It is the announcement that this hemisphere is not to be made part of the substance of European diplomacy. In return we virtually agree to protect by force the interests of modern commerce in the weaker Latin-American states. We forbid European intervention, but we guarantee to remove the cause by which European intervention would be justified by Continental Powers. We have tried to establish an American oasis, free from the shiftings of European power. So far circumstances have enabled us to fulfill our pretensions. But over the rest of the world this struggle has brooded for decades, and the accumulated irritations of it have produced the great war. Diplomacy has appealed to arms because no satisfactory international solution has been found for the Balkan, Turkish, African, and Chinese problems. This war is fought not for specific possessions, but for that diplomatic prestige and leadership which are required to solve all the different problems. It is like a great election to decide who shall have the supreme power in the Concert of Europe. Austria began the contest to secure her position as a great Power in the Balkans; Russia entered it to thwart this ambition; France was engaged because German diplomatic supremacy would reduce France to a “second-class power,” which means a power that holds world power on sufferance; England could not afford to see France “crushed” or Belgium annexed because British imperialism cannot alone cope with the vigor of Germany; Germany felt herself “encircled,” which meant that wherever she went—to Morocco, Asia Minor, or China—there a coalition was ready to thwart her. The ultimate question involved was this: whenever in the future diplomats meet to settle a problem in the backward countries, which European nation shall be listened to most earnestly? What shall be the relative prestige of Germans and Englishmen and Frenchmen and Russians; what sense of their power, what historical halo, what threat of force, what stimulus to admiration shall they possess? To lose this war will be like being a Republican politician in the solid South when the Democrats are in power at Washington. It will mean political, social, and economic inferiority. Americans have every reason to understand the dangers of unorganized territory, to realize clearly why it is a “problem.” Our Civil War was preceded by thirty or forty years of diplomatic struggle for a balance of power in the West. Should the West be slave or free, that is, should it be the scene of homesteads and free labor, or of plantations and slaves? Should it be formed into states which sent senators and representatives to support the South or the North? We were virtually two nations, each trying to upset the balance of power in its own favor. And when the South saw that it was beaten, that is to say “encircled,” when its place in the Western sun was denied, the South seceded and fought. Until the problem of organizing the West had been settled, peace and federal union were impossible. The world’s problem is the same problem tremendously magnified and complicated. Source: Walter Lippmann, The Stakes of Diplomacy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1915), 104–110.

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Document 3.9 The Jones-Shafroth Act, 1917 Unlike Cuba, which secured its independence through the Cuban-American Treaty of 1903, Puerto Rico remained a dependent possession of the United States. Since 1898, the residents of Puerto Rico had occupied a nebulous constitutional status. In 1917, Congress and the Wilson administration sought to resolve the problem with the following legislation. As a polity, Puerto Rico remained outside the mainstream of U.S. governance, structured differently from states or federal territories. At the same time, the residents of Puerto Rico became U.S. citizens.

An Act To provide a civil government for Porto Rico, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, that the provisions of this Act shall apply to the island of Porto Rico and to the adjacent islands belonging to the United States, and waters of those islands; and the name Porto Rico as used in this Act shall be held to include not only the island of that name but all the adjacent islands as aforesaid.

BILL OF RIGHTS. Sec. 2. That no law shall be enacted in Porto Rico which shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, or deny to any person therein the equal protection of the laws. That in all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to have assistance of counsel for his defense, to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation, to have a copy thereof, to have a speedy and public trial, to be confronted with the witnesses against him, and to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor. That no person shall be held to answer for a criminal offense without due process of law; and no person for the same offense shall be twice put in jeopardy of punishment, nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself. That all persons shall before conviction be bailable by sufficient sureties, except for capital offenses when the proof is evident or the presumption great. That no law impairing the obligation of contracts shall be enacted. That no person shall be imprisoned for debt. That the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in case of rebellion, insurrection, or invasion the public safety may require it, in either of which events the same may be suspended by the President, or by the governor, whenever during such period the necessity for such suspension shall exist. That no ex post facto law or bill of attainder shall be enacted. Private property shall not be taken or damaged for public use except upon payment of just compensation ascertained in the manner provided by law. Nothing contained in this Act shall be construed to limit the power of the legislature to enact laws for the protection of the lives, health, or safety of employees.

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That no law granting a title of nobility shall be enacted, and no person holding any office of profit or trust under the government of Porto Rico shall, without the consent of the Congress of the United States, accept any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind whatever from any king, queen, prince, or foreign State or any officer thereof. That excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. That the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. That no warrant for arrest or search shall issue but upon probable cause supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized. That slavery shall not exist in Porto Rico. That involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall not exist in Porto Rico. That no law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech or of the press or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the Government for redress of grievances. That no law shall be made respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, and that the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and worship without discrimination or preference shall forever be allowed, and that no political or religious test other than an oath to support the Constitution of the United States and the laws of Porto Rico shall be required as a qualification. That no public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, sectarian institution or association, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary as such, or for charitable, industrial, educational, or benevolent purposes to any person, corporation, or community not under the absolute control of Porto Rico. Contracting of polygamous or plural marriages hereafter is prohibited. That one year after the approval of this Act and thereafter it shall be unlawful to import, manufacture, sell, or give away, or to expose for sale or gift any intoxicating drink or drug: Provided, That the legislature may authorize and regulate importation, manufacture, and sale of said liquors and drugs for medicinal, sacramental, industrial, and scientific uses only. The penalty for violations of this provision with reference to intoxicants shall be a fine of not less than $25 for the first offense, and for second and subsequent offenses a fine of not less than $50 and imprisonment for not less than one month or submission of repeal more than one year: And provided further, That at any general election within five years after the approval of this Act this provision may, upon petition of not less than ten per centum of the qualified electors of Porto Rico, be submitted to a vote of the qualified electors of Porto Rico, and if a majority of all the qualified electors of Porto Rico voting upon such question shall vote to repeal this provision, it shall thereafter not be in force and effect; otherwise it shall be in full force and effect . . .

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That eight hours shall constitute a day’s work in all cases of employment of laborers and mechanics by and on behalf of the government of the island on public works, except in cases of emergency. That the employment of children under the age of fourteen years in any occupation injurious to health or morals or hazardous to life or limb is hereby prohibited . . . Sec. 4. That the capital of Porto Rico shall be at the city of San Juan, and the seat of government shall be maintained there. Sec. 5. That all citizens of Porto Rico, as defined by section seven of the Act of April twelfth, nineteen hundred, “temporarily to provide revenues and a civil government for Porto Rico, and for other purposes,” and all natives of Porto Rico who were temporarily absent from that island on April eleventh, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, and have since returned and are permanently residing in that island, and are not citizens of any foreign country, are hereby declared, and shall be deemed and held to be, citizens of the United States: Provided, That any person hereinbefore described may retain his present political status by making a declaration, under oath, of his decision to do so within six months of the taking effect of this Act before the district court in the district in which he resides, the declaration to be in form as follows: “I, being duly sworn, hereby declare my intention not to become a citizen of the United States as provided in the Act of Congress conferring United States citizenship upon citizens of Porto Rico and certain natives permanently residing in said island.” . . . Sec. 8. That the harbor areas and navigable streams and bodies of water and submerged lands underlying the same in and around the island of Porto Rico and the adjacent islands and waters, now owned by the United States and not reserved by the United States for public purposes, be, and the same are hereby placed under the control of the government of Porto Rico, to be administered in the same manner and subject to the same limitations as the property enumerated in the preceding section: . . . Provided further, That nothing in this Act contained shall be construed so as to affect or impair in any manner the terms or conditions of any authorizations, permits, or other powers heretofore lawfully granted or exercised in or in respect of said waters and submerged lands in and surrounding said island and its adjacent islands by the Secretary of War or other authorized officer or agent of the United States . . .

EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT. Sec. 12. That the supreme executive power shall be vested in a governor, whose official title shall be “The Governor of Porto Rico.” He shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and hold his office at the pleasure of the President and until his successor is chosen and qualified . . . Sec. 13. That the following executive departments are hereby created: A department of justice, the head of which shall be designated as the attorney general; a department of finance, the head of which shall be designated as the treasurer; a department of interior, the head of which shall be designated as the commissioner of the interior; a department of education, the head of which shall be designated as the commissioner of education; a department of agriculture and labor, the head of which shall be designated as the

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commissioner of agriculture and labor; and a department of health, the head of which shall be designated as the commissioner of health. The attorney general and commissioner of education shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate of the United States, to hold office for four years . . . The heads of departments shall collectively form a council to the governor, known as the executive council . . .

LEGISLATIVE DEPARTMENT. Sec. 25. That all local legislative powers in Porto Rico, except as herein otherwise provided, shall be vested in a legislature which shall consist of two houses, one the senate and the other the house of representatives, and the two houses shall be designated “the Legislature of Porto Rico.” Sec. 26. That the Senate of Porto Rico shall consist of nineteen members elected for terms of four years by the qualified electors of Porto Rico . . . Sec. 27. That the House of Representatives of Porto Rico shall consist of thirty-nine members elected quadrennially by the qualified Number and term of electors of Porto Rico, as hereinafter provided . . . Sec. 28. That for the purpose of elections hereafter to the legislature the island of Porto Rico shall be divided into thirty-five representative districts, composed of contiguous and compact territory and established, so far as practicable, upon the basis of equal population . . . Sec. 31. That members of the Senate and House of Representatives of Porto Rico shall receive compensation at the rate of $7 per day for the first ninety days of each regular session and $1 per day for each additional day of such session while in session, and mileage for each session at the rate of 10 cents per kilometer for each kilometer actually and necessarily traveled in going from their legislative districts to the capital and therefrom to their place of residence in their districts by the usual routes of travel . . .

JUDICIAL DEPARTMENT. Sec 40. That the judicial power shall be vested in the courts and in tribunals of Porto Rico now established and in operation under and by virtue of existing laws. The jurisdiction of said courts and the form of procedure in them, and the various officers and attaches thereof, shall also continue to be as now provided until otherwise provided by law: Provided, however, That the chief justice and associate justices of the supreme court shall be appointed by the President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate of the United States, and the Legislature of Porto Rico shall have authority, from time to time as it may see fit, not inconsistent with this Act, to organize, modify, or rearrange the courts and their jurisdiction and procedure, except the District Court of the United States for Porto Rico. Sec. 41. That Porto Rico shall constitute a judicial district to be called “the district of Porto Rico.” The President, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint one district judge, who shall serve for a term of four years and until his successor

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is appointed and qualified and whose salary shall be $5,000 per annum. There shall be appointed in like manner a district attorney, whose salary shall be $4,000 per annum, and a marshal for said district, whose salary shall be $3,500 per annum, each for a term of four years unless sooner removed by the President . . .

MISCELLANEOUS PROVISIONS. Sec. 50. That, except as in this Act otherwise provided, the salaries of all the officials of Porto Rico not appointed by the President, including deputies, assistants, and other help, shall be such and be so paid out of the revenues of Porto Rico as shall from time to time be determined by the Legislature of Porto Rico and approved by the governor; and if the legislature shall fail to make an appropriation for such salaries, the salaries theretofore fixed shall be paid without the necessity of further appropriations therefor.

Approved, March 2, 1917. Source: Statutes at Large, 64th Cong., 2d sess. (1917): 951–968.

Document 3.10 Herbert Hoover Assesses Conditions in Europe, 1919 Born in 1874, Herbert Hoover first had a career as a mining engineer. He worked on projects throughout the United States and Australia, became a leading expert in the field, and built a sizable fortune. During World War I, he became a humanitarian, coordinating a massive effort to evacuate Americans in Europe at the outbreak of war and later overseeing the distribution of American foodstuffs to starving people throughout Belgium. After the war, he was the logical choice to serve on the council directing the American Relief Administration. Hoover arrived in the wake of the Versailles conference. The following report reflected his assessment of conditions in western Europe, the political threats emerging throughout the continent, and the prospects for American leadership.

Memorandum by the Director-General, of Relief on the Economic Situation of Europe The economic difficulties of Europe as a whole at the signature of Peace may be almost summarised in the phrase “demoralised productivity.” The production of necessaries for this 450,000,000 population (including Russia) has never been at so low an ebb as at this day. A summary of the unemployment bureaux in Europe will show that 15,000,000 families are receiving unemployment allowances in one form or another, and are, in the main, being paid by constant inflation of currency. A rough estimate would indicate that the population of Europe is at least 100,000,000 greater than can be supported without imports, and must live by the production and distribution of exports, and their situation

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is aggravated not only by lack of raw materials imports, but by low production of European raw materials. Due to the same low production, Europe is to-day importing vast quantities of certain commodities which she formerly produced for herself and can again produce. Generally, not only in [is] production far below even the level of the time of the signing of the Armistice, but far below the maintenance of life and health without unparalleled rate of import. Even prior to the war these populations managed to produce from year to year but a trifling margin of commodities over necessary consumption or to exchange for deficient commodities from abroad. It is true that in pre-war times Europe managed to maintain armies and navies, together with a comparatively small class of non-producers, and to gain slowly in physical improvements and investments abroad, but these luxuries and accumulations were only at the cost of a dangerously low standard of living to a very large number. The productivity of Europe in pre-war times had behind it the intensive stimulus of individualism and of a high state of economic discipline, and the density of population at all times responded closely to the resulting volume of production. During the war the intensive organisation of economy in consumption, the patriotic stimulus to exertion, and the addition of women to productive labour largely balanced the diversion of man power to war and munitions. These impulses have been lost.

II It is not necessary to review at length the causes of this decrease of productivity. They comprise in the main as follows:— The industrial and commercial demoralisation arising originally out of the war but continued out of the struggle for political rearrangements during the Armistice, the creation of new Governments, the inexperience and friction between these Governments in the readjustment of economic relations. The proper and insistent demand of labour for higher standards of living and a voice in administration of their effort has, unfortunately, become impregnated with the theory that the limitation of effort below physical necessity will increase the total employment or improve their condition. There is a great relaxation of effort as the reflex of physical exhaustion of large sections of the population from privation, mental and physical strain of the war. To a minor degree, considering the whole volume, there has been a destruction of equipment and tools and loss of organisation and skill due to war diversions with a loss of man power. This latter is not at present pertinent in the face of present unemployment. (The demoralisation in production of coal in Europe to-day is an example in point of all these three forces mentioned above, and promises a coal famine, and with industrial disaster, unless remedied. It is due to a small percentage from the destruction of man power or the physical limitation of coal mines or their equipment. It is due in the largest degree to the human factor of the limitation of effort.)

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The continuation of the blockade after the Armistice has undoubtedly destroyed enterprise even in open countries, and, of course, prevented any recovery in enemy countries. The shortage in overseas transportation and the result of uncertainties of the Armistice upon international credits have checked the flow of raw materials and prevented recovery in the production of commodities especially needed for exchange for imports from overseas. The result of this delay has been unemployment, stagnation, absorption of capital in consumable commodities to some extent all over Europe. From all these causes, accumulated to different intensity in different localities, there is the essential fact that unless productivity can be rapidly increased, there can be nothing but political, moral, and economic chaos, finally interpreting itself in loss of life on a scale hitherto undreamed of.

III Coincident with this demoralisation in production, other disastrous economic phenomena have developed themselves, the principal one of which is that the very large wage paid special workers and the large sums accumulated by speculation and manufacture during the war have raised the standard of living in many individuals from the level of mere necessities to a high level of luxuries. Beyond this class there is a reflex in many other classes from the strenuous economies against waste and the consumption of non-essentials in all countries, and, as a result, there is to-day an outbreak of extravagance to a disheartening degree. Another economic change of favourable nature from a human point of view, but intensifying the problems of the moment, has been the rise in the standard of living in large sections of the working classes through the larger and better wage distribution, separation allowances, &c., during the war. Parallel with these classes are those of fixed income, the unorganised workers, the unemployed to whom the rising cost of living is inflicting the greatest hardship.

IV During some short period, it may be possible for the Western Hemisphere, which has retained and even increased its productivity, to supply the deficiencies of Europe. Such deficiencies would have to be supplied in large degree upon credits; but, aside from this, the entire surplus productivity of the Western Hemisphere is totally incapable of meeting the present deficiency in European production if it is long continued. Nor, as a practical fact, could credits be mobilised for this purpose for more than a short period, because all credits must necessarily be simply an advance against the return of commodities in exchange, and credits will break down the instant that the return of commodities becomes improbable. Further, if such credits be obtained in more than temporary purposes, it would result in economic slavery of Europe to the Western Hemisphere, and the ultimate end would be war again. The solution, therefore, of the problem, except in purely temporary aspects, does not lie in a stream of commodities on credit from the Western Hemisphere, but lies in a vigorous realisation of the actual situation in each country of Europe and a resolute statesmanship based on such a realisation. The populations of Europe must be brought to a realisation that productivity must be instantly increased.

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V The outcome of social ferment and class consciousness is the most difficult of problems to solve. Growing out of the yearning for relief from the misery imposed by the war, and out of the sharp contrasts in degree of class suffering, especially in defeated countries, the demand for economic change in the status of labour has received a great stimulus, leading to violence and revolution in large areas, and a great impulse to radicalism in all others. In the main, these movements have not infected the agricultural classes, but are essentially a town phenomena. In this ferment, Socialism and Communism has embraced to itself the claim to speak for all the downtrodden, to alone bespeak human sympathy, and to alone present remedies, to be the lone voice of liberalism. Every economic patent medicine has flocked under this banner. Europe is full of noisy denunciation of private property as necessarily being exploitation. Considerable reliance upon some degree of Communism has been embraced by industrial labour even in nonrevolutionary countries. Its extremists are loud in assertion that production can be maintained by the impulse of altruism alone, instead of selfinterest. Too often they are embracing criminal support and criminal methods to enforce their ideals of human betterment. Every country is engaged in political experimentation with varying degrees of these hypotheses, and so far every trial has reduced production. The Western Hemisphere, with its more equitable division of property, its wider equality of opportunity, still believes that productivity rests on the stimulus from all the immutable human qualities of selfishness, self-interest, altruism, intelligence, and education. It still believes that the remedy of economic wrong lies, not in tampering with the delicate and highly developed organisation of production and distribution, but in a better division of the profits arising from them. It still believes in the constitutional solution of these problems by the will of the majority, while Europe is drifting toward the domination of extremist minorities. The Western Hemisphere’s productivity is being maintained at a surplus over its own needs. The first and cardinal effort of European statesmanship must be to secure the materials and tools to labour, and to secure its return to work. They must also secure a recognition of the fact that, what ever the economic theory or political cry, it must embrace the maximum individual effort, for there is no margin of surplus productivity in Europe to risk revolutionary experimentation. No economic policy will bring food to those stomachs or fuel to those hearths that does not secure the maximum production. There is no use of tears over rising prices: they are, to a great degree, a visualisation of insufficient production.

VI During the period of reconstruction and recovery from reduced productivity, the conservation in the consumption of non-essential commodities is more critical than any time during the war. The relaxation of restriction on imports and on consumption of articles of this character since the Armistice is disheartening in outlook. It finds its indication in the increased consumption of beverages and articles de luxe in many countries, even above a pre-war normal. Never has there been such a necessity for the curtailment of luxury as exists to-day.

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VII The universal practice in all the countries at war of raising funds by inflation of currency is now bringing home its burden of trouble, and in extreme cases the most resolute action must be taken, and at once. In other countries of even the lesser degree of inflation, such currency must be reduced and included in the funded debt, or alternately the price of wages, living, and international exchange must be expected to adjust itself to this depression. The outcry against the high cost of living, the constant increase of wages, and the fall in exchange that is going on, is, in a considerable degree, due to this inevitable readjustment.

VIII The stimulation of production lies in the path of avoidance of all limitations of the reward to the actual producer. In other words, attempts to control prices (otherwise than in the sense of control of vicious speculation) is the negation of stimulation to production, and can only result in further curtailment of the total of commodities available for the total number of human beings to be fed, clothed, and housed. There still exist in Europe great bureaucracies created from the necessity of control of price and distribution by the conditions of the war who are loath to recognise that with world markets open no such acute situation exists, and that their continued existence is not essential except in the control of speculation. The argument so much advanced that world shortage may develop and justifies continued control of distribution and price is based upon the fallacious assumption that even if the world markets are freed of restraint that there is a shortage today in any commodity so profound as to endanger health and life. From any present evidence, thanks to the high production outside Europe, no shortage exists that will not find its quick remedy in diminished consumption or substitution of other commodities through minor alteration and price. All attempts at international control of price, with view to benefiting the population in Europe at the cost of the producer elsewhere, will inevitably produce retrogression in production abroad, the impact of which will be felt in Europe more than elsewhere. A decrease of 20 per cent of Western Hemisphere wheat would not starve the West; it would starve Europe. It must never be overlooked that control of price and distribution cannot stop with a few prime commodities, but, once started, its repercussions drive into a succeeding chain of commodities, and that on the downward road of price control there can be no stoppage until all commodities have been placed under restriction, with inevitable stifling of the total production. It is also often overlooked by the advocates of price control that, whereas the high level of production was maintained during the war even under a restraint of price, this high production was obtained by the most vivid appeal to patriotic impulse on both sides of the front. This stimulus to production and distribution no longer maintains, and the world must go back to the prime impulse, and that is the reward to the individual producer and distributor. That body of advocates who have deduced from war phenomena that production and distribution can be increased and maintained by appealing to altruism as the equivalent of patriotism or self-interest, should observe the phenomena of Russia, where the greatest food exporting country is to-day starving.

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IX It must be evident that the production cannot increase if political incompetence continues in blockade, embargoes, censorship mobilisation, large armies, navies, and war.

X There are certain foundations of industry in Europe that, no matter what the national or personal ownership or control may be, they yet partake of the nature of the public utilities in which other nations have a moral right. For instance, the discriminatory control of ships, railways, waterways, coal, and iron, in such a manner as to prevent the resumption of production by other States, will inevitably debar economic recuperation and lead to local spats of economic chaos, with its ultimate infection abroad, to say nothing of the decrease in productivity. These misuses are already too evident.

XI The question of assistance from the Western Hemisphere during a certain temporary period and the devotion of its limited surplus productivity to Europe is a matter of importance, and one that requires statesmanlike handling and vision. It is but a minor question compared to those stated above, and it is in a great degree dependent upon the proper solution of the factors already touched upon. It is a service that the Western Hemisphere must approach in a high sense of human duty and sympathy. This sense will, however, be best performed by the insistence that their aid would not be forthcoming to any country that did not resolutely set in order its internal, financial, and political situations, that did not devote itself to the increase of productivity, that did not curtail consumption of luxuries and the expenditure upon armament, and did not cease hostilities, and did not treat their neighbors fairly. If these conditions were complied with, it is the duty of the West to put forth every possible effort to tide Europe over this period of temporary economic difficulties. Without the fulfilment of these conditions the effort is hopeless. With Europe turned toward Peace, with her skill and labour aligned to overcome the terrible accumulation of difficulty, the economic burden upon the West should not last over a year, and can be carried and will be repaid. To effect these results the resources of the Western Hemisphere and here must be mobilised. Herbert Hoover July 3, 1919 Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, vol. 10, The Paris Peace Conference (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office, 1948), 462–468.

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Document 3.11 Robert Lansing on Self-Determination, 1921 During nearly five years as secretary of state (1915–1920), Robert Lansing faced the American struggle to remain neutral during World War I, the often-tense relations among allies after the United States entered the war, the turmoil that followed the war, the complex negotiations at Versailles, and finally the failed effort to secure approval for American participation in the League of Nations. Lansing responded with a calm, methodical style that had also marked his successful legal career. It marked a major change in the State Department. Lansing’s predecessor, perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, was a raucous and inspiring orator who had been an eloquent advocate on behalf of working Americans but was entirely overwhelmed by foreign policy. Lansing shared both the outlook and the style of Woodrow Wilson, but, although he was willing to support the League of Nations, he did not express Wilson’s fervor for the organization. After Wilson’s stroke, Lansing questioned the president’s ability to govern, and he rapidly lost influence within the administration. As if to prove that he could still govern, Wilson secured Lansing’s resignation. Despite the circumstances toward the end of his tenure in the administration, Lansing remained a steadfast advocate on behalf of U.S. goals during the war and at the Paris peace conference. Like so many veterans of the federal leadership, Lansing hoped to secure his legacy by publishing a book. The following excerpt reveals just how much Lansing agreed with a general commitment to self-determination, the criticism of old European empires, and the inability to consider how those principles might extend to colonial peoples.

“Self-determination” is as right in theory as the more famous phrase “the consent of the governed,” which has for three centuries been repeatedly declared to be sound by political philosophers and has been generally accepted as just by civilized peoples, but which has been for three centuries commonly ignored by statesmen because the right could not be practically applied without imperiling national safety, always the paramount consideration in international and national affairs. The two phrases mean substantially the same thing and have to an extent been used interchangeably by those who advocate the principle as a standard of right. “Self-determination” was not a new thought. It was a restatement of the old one. Under the present political organization of the world, based as it is on the idea of nationality, the new phrase is as unsusceptible of universal application as the old one was found to be. Fixity of national boundaries and of national allegiance, and political stability would disappear if this principle was uniformly applied. Impelled by new social conditions, by economic interests, by racial prejudices, and by the various forces which affect society, change and uncertainty would result from an attempt to follow the principle in every case to which it is possible to apply it. Among my notes I find one of December 20, 1918—that is, one week after the American Commission landed in France—in which I recorded my thoughts concerning certain phrases or epigrams of the President, which he had declared to be bases of peace, and which I considered to contain the seeds of future trouble. In regard to the asserted right of “self-determination” I wrote:

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“When the President talks of ‘self-determination’ what unit has he in mind? Does he mean a race, a territorial area, or a community? Without a definite unit which is practical, application of this principle is dangerous to peace and stability.”

Ten days later (December 30) the frequent repetition of the phrase in the press and by members of certain groups and unofficial delegations, who were in Paris seeking to obtain hearings before the Conference, caused me to write the following: “The more I think about the President’s declaration as to the right of ‘self-determination,’ the more convinced I am of the danger of putting such ideas into the minds of certain races. It is bound to be the basis of impossible demands on the Peace Congress and create trouble in many lands. “What effect will it have on the Irish, the Indians, the Egyptians, and the nationalists among the Boers? Will it not breed discontent, disorder, and rebellion? Will not the Mohammedans of Syria and Palestine and possibly of Morocco and Tripoli rely on it? How can it be harmonized with Zionism, to which the President is practically committed? “The phrase is simply loaded with dynamite. It will raise hopes which can never be realized. It will, I fear, cost thousands of lives. In the end it is bound to be discredited, to be called the dream of an idealist who failed to realize the danger until too late to check those who attempt to put the principle in force. What a calamity that the phrase was ever uttered! What misery it will cause! . . .”

It may be pointed out as a matter of special interest to the student of American history that, if the right of “self-determination” were sound in principle and uniformly applicable in establishing political allegiance and territorial sovereignty, the endeavor of the Southern States to secede from the American Union in 1861 would have been wholly justifiable; and, conversely, the Northern States, in forcibly preventing secession and compelling the inhabitants of the States composing the Confederacy to remain under the authority of the Federal Government, would have perpetrated a great and indefensible wrong against the people of the South by depriving them of a right to which they were by nature entitled. This is the logic of the application of the principle of “selfdetermination” to the political rights at issue in the American Civil War. I do not believe that there are many Americans of the present generation who would support the proposition that the South was inherently right and the North was inherently wrong in that great conflict. There were, at the time when the sections were arrayed in arms against each other, and there may still be, differences of opinion as to the legal right of secession under the Constitution of the United States, but the inherent right of a people of a State to throw off at will their allegiance to the Federal Union and resume complete sovereignty over the territory of the State was never urged as a conclusive argument. It was the legal right and not the natural right which was emphasized as justifying those who took up arms in order to disrupt the Union. But if an American citizen denies that the principle of “self-determination” can be rightfully applied to the affairs of his own country, how can he consistently maintain that it is a right inseparable from a true conception of political liberty and therefore universally applicable, just in principle, and wise from the practical point of view? Of course, those who subscribe to “self-determination” and advocate it as a great truth fundamental to every political society organized to protect and promote civil liberty, do not claim it for races, peoples, or communities whose state of barbarism or ignorance

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deprive them of the capacity to choose intelligently their political affiliations. As to peoples or communities, however, who do possess the intelligence to make a rational choice of political allegiance, no exception is made, so far as words go, to the undeviating application of the principle. It is the affirmation of an unqualified right. It is one of those declarations of principle which sounds true, which in the abstract may be true, and which appeals strongly to man’s innate sense of moral right and to his conception of natural justice, but which, when the attempt is made to apply it in every case, becomes a source of political instability and domestic disorder and not infrequently a cause of rebellion. Source: Robert Lansing, The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), 96–102.

Document 3.12 The Indian Citizenship Act, 1924 Throughout much of the eighteenth century, Native Americans had been expressly denied state and federal citizenship in the United States. By the twentieth century, however, large numbers of Native Americans had secured federal citizenship, either through changes in citizenship law, marriage, or legal challenges. Meanwhile, most Native Americans also had formal membership in the various federally recognized tribes. In 1924, Congress hoped to resolve the status of Native Americans once and for all. Powerful in its brevity, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 proclaimed that Indians would enjoy both federal citizenship and tribal membership. In so doing, the act extended to Native Americans the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which had been ratified in 1868 and, in its promise of citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the United States, was intended primarily to secure the rights of former slaves. But Native Americans had occupied a more nebulous status in the years after 1868, in large part because Native Americans themselves had proclaimed their own independence. For all its promises of legal change, the Indian Citizenship Act had only limited impact. Native Americans continued to face both legal and unofficial discrimination.

An Act To authorize the Secretary of the Interior to issue certificates of citizenship to Indians. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That all non-citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States: Provided, That the granting of such citizenship shall not in any manner impair or otherwise affect the right of any Indian to tribal or other property.

Approved, June 2, 1924. Source: Statutes at Large, 68th Cong., 1st sess. (1924): 253.

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Document 3.13 FDR Proposes an American Foreign Policy, 1928 In 1928, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was preparing for his political rebirth. Seven years after polio left him unable to walk, Roosevelt was making a series of discreet public appearances in the run-up to his bid for governor of New York in 1929. Most of his comments focused on the need for domestic reform; this article, published in Foreign Affairs, was one of his few major statements on international relations. The article appeared opposite a similar discussion of Republican foreign policy by Ogden L. Mills, who, like Roosevelt, was a former member of the New York State legislature and who, in 1927, was undersecretary of the Treasury in the Coolidge administration. There are two ways to read this article. If the reader looks backward from Roosevelt’s role as world leader in World War II, the article can seem like a prescient call for internationalism in an age of growing isolationist sentiment. If one looks forward, however, as Roosevelt himself had to do, the article takes on a different character. Long an admirer of the sort of vigorous foreign policy and global mission championed by Theodore Roosevelt, FDR was only the latest American policymaker to take a long view in claiming that the United States had a right and a responsibility to be a world leader. More specifically, he shared the conviction of the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations that the United States should play a direct role in shaping the development of countries in the Americas.

OUR FOREIGN POLICY A DEMOCRATIC VIEW By Franklin D. Roosevelt In our century and a half of national life there have been outstanding periods when American leadership has influenced the thought and action of the civilized world towards international good will and peace; and there have been moments—rare ones, fortunately—when American policy either has been negative and sterile, or has earned for us dislike or fear or ridicule. I believe many millions of citizens in the United States share my conviction that the past nine years must be counted on the debit side of the ledger. Since the summer of 1919 our country has had to face the charge that in a time when great constructive aid was needed in the task of solving the grave problems facing the whole earth, we have contributed little or nothing save the isolated Naval Conference of 1921. Even here the ground gained was not held. The definite sacrifices we made were not productive because we assumed that a mere signature was enough; no machinery was set up to finish the work. This is a negative charge. On the positive side, we must admit also that the outside world almost unanimously views us with less good will today than at any previous period. This is serious unless we take the deliberate position that the people of the United States owe nothing to the rest of mankind and care nothing for the opinion of others so long as our seacoasts are impregnable and our pocketbooks are filled.

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An analysis of our own history disproves the accusation that this selfish spirit is the real American spirit. In the debates during the war of the Revolution and in the long discussions immediately preceding the adoption of the Constitution it was plain that careful thought was being given to every conceivable form of government in the hope that what the United States finally adopted might serve as a pattern for other peoples, especially in regard to the spirit that should govern the relations of one state with another. The words of the Declaration of Independence itself invoke a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Through more than twenty years of European turmoil following the French Revolution our course was a pacific one, marked by a growing understanding of the old-fashioned evils of privateering, impressment and interference with neutral commerce by belligerents. It is worth while to remember that the modern “economic boycott” had its ancestor in the interesting if premature “embargo” and “non-intercourse” laws of Jefferson. After the general peace of 1815, the newly-won independence of the Central and South American nations provided frequent opportunities for reconquest and disturbance; our response was the Monroe Doctrine, a policy aimed not only at self-protection but, in the larger sense, at continental peace. Promulgated by a Democratic Administration, it was our counter-move against the desperate attempt of the Holy Alliance to curb the rise of liberalism by interfering in the internal affairs of government and by crushing revolting colonies desirous of setting up democracies. Here again the thought of America was not solely selfish, but was influenced by an ideal. As the years passed, American foreign policy, through ups and downs, showed a broadening tendency towards settling disputes peacefully, helping sister nations, and gaining the world’s respect and good will. With Canada, our nearest neighbor, the Maine and Oregon boundaries were permanently adjudicated and the whole frontier was disarmed. In the Far Eastern attitude of respect for Chinese national integrity, the Perry Expedition, and the visit of Townsend Harris to Japan were, in comparison with European habits, founded on peaceful methods not on naval bombardments. The settlement by arbitration of the Alabama claims and later of the Fisheries and Behring Sea controversies were further milestones on the same road. Those of us who remember well the war with Spain will agree that, in spite of the slogan “Remember the Maine,” the country’s deep-seated approval of the war grew out of a desire for the liberation of the people of Cuba from a stupid and antiquated Spanish yoke. It was not a war of revenge, but the offer of a helping hand. It took the elder statesmen of Europe ten years to believe that we had no intention of annexing Cuba . . . So also the useful if unsuccessful agitation by the “Anti-Imperialists” helped to fix it as a national policy that we should educate the Filipinos with a view to their ultimately being ready for self-government. This was the precursor of the “Mandate” theory of the league of nations . . . In 1909 began four years which counted as a definite setback in our liberal leadership. “Dollar Diplomacy” as adopted by President Taft and Secretary Knox placed money leadership ahead of moral leadership in the Far East. This policy was extended to Honduras and Nicaragua, and the American Marines who went to the latter country in 1911 as a very definite part of a banking deal have been there almost continuously ever

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since. To these years also belongs the Panama Canal Tolls legislation, a definite breach of an existing Treaty. It was healed several years later when, at the insistence of President Wilson, the offending legislation was repealed. We are apt to think of the Wilson Administration’s foreign policies only in terms of the Great War. We forget that from its earliest days it marked a restoration of high moral purpose to our international relationships. In 1913 the President threw “Dollar Diplomacy” out of the window by refusing to approve a six-power loan to China. He based his action broadly on the wish to see China retain control of its own resources and not become subject to further dismemberment at the hands of European creditors. Next came the very notable declaration to Latin America in the Mobile speech in October, 1913: “The United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest. She must regard it as one of the duties of friendship to see that from no quarter are material interests made superior to human liberty and national opportunity.” President Wilson’s policy towards Mexico, ridiculed as “watchful waiting,” was in line with the Mobile declaration, and a growing belief among South Americans in our honesty of purpose resulted in the offer of mediation by the “A.B.C. powers”—Argentine, Brazil and Chili. Here was an action which future statesmen can and should turn to great advantage. The problem was a local one; Mexico is at our very doors. Yet we hailed gladly the friendly offer of three other American republics, thousands of miles away, in another continent, to help work out a constructive solution. Only the explosion of the World War prevented the fruitful development of this method of dealing with Latin American difficulties . . . Last of all, and in many ways most important of all, is the subject of the Americas. The Wilson Administration started splendidly by eliminating “Dollar Diplomacy,” and by the Mobile speech to which I have already referred. It helped the cause of better feeling on the part of the Central and South American nations by its ready acceptance of the offer of Argentine, Brazil, and Chili to be of friendly assistance in Mexico. But intervention as we practiced it in Santo Domingo and Haiti was not another forward step. It is not that assistance of some sort was not necessary; it was the method which was wrong. I had a slight part in these actions. As they are excellent illustrations of circumstances which may recur it is worth while to summarize them. In the case of Santo Domingo we had had for several years by treaty an American Customs Receiver in that Republic, principally to insure the payment of the external debt. Serious political disturbances endangered economic life and threatened anarchy, and when a revolution left the country without a president, a cabinet or legislature, or even any form of government, American marines and sailors were landed. They remained until last year. Peace was insured, goods, roads, railroads, sanitation, honest taxes and honest expenditures were introduced, and the government was handed back to the citizens of Santo Domingo after a stewardship of about twelve years. We accomplished an excellent piece of constructive work, and the world ought to thank us. In Haiti a worse situation faced us. That Republic was in chronic trouble, and as it is close to Cuba the bad influence was felt across the water. Presidents were murdered, governments fled, several times a year. We landed our marines and sailors only when the unfortunate Chief Magistrate of the moment was dragged out of the French Legion, cut into six pieces and

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thrown to the mob. Here again we cleaned house, restored order, built public works and put governmental operation on a sound an honest basis. We are still there. It is true, however, that in Santo Domingo and especially in Haiti we seem to have paid too little attention to making the citizens of these states more capable of reassuming the control of their own governments. But we have done a fine piece of material work, and the world ought to thank us. But does it? In these cases the world is really the Latin American world, for Europe cares little about what goes on in Santo Domingo or Haiti or Nicaragua. The other republics of the Americas do not thank us, on the contrary they disapprove our intervention almost unanimously. By what right, they say, other than the right of main force, does the United States arrogate unto itself the privilege of intervening alone in the internal affairs of another Sovereign Republic? The net result of these instances, and recently of the far less justified intervention in Nicaragua, is that never before in our history have we had fewer friends in the Western Hemisphere than we have today. We are certainly far from popular in Canada; we are slightly better off than last year in Mexico, thanks to the individual efforts of Mr. Morrow and Col. Lindbergh; and in the sixteen Republics of Central and South America the United States Government by its recent policies has allowed a dislike and mistrust of long standing to grow intro something like positive hate and fear. The time has come when we must accept not only certain facts but many new principles of a higher law, a newer and better standard in international relations. We are exceedingly jealous of our own sovereignty and it is only right that we should respect a similar feeling among other nations. The peoples of other Republics of this Western world are just as patriotic, just as proud of their sovereignty. Many of these nations are large, wealthy and highly civilized. The peace, the security, the integrity, the independence of every one of the American Republics is of interest to all the others, not to the United States alone. It is possible that in the days to come one of our sister nations may fall upon evil days; disorder and bad government may require that a helping hand be given her citizens as a matter of temporary necessity to bring back order and stability. In that event it is not the right or the duty of the United States to intervene alone. It is rather the duty of the United States to associate with itself other American Republics, to give intelligent joint study to the problem, and, if the conditions warrant, to offer the helping hand or hands in the name of the Americas. Single-handed intervention by us in the internal affairs of other nations must end; with the coöperation of others we shall have more order in this hemisphere and less dislike . . . In the simplest terms, this is the argument for a policy different from that of the past nine years. Up until then most of our history shows us to have been a nation leading others in the slow upward steps to better international understanding and the peaceful settlement of disagreements. During these nine years we have stood still, with the unfortunate effect of earning greater or less ill will on the part of the other civilized peoples. Even a lack of good will in the long run must affect our trade, as we have been shown by a recent concrete example in Argentina. Neither from the argument of financial gain, nor from the sounder reasoning of the Golden Rule, can our policy, or lack of policy, be approved. This time is ripe to start another chapter. On that new page there is much that should be written in the spirit of our forbears. If the leadership is right—or, more truly, if the spirit behind it is great—the United States can regain

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the world’s trust and friendship and become again of service. We can point the way once more to the reducing of armaments; we can coöperate officially and whole-heartedly with every agency that studies and works to relieve the common ills of mankind; and we can for all time renounce the practice of arbitrary intervention in the home affairs of our neighbors. It is the spirit, sir, which matters. Source: Foreign Affairs 6 (1927–1928): 573–586.

Document 3.14 Augusto Sandino Protests U.S. Policy, 1927 and 1929 Augusto Sandino was an important political figure in his own time and an immensely important symbolic figure in the decades that followed. Born in Nicaragua in 1895, he quickly entered the radical politics of twentieth-century Latin America. A veteran of the Mexican Revolution, he returned to Nicaragua as a coalition of forces mobilized to oppose the newly installed government of Adolfo Díaz. With critics charging that the Díaz regime was merely a puppet of the United States that had secured power only after U.S. troops had invaded, and with the government responding by clamping down on all opposition, a civil war quickly spread throughout Nicaragua. Sandino emerged as one of the most eloquent spokesmen on behalf of a new government in Nicaragua free of American influence. In the process, he established a series of models for how people throughout Latin America criticized U.S. interventionism. Sandino argued that the U.S. government, acting on behalf of American business interests, had imposed its will upon Latin American countries, with the poorest residents bearing the brunt of suffering. By the time U.S. troops finally withdrew from Nicaragua in 1933, Sandino had become a hero to people throughout Nicaragua. Eager to find a place in what he hoped would be the new politics of a truly independent Nicaragua, Sandino made his peace with the government. Barely a year later, he was murdered at the behest of Anastasio Somoza, a general in the Nicaraguan army who later seized power in his own right through a coup d’état in 1937. Enjoying support from the United States, Somoza and his family consolidated power. In the meantime, Sandino became the galvanizing figure for the Nicaraguan resistance. When the Somoza regime finally collapsed in 1979, the new government that took charge consisted of Sandinistas who remained true to their founder’s suspicion of the United States. The documents that follow consist of Sandino’s correspondence with a U.S. Marine Corps captain as well as two public pronouncements to the Nicaraguan people and their government. These excerpts capture Sandino’s condemnation of American policy in Latin America.

Camp of El Chipote Via San Fernando To Captain G. D. Hatfield El Ocotal I received your message yesterday, and I fully understand it. I will not surrender, and I await you here. I want a free country or death. I am not afraid of you. I rely upon the patriotic ardor of those who accompany me. Patria y Libertad. A. C. Sandino

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Hatfield’s Circular, Circa July 13, 1927 To whom it may concern: Augusto C. Sandino, formerly a general of the Liberal Armies, is now an individual outside the law, in rebellion against the government of Nicaragua. Consequently, those who accompany him or remain in territory occupied by his forces do so at their own risk, and neither the government of Nicaragua nor that of the United States of America will be responsible for deaths or injuries that may result from the military operations of the Nicaraguan or American forces in territory occupied by Sandino. G. D. Hatfield Captain, Marine Corps., Commanding Nueva Segovia

Manifesto to the Nicaraguan Liberals, January 1, 1929 Coreligionists and companions: I come before you after three years of intrepid struggle to invite you once again to continue the liberating action that our army has sustained since the treason that José María Moncada committed against our Liberal party, entering into agreements with the Yankee invaders on May 4, 1927. The result of that betrayal of the Liberal party by Moncada was that the Yankee invaders have imposed him as president of the Republic for the period from 1929 to 1932. With Moncada’s imposition it appears as if the Liberal party is willing to accept the sell-out of Nicaragua to the Yankees made by the Conservatives, but this is not true, because what distinguishes Liberals from Conservatives is that we Liberals have always opposed and will always continue to oppose the Yankee intervention, and we have condemned and will always condemn the selling of our country to the filibusters that has been carried out by the Conservatives. The thrusting of Moncada, so often a traitor to our Liberal party, into the presidency of the Republic gives him the opportunity to satisfy his ambitions for personal profit. Proof of this is that on May 5, 1927, in La Cruz de Teustepe, Moncada told me in the presence of my general staff that I should not commit the insane act of sacrificing myself for the people, that the people are not grateful, that he was speaking from experience, that the duty of every man is to make money, to acquire comfort and personal well-being, without any concern for others, that life ends and the country remains, and it was for this reason that he felt no remorse when he sold his rifles at a moment when our cause had triumphed. This is Moncada; this is the traitor who makes promises to the people, and who calls himself a Liberal. If what Moncada said to me is not enough evidence to brand him as an opportunist, history shows that he has never been a Liberal. On several occasions he has stated that he is not a Liberal, that “Liberal” signifies robbery, assassination, infamy. It was he who as minister of the interior in 1910 ordered the machine-gunning of the people of Leon. As a result of this act by Moncada against the freedom of the people of Leon, the young Luis Somarriba died, clutching the Liberal banner, which he did not release from his grip until Moncada’s myrmidons had cut off his hands with machetes. Moncada’s whole life has been one of treachery toward our party, and to put things simply, Moncada is Adolfo Díaz himself with a red sash.

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For the good of the country our army has preserved the honor and dignity of the nation and of the Liberal party in the face of the invaders, the Conservative sell-outs of their country, and the traitor José María Moncada. Faced by the Yankee pirates’ imposition of Moncada, we are ready to drive him from power with bullets, until we have again established our own national government. Like the Conservatives, Moncada will concern himself only with the Yankees’ interests because they have given him power. The national government that we proclaim today will look out for the interests of the nation’s sons, and not the interests of the pirates. We will not fire a single shot against Liberalism, and we do not think there is a Liberal who will fire upon us. We will use our weapons of liberation only against the traitor Moncada and against those who follow him, because they are not Liberals, but traitors to their country and to their party. Our weapons of liberation are ready to drive Moncada from the power that the invaders have given him as a reward for his treason. The traitor Moncada will not be able to resist our army’s power, and he will not hesitate to ask for Yankee intervention. With everything I have said I have defined my position regarding the traitor Moncada, and that position will not change for as long as we do not see our nation free of invaders and sell-outs of their country. El Chipotón, January 1, 1929 Patria y Libertad. A. C. Sandino

Fundamental Principles of an Agreement Proposed to General José María Moncada so that His Position as President of the Republic in the Period from 1929 to 1932 May Conform to the Constitution General José María Moncada is not a constitutional ruler of Nicaragua, because when his election as president of our Republic took place, a large part of the Nicaraguan people were up in arms against the Yankee invasion of our country and against the usurper Adolfo Díaz. However, General José María Moncada could indeed become a constitutional leader by rendering himself accountable to the Nicaraguan people by means of a document, and to the liberating army by complying with the fundamental principles that this agreement outlines below. In this case General José María Moncada will be a constitutional ruler because the law will favor him for having obtained, because of his honesty and integrity, the votes of a large part of the Nicaraguans who found themselves with weapons in hand at the time the presidential election of . . . Moncada took place, repelling the Yankee invader and fighting the usurper Adolfo Díaz. Without the acceptance of the fundamental principles of this agreement he will not be a ruler of the people of Nicaragua and so will in fact be disregarded. The fundamental principles appearing below are those which a president of the Republic of Nicaragua who is elected by the people and for the people should regard as basic in his governmental program; in virtue of this, they are the same which the Army in Defense of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua is offering through its supreme leader, who accepts them for the advancement of our country, so terribly scourged by the bad

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governments that have succeeded one another from 1909 until the present date; or, in other words, since the Wall Street bankers loaned $800,000—eight hundred thousand dollars—to Adolfo Díaz, so that he could overthrow the government of General José Santos Zelaya, constitutional president of Nicaragua in that epoch, such a loan being inadmissible because at that time that same Díaz was a simple bookkeeper, with a daily salary of $2.65—two pesos and sixty-five centavos—in the North American-owned mines of La Luz and Los Angeles, Pis-Pis, Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua, a man who could not have guaranteed a loan of that amount, and because it is not possible that that amount would have been loaned as a result of naivete on the part of the mining company, or because of the great affection it felt for the renegade sell-out of his country, Adolfo Díaz. It is well known that the rebellion against General José Santos Zelaya encouraged the treason of Juan J. Estrada, who at that time was governor of the department of Bluefields, and that that treason was committed by Estrada in connivance with Adolfo Díaz and Emiliano Chamorro. In the same manner, it is known to the Nicaraguan people that the direct pressure of the government of the United States of America made itself felt in Nicaragua when President José Santos Zelaya ordered the execution of the Yankee adventurers, the one named Cannon, the other, Groce, who had been paid by the leaders of the revolt to set off a bomb in the San Juan River against ships carrying the soldiers of President José Santos Zelaya. The Nicaraguan people know that since that time Nicaragua has never had a constitutional government, and that all those who have thrust their way into national power were imposed by Yankee bayonets, with the exception of the free election carried out in the period of the honorable ex-President Bartolome Martinez, as a result of which Carlos Solorzano and Dr. Juan Bautista Sacasa were elected president and vice president respectively; a constitutionality cut short by the famous Lomazo, carried out on October 24, 1925, by the spurious sons of Nicaragua, Emiliano Chamorro and Adolfo Díaz, which, we have no doubt, was in response to instructions of the same Yankee octopus. Note that not even the presidency of Bartolome Martinez was legal, but that he nevertheless supported a constitutional election. In such a situation it is obvious that all the treaties, pacts, or conventions celebrated between the governments of the United States of America and the individuals imposed upon Nicaragua by those same governments, from 1909 until the present, possess no legality because they have not been recognized by the Nicaraguan people, and that they are indecent as well and therefore ought to be entirely nullified by a government that is of the people and is expected to defend the nation’s interests. With these basic considerations established, the fundamental principles that we propose are the following: 1. To demand of the government of the United States of America the immediate and total withdrawal of their invasion forces from our territory, and if to accomplish this it becomes necessary to use force, the government of Nicaragua that commits itself to follow these fundamental principles may rely in advance upon our brave and patriotic assistance. 2. Not to accept during his administration any Yankee loan, and if for the requirements of that administration a loan becomes necessary, it must be done through Nicaraguan

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capitalists, giving them the same rights that would be given to the Yankees, with the condition that the debt cannot be transferred to foreign capitalists. 3. To consider null and void the Chamorro-Bryan Treaty and any treaties, pacts, or conventions that have been celebrated by the governments that have held power from 1909 until the present date, which impair our national sovereignty. 4. To reject in a most manly fashion any interference that governments of the United States of America may wish to attempt in the internal and external affairs of our free people, and much less to allow those governments in the future to supervise presidential elections, or elections of any kind, since we ourselves are capable of carrying out free elections . . . [Eleven items follow, focusing primarily on recommendations for the political and constitutional structure in Nicaragua, and occasionally reasserting the demand that Nicaragua establish full independence from the United States.] We have not seen the government program that General José María Moncada has offered to the Nicaraguan people, but we know that what is offered in it as attractive to our citizens is the construction of highways and railroads, which surely would not be of any importance to the Nicaraguan people, even if they were built, if their beneficiaries were to be only the foreign companies, the only real gainers from such constructions, because we are not unaware that the government of Nicaragua has pledged to the Yankees even the benches in our public buildings. What the Nicaraguan people need is to restore their rights lost from 1909 until the present. The Nicaraguan people will not recognize any government of Nicaragua as legal, much less this one, if it continues to make itself the handservant of the government of the United States of America. From what is contained in the fundamental principles in this document, it can be seen that there is not one that asks for amnesty for the members of the Army in Defense of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua. The reason for this is that no individual who has been called to government as was the usurper Adolfo Díaz can place “outside the law” the citizens who are defending the nation’s honor, and if he did so at the request of the invaders, they had no right to label as “bandits” those of us who have known and will always know how to do our duty. As we understand it, bandits are those people who would like to deny us our rights as citizens of a free, sovereign, and independent nation. Two broad solutions remain for General José María Moncada: 1. If General José María Moncada does not have secret pacts with the bankers of the United States of America and with Adolfo Díaz, he will not find it inconvenient to accept the fundamental principles of this agreement. 2. If General José María Moncada is not prepared to sacrifice his life, as he told me in La Cruz de Teustepe, to restore the rights that have been taken from the Nicaraguan people from 1909 until the present date, he should renounce the position he now holds in favor of a citizen whom he regards as capable of sacrificing himself for Nicaragua. If these fundamental principles should be accepted in all their points, the weapons of the army of liberation will be set aside, in the manner agreed to in the conferences, and

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after this document is signed by the representatives of General José María Moncada, it will be turned over to the Nicaraguan people in an appropriate manner. Then this exleader of the army of liberation will withdraw to some region of our republic to dedicate himself to work in the fields. Las Segovias, General Headquarters El Chipotón, Nicaragua, Central America, the sixth of January of nineteen hundred and twenty-nine. Patria y Libertad. Augusto Cesar Sandino Source: Sergio Ramírez, ed., Sandino, the Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot: 1921–1934 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 78, 219–226.

Document 3.15 The Tydings-McDuffie Act, 1934 After close to forty years of U.S. control, in 1934 the federal government contemplated Philippine independence. This decision came only after a generation of work by Filipinos, who had mobilized in various ways to secure an end to foreign rule. Some were aging veterans of the struggle against Spain that began in the 1890s. Still others were of a younger generation who had joined the global effort to end colonial rule in the wake of World War I. Some were radical, others were accommodationists. Some advocates of independence were convinced that U.S. rule had actually been of immense benefit to the Philippines, allowing the development of the institutions necessary for self-rule. The Tydings-McDuffie Act established the framework for Philippine independence. The legislation provided a timetable, required a process of constitution writing, and dictated the general contours of the new government that would need to take charge. In other words, the Tydings-McDuffie Act extended the principles of the territorial system to the Philippines. Although the Philippines had never formally become a territory, the general provisions for local autonomy, constitution writing, and eventual self-government drew on principles the United States had developed on the North American continent since the Northwest Ordinance.

An Act to provide for the complete independence of the Philippine Islands, to provide for the adoption of a constitution and a form of government for the Philippine Islands, and for other purposes. Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

CONVENTION TO FRAME CONSTITUTION FOR PHILIPPINE ISLANDS SECTION 1. The Philippine Legislature is hereby authorized to provide for the election of delegates to a constitutional convention, which shall meet in the hall of the house of

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representatives in the capital of the Philippine Islands, at such time as the Philippine Legislature may fix, but not later than October 1, 1934, to formulate and draft a constitution for the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands, subject to the conditions and qualifications prescribed in this Act, which shall exercise jurisdiction over all the territory ceded to the United States by the treaty of peace concluded between the United States and Spain on the 10th day of December 1898, the boundaries of which are set forth in article III of said treaty, together with those islands embraced in the treaty between Spain and the United States concluded at Washington on the 7th day of November 1900. The Philippine Legislature shall provide for the necessary expenses of such convention.

CHARACTER OF CONSTITUTION-MANDATORY PROVISIONS SEC. 2. (a) The constitution formulated and drafted shall be republican in form, shall contain a bill of rights, and shall, either as a part thereof or in an ordinance appended thereto, contain provisions to the effect that, pending the final and complete withdrawal of the sovereignty of the United States over the Philippine Islands— (1) All citizens of the Philippine Islands shall owe allegiance to the United States. (2) Every officer of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands shall, before entering upon the discharge of his duties, take and subscribe an oath of office, declaring, among other things, that he recognizes and accepts the supreme authority of and will maintain true faith and allegiance to the United States. (3) Absolute toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured and no inhabitant or religious organization shall be molested in person or property on account of religious belief or mode of worship. (4) Property owned by the United States, cemeteries, churches, and parsonages or convents appurtenant thereto, and all lands, buildings, and improvements used exclusively for religious, charitable, or educational purposes shall be exempt from taxation. (5) Trade relations between the Philippine Islands and the United States shall be upon the basis prescribed in section 6. (6) The public debt of the Philippine Islands and its subordinate branches shall not exceed limits now or hereafter fixed by the Congress of the United States; and no loans shall be contracted in foreign countries without the approval of the President of the United States. (7) The debts, liabilities, and obligations of the present Philippine government, its Provinces, municipalities, and instrumentalities, valid and subsisting at the time of the adoption of the constitution, shall be assumed and paid by the new government. (8) Provision shall be made for the establishment and maintenance of an adequate system of public schools, primarily conducted [in] the English language. (9) Acts affecting currency, coinage, imports, exports, and immigration shall not become law until approved by the President of the United States.

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(10) Foreign affairs shall be under the direct supervision and control of the United States. (11) All acts passed by the Legislature of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands shall be reported to the Congress of the United States. (12) The Philippine Islands recognizes the right of the United States to expropriate property for public uses, to maintain military and other reservations and armed forces in the Philippines, and, upon order of the President, to call into the service of such armed forces all military forces organized by the Philippine government. (13) The decisions of the courts of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands shall be subject to review by the Supreme Court of the United States as provided in paragraph (6) of section 7. (14) The United States may, by Presidential proclamation, exercise the right to intervene for the preservation of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands and for the maintenance of the government as provided in the constitution thereof, and for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty and for the discharge of government obligations under and in accordance with the provisions of the constitution. (15) The authority of the United States High Commissioner to the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands, as provided in this Act, shall be recognized. (16) Citizens and corporations of the United States shall enjoy in the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands all the civil rights of the citizens and corporations, respectively, thereof. (b) The constitution shall also contain the following provisions, effective as of the date of the proclamation of the President recognizing the independence of the Philippine Islands, as hereinafter provided: (1) That the property rights of the United States and the Philippine Islands shall be promptly adjusted and settled, and that all existing property rights of citizens or corporations of the United States shall be acknowledged, respected, and safeguarded to the same extent as property rights of citizens of the Philippine Islands. (2) That the officials elected and serving under the constitution adopted pursuant to the provisions of this Act shall be constitutional officers of the free and independent government of the Philippine Islands and qualified to function in all respects as if elected directly under such government, and shall serve their full terms of office as prescribed in the constitution. (3) That the debts and liabilities of the Philippine Islands, its Subsisting Provinces, cities, municipalities, and instrumentalities, which shall be valid and subsisting at the time of the final and complete withdrawal of the sovereignty of the United States, shall be assumed by the free and independent government of the Philippine Islands; and that where bonds have been issued under authority of an Act of Congress of the United States by the Philippine Islands, or any Province, city, or municipality therein, the Philippine government will make adequate provision for the necessary funds for the payment of interest and principal, and such obligations shall be a first lien on the taxes collected in the Philippine Islands.

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(4) That the government of the Philippine Islands, on becoming independent of the United States, will assume all continuing obligations assumed by the United States under the treaty of peace with Spain ceding said Philippine Islands to the United States. (5) That by way of further assurance the government of the Philippine Islands will embody the foregoing provisions (except paragraph (2)) in a treaty with the United States.

SUBMISSION OF CONSTITUTION TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES SEC. 3. Upon the drafting and approval of the constitution by the constitutional convention in the Philippine Islands, the constitution shall be submitted within two years after the enactment of this Act to the President of the United States, who shall determine whether or not it conforms with the provisions of this Act. If the President finds that the proposed constitution conforms substantially with the provisions of this Act he shall so certify to the Governor General of the Philippine Islands, who shall so advise the constitutional convention. If the President finds that the constitution does not conform with the provisions of this Act he shall so advise the Governor General of the Philippine Islands, stating wherein in his judgment the constitution does not so conform and submitting provisions which will in his judgment make the constitution so conform. The Governor General shall in turn submit such message to the constitutional convention for further action by them pursuant to the same procedure hereinbefore defined, until the President and the constitutional convention are in agreement.

SUBMISSION OF CONSTITUTION TO FILIPINO PEOPLE SEC. 4. After the President of the United States has certified that the constitution conforms with the provisions of this Act, it shall be submitted to the people of the Philippine Islands for their ratification or rejection at an election to be held within four months after the date of such certification, on a date to be fixed by the Philippine Legislature, at which election the qualified voters of the Philippine Islands shall have an opportunity to vote directly for or against the proposed constitution and ordinances appended thereto. Such election shall be held in such manner as may be prescribed by the Philippine Legislature, to which the return of the election shall be made. The Philippine Legislature shall by law provide for the canvassing of the return and shall certify the result to the Governor General of the Philippine Islands, together with a statement of the votes cast, and a copy of said constitution and ordinances. If a majority of the votes cast shall be for the constitution, such vote shall be deemed an expression of the will of the people of the Philippine Islands in favor of Philippine independence, and the Governor General shall, within thirty days after receipt of the certification from the Philippine Legislature, issue a proclamation for the election of officers of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands provided for in the constitution. The election shall take place not

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earlier than three months nor later than six months after the proclamation by the Governor General ordering such election. When the election of the officers provided for under the constitution has been held and the results determined, the Governor General of the Philippine Islands shall certify the results of the election to the President of the United States, who shall thereupon issue a proclamation announcing the results of the election, and upon the issuance of such proclamation by the President the existing Philippine government shall terminate and the new government shall enter upon its rights, privileges, powers, and duties, as provided under the constitution. The present government of the Philippine Islands shall provide for the orderly transfer of the functions of government. If a majority of the votes cast are against the constitution, the existing government of the Philippine Islands shall continue without regard to the provisions of this Act.

TRANSFER OF PROPERTY AND RIGHTS TO PHILIPPINE COMMONWEALTH SEC. 5. All the property and rights which may have been acquired in the Philippine Islands by the United States under the treaties mentioned in the first section of this Act, except such land or other property as has heretofore been designated by the President of the United States for Military and other reservations of the Government of the United States, and except such land or other property or rights or interests therein as may have been sold or otherwise disposed of in accordance with law, are hereby granted to the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands when constituted . . . SEC. 7. Until the final and complete withdrawal of American sovereignty, sovereignty over the Philippine Islands— (1) Every duly adopted amendment to the constitution of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands shall be submitted to the President of the United States for approval. If the President approves the amendment or if the President fails to disapprove such amendment within six months from the time of its submission, the amendment shall take effect as a part of such constitution. (2) The President of the United States shall have authority to suspend the taking effect of or the operation of any law, contract, on the President or executive order of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands, which in his judgment will result in a failure of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands to fulfill its contracts, or to meet its bonded indebtedness and interest thereon or to provide for its sinking funds, or which seems likely to impair the reserves for the protection of the currency of the Philippine Islands, or which in his judgment will violate international obligations of the United States. (3) The Chief Executive of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands shall make an annual report to the President and Congress of the United States of the proceedings and operations of the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands and shall make such other reports as the President or Congress may request. (4) The President shall appoint, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, a United States High Commissioner to the government of the Commonwealth of the

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Philippine Islands who shall hold office at the pleasure of the President and until his successor is appointed and qualified. He shall be known as the United States High Commissioner to the Philippine Islands. He shall be the representative of the President of the United States in the Philippine Islands, and shall be recognized as such by the government of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands, by the commanding officers of the military forces of the United States, and by all civil officials of the United States in the Philippine Islands. He shall have access to all records of the government or any subdivision thereof, and shall be furnished by the Chief Executive of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands with such information as he shall request . . . (6) Review by the Supreme Court of the United States of cases from the Philippine Islands shall be as now provided by law; and such review shall also extend to all cases involving the constitution of the Commonwealth of the Philippine Islands. SEC. 8. (a) Effective upon the acceptance of this Act by concurrent resolution of the Philippine Legislature or by a convention called for that purpose, as provided in section 17— (1) For the purposes of the Immigration Act of 1917, the Immigration Act of 1924 (except section 13(c)) this section, and all other laws of the United States relating to the immigration, exclusion, or expulsion of aliens, citizens of the Philippine Islands who are not citizens of the United States shall be considered as if they were aliens. For such purposes the Philippine Islands shall be considered as a separate country and shall have for each fiscal year a quota of fifty. This paragraph shall not apply to a person coming or seeking to come to the Territory of Hawaii who does not apply for and secure an immigration or passport visa, but such immigration shall be determined by the Department of the Interior on the basis of the needs of industries in the Territory of Hawaii. (2) Citizens of the Philippine Islands who are not citizens of the United States shall not be admitted to the continental United States from the Territory of Hawaii (whether entering such Territory before or after the effective date of this section) unless they belong to a class declared to be nonimmigrants by section 3 of the Immigration Act of 1924 or to a class declared to be nonquota immigrants under the provisions of section 4 of such Act other than subdivision (c) thereof, or unless they were admitted to such Territory under an immigration visa. The Secretary of Labor shall by regulations provide a method for such exclusion and for the admission of such excepted classes. (3) Any Foreign Ser vice officer may be assigned to duty in the Philippine Islands, under a commission as a consular officer, for such period as may be necessar y and under such regulations as the Secretar y of State may prescribe, during which assignment such officer shall be considered as stationed in a foreign country . . . (4) For the purposes of sections 18 and 20 of the Immigration Act of 1917, as amended, the Philippine Islands shall be considered to be a foreign country . . .

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RECOGNITION OF PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE AND WITHDRAWAL OF AMERICAN SOVEREIGNTY SEC. 10. (a) On the 4th day of July immediately following the expiration of a period of ten years from the date of the inauguration of the new government under the constitution provided for in this Act the President of the United States shall by proclamation withdraw and surrender all right of possession, supervision, jurisdiction, control, or sovereignty then existing and exercised by the United States in and over the territory and people of the Philippine Islands, including all military and other reservations of the Government of the United States in the Philippines (except such naval reservations and fueling stations as are reserved under section 5), and, on behalf of the United States, shall recognize the independence of the Philippine Islands as a separate and self-governing nation and acknowledge the authority and control over the same of the government instituted by the people thereof, under the constitution then in force . . .

IMMIGRATION AFTER INDEPENDENCE SEC. 14. Upon the final and complete withdrawal of American sovereignty over the Philippine Islands the immigration laws of the United States (including all the provisions thereof relating to persons ineligible to citizenship) shall apply to persons who were born in the Philippine Islands to the same extent as in the case of other foreign countries . . .

Approved, March 24, 1934. Source: Philippine Independence Act (Tydings-McDuffie Act), Public Law 73-127, Statutes At Large (1934): 456–465.

Document 3.16 Japan, Germany, and the Congressional Understanding of Imperialism, 1936 and 1938 By the late 1930s, both Europe and East Asia had endured war and upheaval. In 1931, Japan seized the Chinese province of Manchuria, and in 1937 it launched a wholesale war with China that lasted until the end of World War II in 1945. Meanwhile, China was in the midst of its own civil war pitting the nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek against the Communist insurgency led by Mao Zedong. The Communist government of China’s neighbor, the Soviet Union, had only recently finished the process of establishing power against internal and external opponents. Only a few years later, western Europe faced its own violent conflicts. In 1938, Hitler’s Germany seized the whole of Austria, followed soon by the contested borderlands of other neighboring countries. Much like Japan, Germany sought to command these territories within a broader imperial structure.

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The U.S. attitude toward these nations varied. Americans were quick to condemn Germany and Japan, but they were divided in how best to respond. In Congress, the debate centered on those advocating a strong opposition and closer alliances with Britain, France, and China, and those advocating strict neutrality in an effort to protect the United States from being sucked into a European conflict. The comments that follow reflect these concerns. Americans criticized both Germany and Japan but often through their own understanding of the appropriate role for an American empire. They are presented as follows: Compton White, a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Idaho, and Key Pittman, a Democratic senator from Nevada, addressed Japanese expansionism in the Pacific in 1936. They were concerned with economic and strategic threats and primarily with their own belief that Japan had no right to evict American power. Pittman referred to a Monroe Doctrine for China—the Nine-Power Treaty—which protected Chinese autonomy, but with terms imposed by the United States. Martin Dies, a Democratic member of the House from Texas, and William Borah, a Republican senator from Idaho, addressed Germany and, to a lesser degree, Japan in 1938. Their comments emerged in a debate over the budget for the United States Navy. Dies decried the way Germany denied Austria’s sovereignty in contrast with the American commitment to self-determination. Borah, a leading figure of the Progressive Era, was deeply suspicious of American overseas adventurism, and he cast his criticism of naval expansion within a broader critique of American imperialism.

CONQUESTS IN THE ORIENT February 3, 1936 Mr. WHITE. Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, in the light of the great changes that have taken place in the Orient in recent times, the subjugation of Manchuria and the establishment of a government dominated by the Japanese, and the monetary changes that have been effected in China and their effect on the business and financial relations of the people of this country and those of China and Japan, it will be interesting to review some of the statements that appear in the memorial of Premier Tanaka, an ambitious plan for the conquest of China and the rest of Asia and world dominance, with the following quotations from the Memoirs of Tanaka that appeared in a contribution made by myself in 1932, before the conquest of Manchuria, the bombardment of Shanghai, or the nationalization of silver in China . . . Is there a parallel between the scheme outlined by the Japanese Premier by the manipulation of money based on the gold standard for the subjugation and control of the Chinese people and the schemes, recently exposed, of our international bankers for the subjugation and control of the masses of the American people? Is the money system of this country under its present management being allowed to function freely for the advancement and general welfare of the masses, or is it being manipulated to deprive them of the fruits of their thrift and industry?

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While the Japanese Government has repudiated and disavowed the authenticity of the memorial, subsequent events point to the adoption of a preconceived plan that closely follows the proposal contained in the memorial text of the pronouncement. It is apparent that outside influence, with the connivance of Chinese financiers, has successfully brought about the nationalization of silver by China, placing an interest burden on the business of the Chinese people, as has been done in this and other countries, by retiring gold and silver and replacing the coinage with paper money, loaned into circulation when secured by such interest-bearing obligations as may be eligible. It will be interesting to watch the results of the efforts of financiers to retain control of money and credit in the several nations and at the same time restore business conditions by these experiments.

JAPAN’S ORIENTAL POLICY THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES AND CHINESE OPEN-DOOR POLICY February 10, 1936 Mr. PITTMAN. Mr. President, there have been a great number of publications emanating from officers of the Japanese Government touching their policy in the Orient as it affects our own foreign policy. I have very carefully segregated and collated these statements for the purpose of having Congress determine exactly what their policy is and, as nearly as possible, how it will affect us in the future. I have condensed my statement as much as possible. I will say to the Senate, and therefore I will appreciate it if I may read the statement before any questions are asked. If there shall be any questions after that, I shall be very pleased to attempt to answer them. Mr. President, I think it is high time that Congress take cognizance of the Japanese policy with regard to China, and its intended effect upon the United States. I say “Congress,” because in the end Congress alone has the power and the duty imposed upon it to appropriate money for the national defense. The Japanese Government seems very intense in its desire that we should fully understand their foreign policy and its relation to our Government. Let us, therefore, calmly and judiciously accommodate the Japanese Government and consider their policy as evidenced by their frank and bold pronouncements, and substantiated by their acts. We have not forgotten the history of the conquest of Korea, and the conquest of Manchuria is fresh in our minds. That last conquest was in violation of the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact to outlaw war, and the nine-power pact adopted at Washington in 1922. Japan at the time of such conquest was a party to all of such treaties. We have taken notice of the acts of Japan in North China, looking to the consummation of the Chinese policy. We are aware of the three-point demand made by Japan on China; we are aware that the acceptance by China of such demand is a final surrender of her sovereignty. Yes; we fully understand Japan’s policy toward China and toward our Government with relation to China.

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I am astonished however, that the distinguished Ambassador of Japan, who is so learned in history and international law, should attempt to create the impression in our country that Japan’s doctrine with relation to China is similar to our Monroe Doctrine. Such doctrines may have similarity as to the threat implied against foreign conquest, but under the Monroe Doctrine we did not arrogate to ourselves the right of conquest or domination in the Americas. We were seeking to preserve the republics of Latin America, not to destroy them. There is, however, a Monroe doctrine applicable to China, which Japan, together with eight other governments, including the United States, solemnly agreed to abide by and respect. It is in full force and effect at the present time and has been in full force and effect since 1922. It is known as the Nine-Power Pact. It was adopted at Washington, at the great conference for the elimination of armament and for other purposes, held in the years 1921 and 1922.

MONROE DOCTRINE FOR CHINA Let us see what that doctrine is. I wish the Senate to note carefully this compact. It has been challenged absolutely by Japan and apparently ignored by other members of the compact. I read article 1: The contracting powers, other than China, agree: (1) To respect the sovereignty, the independence, and the territorial and administrative integrity of China; (2) To provide the fullest and most unembarrassed opportunity to China to develop and maintain for herself an effective and stable government; (3) To use their influence for the purpose of effectually establishing and maintaining the principle of equal opportunity for the commerce and industry of all nations throughout the territory of China; (4) To refrain from taking advantage of conditions in China in order to seek special rights or privileges which would abridge the rights of subjects or citizens of friendly states, and from countenancing action inimical to the security of such states. That is the Monroe doctrine for China . . .

March 14, 1938 Mr. DIES. Mr. Chairman, there are some who want to shape their actions and conduct upon the basis of what the world should be and not upon the basis of what it is. There are many who want to formulate domestic and foreign policies upon idealistic conceptions and upon visionary schemes and fail to take into account the fundamental problems that confront the world. I believe it can be said truthfully that the situation which now confronts the world is perhaps more critical and more serious than at any time since the World War. Europe is divided into armed camps. Germany, Italy, and Japan are better prepared today than they were prior to 1914. The recent conquest of Austria, in which Germany in a very short period seized possession of that country and overnight ended its political independence as a nation, should

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convince any of us that Germany is better prepared in every sense of the word today than it has been at any previous time. I am one of those who believes that neither Germany, Italy, nor England, nor any other European country, has any intention of invading the United States. I do not fall for the propaganda that is distributed by war agitators and factories making munitions of war or by anybody else. Nevertheless there have been so many marvelous strides in the field of armament that no man today can predict how far airplanes may be able to travel tomorrow. No man can predict what a war-maddened nation may undertake to do in the next few years; at least, this much we know. Those nations which have failed adequately to prepare themselves, those nations that have made the fatal blunder of not maintaining their defensive armament at all times have suffered the consequences of their neglect. It therefore seems to me in view of the situation which now faces Europe, in view of what I consider to be an inevitable war between nations that are straining at the bit, with millions of well trained, highly intelligent, and mechanized armies, with a degree of discipline within their midst unparalleled in the world, with all the modern implements of warfare and with the probability, if not the certainty, of a European conflagration the like of which has never been witnessed in the history of the world, I do think that although we may reluctantly agree to it, and may dislike the necessity at this time of entering upon a program which will require money that we do not have and further jeopardize our credit, nevertheless we are compelled to do so, for we have a definite obligation. We have an obligation not only to defend our entire coast lines, but likewise to defend the South American countries. To do this we must have an adequate navy . . . Mr. Chairman, as I have said, we must take the world as we find it. In order to defend democracy and defend our own national integrity, we must be prepared to do so. As to what is sufficient preparation is always a debatable subject. Certainly I do not believe I am qualified to pass definitely upon that question. I do know this: A large part of the resources of other countries is now being devoted to the building up of huge armaments on sea and on land. If I had my own way about our foreign policy, it would be a very simple one. It would simply be to stay on our own shores, to mind our own business, and to be prepared to defend our integrity and our own institutions . . . I am seriously alarmed by the triumphant march of dictatorships throughout the world. To my way of thinking, with the exception of France, England, and the United States, the rest of the world is now in the deadly grip of dictatorship. From Russia, dictated to by Stalin, all powerful, cruel, and brutal, on to Germany, the great masses of those people today are controlled not by a majority government, but by a minority government. I believe that the greatest danger that faces us today in the United States is not from any foreign power. I am not so foolish as to say that in my opinion our destruction will ever be brought about by foreign nations, but I do believe that a democracy to succeed must impose upon itself self-restraint and moderation. Excesses, immoderation, and disorder lead to conditions that encourage dictatorship. Democracy is a growth in the individual. It is something in the heart and soul and mind of a people. It cannot be achieved by militarism. Democracy, if I might so express it, is only possible among a people who are capable of restraining their emotions, their feeling, a people sufficiently intelligent and patient to work out their problems in a sane and practical way, who refuse to yield to the excesses of the many or the selfishness of a few. [Applause.]

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April 26, 1938 Mr. BORAH. Mr. President, as I have said, I see little danger from Japan. Japan has all she can possibly attend to . . . What the future may have in store no one knows, but let us take conditions as they are at present. That is the only thing we can judge by. There is no possibility of any combination which would relieve Japan of her very distressing present situation. As to Germany and Italy, if the Treaty of Versailles had never been written in the terms in which it was written, there would be comparatively no turmoil in Europe today. Every single controversy can be traced to the Versailles Treaty. We recall that Castlereagh, the representative of the British Government at the close of the Napoleonic wars, representing Great Britain, stood firm against the dismemberment of France. His allies and associates insisted on dismembering France. One wanted a piece of territory here and another a piece of territory yonder. France was to be carved up and very heavy reparations were to be placed on her. But Castlereagh said, in effect, “I want peace in Europe, and in order to have peace in Europe we must maintain the integrity of France.” Assailed at home and assailed by his associates, nevertheless, he maintained his position, and he preserved France in practically her integrity. He cut the reparations to almost a minimum. The result was that there was no major war in Europe for a hundred years. If the leaders at Versailles had followed the example of Castlereagh and had said, “Here is a great people, great in mechanical genius, great in industry, great in character, and it is impossible to destroy them. It cannot be done. Let us preserve the integrity of Germany, and let us preserve the integrity of these other countries, like Austria.” If that had been done, in my opinion, subsequent events would have been wholly different from what they have been. But what is happening in Europe now is the doing of those things which ought to have been done at Versailles. It is very unfortunate that they have to be done in this way. It is very regrettable that it has occurred in the manner in which it has happened. We would all prefer to have had it different. It is impossible to extinguish or circumscribe the power of a great people; and the sooner the world finds that out the more quickly we will be at peace. I shall, I hope, find time later to undertake to show that the German problem does not call for any increased naval power any more than the Ethiopian or Spanish problem. The going of Austria over to Germany was inevitable. Austria could not stand alone. She had not stood alone an hour since she escaped the laboratory at Versailles. She had always depended upon some other country. In 1931 she undertook to come into close relations with Germany voluntarily of her own free will. That was prohibited by the powers then in control. So the result was inevitable that in time Austria must come under the control of some great power, and the great power that was prepared to take her over was Germany. It was not a matter about which we could be concerned. It should not affect our foreign policy in the slightest. It does not make any difference to us as a government whether Italy has control of Austria or Germany has control of Austria. Some country was going to control Austria under the circumstances, because she could not stand alone.

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Mr. President, if this great, strong, free people join in this great naval race, where can we look for the influence or the power which will stay its devastating course? I cannot bring myself to be a party to a proposal so fraught with danger to the cause of peace and the cause of humanity . . .

May 2, 1938 While we are debating this naval bill today, two of the great figures in the present political world are preparing for a historic meeting. Hitler is on his way to confer with Mussolini. They are both in the land-grabbing business and both claiming they are agents of the Supreme Being. It has been the claim of Hitler and of Mussolini that they are acting under the inspiration and leadership of God. Mussolini claims that he is rebuilding the old Roman Empire under divine guidance. Hitler, that he is recovering into one nation the great German people, and, as he has said in so many words, that he is the agent of divine power in doing that. Hitler especially will be greatly enthused and doubtless encouraged when he reads that the American people justify their taking of vast lands from Mexico because God so ordained it. The only limit to God’s will so far as Hitler is concerned is the amount of territory he desires. The same applies to Mussolini. Now they have an avowed example in the great democracy of the West. Mr. President, God had very little to do with the war with Mexico. There was practically no justification for the war. It was started because there was a desire for territory. Slavery had more to do with starting that war than God . . . Source: Congressional Record, 74th Cong., 2d sess. (1936), 1374–1375, 1703–1704; and Congressional Record, 75th Cong., 3d sess. (1938), 3335–3336, 5782, 6044.

Document 3.17 The Atlantic Charter, 1941 The Atlantic Charter is one of the most important international agreements in U.S. history, a fact made all the more remarkable by the brevity of the document. In the summer of 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain led delegations that met in Newfoundland. During this, the last major meeting between the United States and Britain before the United States entered World War II, the two countries reasserted their support for each other and for a set of international goals. Their public declaration asserted the right of national independence and self-determination. The Atlantic Charter became the foundation of numerous agreements, including the wartime alliance between Great Britain and the United States, the United Nations, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The declaration also sustained the inherent contradictions of imperial politics. On one hand, the declaration condemned territorial acquisitions of the type the Axis had made. On the other, the declaration upheld the territorial claims of other nations, implicitly validating the authority of imperial authorities over both colonial territories and colonial subjects.

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Joint Declaration of the President of the United States and the Prime Minster of Great Britain [Released to the press by the White House August 14.] The following statement was signed by the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain: “First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other; “Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned; “Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them; “Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity; “Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security; “Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all the men in all lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want; “Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans without hindrance; “Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as spiritual reasons must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measure which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments. Franklin D. Roosevelt Winston S. Churchill” Source: Bulletin of the Department of State, August 16, 1941, 125–126.

Document 3.18 The Allies’ Plan to Dismantle the Axis Empires, 1943–1945 The Atlantic Charter was only one in a series of multinational agreements produced by the allied conferences of World War II. As the Soviet Union joined an uneasy alliance with the United

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States, Great Britain, and the other nations warring against the Axis powers, war planning often overlapped with contested arguments about a postwar world. The following two documents are best known now as products of those broad strategies. But the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Declaration were also statements about empire. In both documents, the Allies articulated their commitment to dismembering the territorial acquisitions of the Axis powers, proclaiming these empires as artificial political arrangements based on a tyrannical politics. These documents extended many of the principles Roosevelt and Churchill first stated in the Atlantic Charter.

The Cairo Declaration, November 27, 1943 President Roosevelt, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek and Prime Minister Churchill, together with their respective military and diplomatic advisers, have completed a conference in North Africa. The following general statement was issued: “The several militar y missions have agreed upon future militar y operations against Japan. The three great Allies expressed their resolve to bring unrelenting pressure against their brutal enemies by sea, land and air. This pressure is already rising. “The three great Allies are fighting this war to restrain and punish the aggression of Japan. They covet no gain for themselves and have no thought of territorial expansion. It is their purpose that Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or occupied since the beginning of the first World War in 1914, and that all the territories Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa, and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China. Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed. The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent. “With these objects in view the three Allies, in harmony with those of the United Nations at war with Japan, will continue to persevere in the serious and prolonged operations necessary to procure the unconditional surrender of Japan.” Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, The Conferences at Cairo and Tehran (1943), 448–449.

The Yalta Declaration, February 11, 1945 The Crimea Conference of the Heads of the Governments of the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics which took place from February 4th to 11th came to the following conclusions. I. WORLD ORGANIZATION [Section I outlines the structure for the United Nations.]

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II. DECLARATION ON LIBERATED EUROPE The following declaration has been approved: “The Premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the President of the United States of America have consulted with each other in the common interests of the peoples of their countries and those of liberated Europe. They jointly declare their mutual agreement to concert during the temporary period of instability in liberated Europe the policies of their three governments in assisting the peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi Germany and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems. “The establishment of order in Europe and the re-building of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter—the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live—the restoration of sovereign rights and selfgovernment to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations. “To foster the conditions in which the liberated peoples may exercise these rights, the three governments will jointly assist the people in any European liberated state or former Axis satellite state in Europe where in their judgment conditions require (a) to establish conditions of internal peace; (b) to carry out emergency measures for the relief of distressed peoples; (c) to form interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population and pledged to the earliest possible establishment through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people; and (d) to facilitate where necessary the holding of such elections. “The three governments will consult the other United Nations and provisional authorities or other governments in Europe when matters of direct interest to them are under consideration. “When, in the opinion of the three governments, conditions in any European liberated state or any former Axis satellite state in Europe make such action necessary, they will immediately consult together on the measures necessary to discharge the joint responsibilities set forth in this declaration. “By this declaration we reaffirm our faith in the principles of the Atlantic Charter, our pledge in the Declaration by the United Nations, and our determination to build in cooperation with other peace-loving nations world order under law, dedicated to peace, security, freedom and general well-being of all mankind. “In issuing this declaration, the Three Powers express the hope that the Provisional Government of the French Republic may be associated with them in the procedure suggested.”

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III. DISMEMBERMENT OF GERMANY It was agreed that Article 12 (a) of the Surrender Terms for Germany should be amended to read as follows: “The United Kingdom, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics shall possess supreme authority with respect to Germany. In the exercise of such authority they will take such steps, including the complete disarmament, demilitarisation and the dismemberment of Germany as they deem requisite for future peace and security.” The study of the procedure for the dismemberment of Germany was referred to a Committee, consisting of Mr. Eden (Chairman), Mr. Winant and Mr. Gousev. This body would consider the desirability of associating with it a French representative.

IV. ZONE OF OCCUPATION FOR THE FRENCH AND CONTROL COUNCILS FOR GERMANY. It was agreed that a zone in Germany, to be occupied by the French Forces, should be allocated to France. This zone would be formed out of the British and American zones and its extent would be settled by the British and Americans in consultation with the French Provisional Government. It was also agreed that the French Provisional Government should be invited to become a member of the Allied Control Council 3 for Germany.

V. REPARATION The following protocol has been approved: 1. Germany must pay in kind for the losses caused by her to the Allied nations in the course of the war. Reparations are to be received in the first instance by those countries which have borne the main burden of the war, have suffered the heaviest losses and have organised victory over the enemy. 2. Reparation in kind is to be exacted from Germany in three following forms:

a) Removals within 2 years from the surrender of Germany or the cessation of organised resistance from the national wealth of Germany located on the territory of Germany herself as well as outside her territory (equipment, machine-tools, ships, rolling stock, German investments abroad, shares of industrial, transport and other enterprises in Germany etc.), these removals to be carried out chiefly for purpose of destroying the war potential of Germany. b) Annual deliveries of goods from current production for a period to be fixed. c) Use of German labour. 3. For the working out on the above principles of a detailed plan for exaction of reparation from Germany an Allied Reparation Commission will be set up in Moscow. It will consist of three representatives—one from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, one from the United Kingdom and one from the United States of America.

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4. With regard to the fixing of the total sum of the reparation as well as the distribution of it among the countries which suffered from the German aggression the Soviet and American delegations agreed as follows: “The Moscow Reparation Commission should take in its initial studies as a basis for discussion the suggestion of the Soviet Government that the total sum of the reparation in accordance with the points (a) and (b) of the paragraph 2 should be 20 billion dollars and that 50% of it should go to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” The British delegation was of the opinion that pending consideration of the reparation question by the Moscow Reparation Commission no figures of reparation should be mentioned. The above Soviet-American proposal has been passed to the Moscow Reparation Commission as one of the proposals to be considered by the Commission. VI. MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS The Conference agreed that the question of the major war criminals should be the subject of enquiry by the three Foreign Secretaries for report in due course after the close of the Conference . . .

Agreement Regarding Entry of the Soviet Union Into the War Against Japan TOP SECRET AGREEMENT The leaders of the three Great Powers—the Soviet Union, the United States of America and Great Britain—have agreed that in two or three months after Germany has surrendered and the war in Europe has terminated the Soviet Union shall enter into the war against Japan on the side of the Allies on condition that: 1. The status quo in Outer-Mongolia (The Mongolian People’s Republic) shall be preserved; 2. The former rights of Russia violated by the treacherous attack of Japan in 1904 shall be restored, viz:

(a) the southern part of Sakhalin as well as all the islands adjacent to it shall be returned to the Soviet Union, (b) the commercial port of Dairen shall be internationalized, the preeminent interests of the Soviet Union in this port being safeguarded and the lease of Port Arthur as a naval base of the USSR restored, (c) the Chinese-Eastern Railroad and the South-Manchurian Railroad which provides an outlet to Dairen shall be jointly operated by the establishment of a joint Soviet-Chinese Company it being understood that the preeminent

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interests of the Soviet Union shall be safeguarded and that China shall retain full sovereignty in Manchuria; 3. The Kuril islands shall be handed over to the Soviet Union. It is understood, that the agreement concerning Outer-Mongolia and the ports and railroads referred to above will require concurrence of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. The President will take measures in order to obtain this concurrence on advice from Marshal Stalin. The Heads of the three Great Powers have agreed that these claims of the Soviet Union shall be unquestionably fulfilled after Japan has been defeated. For its part the Soviet Union expresses its readiness to conclude with the National Government of China a pact of friendship and alliance between the USSR and China in order to render assistance to China with its armed forces for the purpose of liberating China from the Japanese yoke. February 11, 1945.  CtajiII h [J. Stalin] II Franklin D. Roosevelt Winston S. Churchill Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, Conferences at Malta and Yalta (1945), 977–982, 984.

The Potsdam Declaration, July 26, 1945 Proclamation By The Heads Of Governments, United States, China And The United Kingdom (1) We, the President of the United States, the President of the National Government of the Republic of China and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, representing the hundreds of millions of our countrymen, have conferred and agree that Japan shall be given an opportunity to end this war. (2) The prodigious land, sea and air forces of the United States, the British Empire and of China, many times reinforced by their armies and air fleets from the west are poised to strike the final blows upon Japan. This military power is sustained and inspired by the determination of all the Allied nations to prosecute the war against Japan until she ceases to resist. (3) The result of the futile and senseless German resistance to the might of the aroused free peoples of the world stands forth in awful clarity as an example to the people of Japan. The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people. The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland.

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(4) The time has come for Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers whose unintelligent calculations have brought the Empire of Japan to the threshold of annihilation, or whether she will follow the path of reason. (5) Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay. (6) There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world. (7) Until such a new order is established and until there is convincing proof that Japan’s war-making power is destroyed, points in Japanese territory to be designated by the Allies shall be occupied to secure the achievement of the basic objectives we are here setting forth. (8) The terms of the Cairo Declaration shall be carried out and Japanese sovereignty shall be limited to the islands of Honshu, Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku and such minor islands as we determine. (9) The Japanese military forces, after being completely disarmed, shall be permitted to return to their homes with the opportunity to lead peaceful and productive lives. (10) We do not intend that the Japanese shall be enslaved as a race or destroyed as [a] nation, but stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners. The Japanese government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strength[en]ing of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established. (11) Japan shall be permitted to maintain such industries as will sustain her economy and permit the exaction of just reparations in kind, but not those industries which would enable her to re-arm for war. To this end, access to, as distinguished from control of raw materials shall be permitted. Eventual Japanese participation in world trade relations shall be permitted. (12) The occupying forces of the Allies shall be withdrawn from Japan as soon as these objectives have been accomplished and there has been established in accordance with the freely expressed will of the Japanese people a peacefully inclined and responsible government. (13) We call upon the Government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all the Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.

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Potsdam July 26, 1945 Harry S. Truman Winston Churchill By H.S.T. President of China By Wire Source: Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conference of Berlin (The Potsdam Conference), 1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), vol. 2, 1474–1476.

Document 3.19 Announcing the Liberation of the Axis Colonies, 1944 and 1945 Statements like those in Document 3.18 imagined a more egalitarian and democratic world after the fall of the Axis powers, and two American presidents would herald that world and its potential as it began to take shape. When U.S. troops landed in the Philippines in October 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued a statement that celebrated the prospect of selfgovernment in the Philippines even as it reasserted the American claim to the islands. Four days after Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, the new president, Harry S. Truman, delivered an address to the U.S. Congress in which he first lamented his predecessor’s death and then asserted that the unique experiences and history of the United States must motivate it to end the dictatorships of the German and Japanese empires. Germany subsequently surrendered in May 1945; Japan in September of that same year. Soon after, Truman would describe a future for an independent Korea that revealed both important similarities to and differences from Roosevelt’s predictions for the neighboring Philippines.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Statement on the Landing of American Troops in the Philippines, October 20, 1944 This morning American troops landed on the island of Leyte in the Philippines. The invasion forces, under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, are supported by the greatest concentration of naval and air power ever massed in the Pacific Ocean. We have landed in the Philippines to redeem the pledge we made over two years ago when the last American troops surrendered on Corregidor after five months and twentyeight days of bitter resistance against overwhelming enemy strength. We promised to return; we have returned. In my last message to General Wainwright, sent on the fifth of May, 1942, just before he was captured, I told him that the gallant struggle of his comrades had inspired every soldier, sailor, and marine and all the workers in our shipyards and munitions plants. I said

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President Franklin D. Roosevelt, right, with Vice President Harry S. Truman at the White House on August 18, 1944. Roosevelt's death in April 1945 meant that Truman inherited the task of managing America's postwar occupations. Source: The Granger Collection, New York

that he and his devoted followers had become the living symbol of our war aims and the guarantee of our victory. That was true in 1942. It is still true in 1944 . . . In the six years before war broke out, the Philippine Government, acting in harmonious accord with the United States, made great strides towards complete establishment of her sovereignty. The United States promised to help build a new Nation in the Pacific, a Nation whose ideals, like our own, were liberty and equality and the democratic way of life- a Nation which in a very short time would join the friendly family of Nations on equal terms. We were keeping that promise. When war came and our work was wrecked, we pledged to the people of the Philippines that their freedom would be redeemed and that their independence would be established and protected. We are fulfilling that pledge now. When we have finished the job of driving the Japs from the Islands, the Philippines will be a free and independent Republic. There never was a doubt that the people of the Philippines were worthy of their independence. There will never be a doubt. The Filipinos have defended their homeland with fortitude and gallantry. We confidently expect to see them liberate it with courage and audacity. Under the leadership of President Manuel Quezon whose death came on the eve of his country’s liberation, and now under the leadership of their President Sergio Osmena, the

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Filipinos have carried on, and are carrying on, with gallantry—even in the midst of the enemy. We are glad to be back in the Philippines but we do not intend to stop there. Leyte is only a way station on the road to Japan. It is 700 miles from Formosa. It is 850 miles from China. We are astride the lifeline of the war lords’ empire; we are severing that life line. Our bombers, our ships, and our submarines are cutting off the ill-gotten conquests from the homeland. From our new base we shall quicken the assault. Our attacks of the last week have been destructive and decisive, but now we shall strike even more devastating blows at Japan. We have learned our lesson about Japan. We trusted her, and treated her with the decency due a civilized neighbor. We were foully betrayed. The price of the lesson was high. Now we are going to teach Japan her lesson. We have the will and the power to teach her the cost of treachery and deceit, and the cost of stealing from her neighbors. With our steadfast allies, we shall teach this lesson so that Japan will never forget it. We shall free the enslaved peoples. We shall restore stolen lands and looted wealth to their rightful owners. We shall strangle the Black Dragon of Japanese militarism forever.

Harry S. Truman Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress, April 16, 1945 Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Members of the Congress: It is with a heavy heart that I stand before you, my friends and colleagues, in the Congress of the United States. Only yesterday, we laid to rest the mortal remains of our beloved President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. At a time like this, words are inadequate. The most eloquent tribute would be a reverent silence. Yet, in this decisive hour, when world events are moving so rapidly, our silence might be misunderstood and might give comfort to our enemies . . . So that there can be no possible misunderstanding, both Germany and Japan can be certain, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that America will continue the fight for freedom until no vestige of resistance remains! We are deeply conscious of the fact that much hard fighting is still ahead of us. Having to pay such a heavy price to make complete victory certain, America will never become a party to any plan for partial victory! To settle for merely another temporary respite would surely jeopardize the future security of all the world. Our demand has been, and it remains—Unconditional Surrender! We will not traffic with the breakers of the peace on the terms of the peace. The responsibility for making of the peace—and it is a very grave responsibility—must rest with the defenders of the peace. We are not unconscious of the dictates of humanity. We do not wish to see unnecessary or unjustified suffering. But the laws of God and of

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man have been violated and the guilty must not go unpunished. Nothing shall shake our determination to punish the war criminals even though we must pursue them to the ends of the earth. Lasting peace can never be secured if we permit our dangerous opponents to plot future wars with impunity at any mountain retreat-however distant. In this shrinking world, it is futile to seek safety behind geographical barriers. Real security will be found only in law and in justice. Here in America, we have labored long and hard to achieve a social order worthy of our great heritage. In our time, tremendous progress has been made toward a really democratic way of life. Let me assure the forward-looking people of America that there will be no relaxation in our efforts to improve the lot of the common people. In the difficult days ahead, unquestionably we shall face problems of staggering proportions. However, with the faith of our fathers in our hearts, we do not fear the future. On the battlefields, we have frequently faced overwhelming odds-and won! At home, Americans will not be less resolute! We shall never cease our struggle to preserve and maintain our American way of life. At this moment, America, along with her brave Allies, is paying again a heavy price for the defense of our freedom. With characteristic energy, we are assisting in the liberation of entire nations. Gradually, the shackles of slavery are being broken by the forces of freedom. All of us are praying for a speedy victory. Every day peace is delayed costs a terrible toll. The armies of liberation today are bringing to an end Hitler’s ghastly threat to dominate the world. Tokyo rocks under the weight of our bombs . . . Our forefathers came to our rugged shores in search of religious tolerance, political freedom and economic opportunity. For those fundamental rights, they risked their lives. We well know today that such rights can be preserved only by constant vigilance, the eternal price of liberty! . . . At this moment, I have in my heart a prayer. As I have assumed my heavy duties, I humbly pray Almighty God, in the words of King Solomon: “Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad; for who is able to judge this thy so great a people?” I ask only to be a good and faithful servant of my Lord and my people.

Harry S. Truman Statement by the President on the Liberation of Korea, September 18, 1945 The Surrender of the Japanese forces in Seoul, ancient Korean capital, heralds the liberation of a freedom-loving and heroic people. Despite their long and cruel subjection under the warlords of Japan, the Koreans have kept alive their devotion to national liberty

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and to their proud cultural heritage. This subjection has now ended. The Japanese warlords are being removed. Such Japanese as may be temporarily retained are being utilized as servants of the Korean people and of our occupying forces only because they are deemed essential by reason of their technical qualifications. In this moment of liberation we are mindful of the difficult tasks which lie ahead. The building of a great nation has now begun with the assistance of the United States, China, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, who are agreed that Korea shall become free and independent. The assumption by the Koreans themselves of the responsibilities and functions of a free and independent nation and the elimination of all vestiges of Japanese control over Korean economic and political life will of necessity require time and patience. The goal is in view but its speedy attainment will require the joint efforts of the Korean people and of the allies. The American people rejoice in the liberation of Korea as the Taegook-kee, the ancient flag of Korea, waves again in the Land of the Morning Calm. Source: John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, Santa Barbara, CA: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

NOTES 1. The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson, ed. Albert Shaw (New York: Review of Reviews Corporation, 1924), 2: 629–630. 2. Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 87–228. 3. Kramer, The Blood of Government, 140–142. 4. Theodore Roosevelt to William Wingate Sewall, 24 April 1900, in The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt, ed. Elting Elmore Morison et al. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951), 2: 1270. 5. Robert Fatton, The Roots of Haitian Despotism (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007), 131–158; Philippe R. Girard, Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 55–91; Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 6. Scholars have long contemplated Wilson’s foreign policy. For selected approaches to various elements of U.S. foreign relations during the Wilson administration, see Frederick S. Calhoun, Uses of Force and Wilsonian Foreign Policy (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993); Matthew C. Price, The Wilsonian Persuasion in American Foreign Policy (Youngstown, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2007); Robert W. Tucker, Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 7. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Dell Pub. Co., 1972 [1959]). 8. Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 26–34; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

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9. John Milton Cooper, Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 10. Manela, The Wilsonian Moment. 11. Frank Costigliola, Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984); Melvyn P. Leffler, The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979).

CHAPTER

4

Global Power, 1945–1965

L

ike Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy displayed a knack for describing the world in compelling terms. Like those earlier presidents, Kennedy described a grand mission for the United States as a source of freedom and democratic government that could extend around the world; he knew how to use the instruments of state in the pursuit of national interest; and he at times found those goals mutually reinforcing and, at other times, clearly at odds. Kennedy sought to explain these connections in his first major address to Congress. Delivered on May 25, 1961, only four months after an inauguration that followed The 1947 cartoon, “Peace-Mongering,” by Daniel R. Fitzpatrick one of the closest, most hard- depicted the Marshall Plan for the post–World War II recovery of fought presidential campaigns Western Europe. Source: The Granger Collection, New York in U.S. history, the address was to a joint session of Congress, and it detailed what Kennedy called “urgent national needs.” Always displaying a keen grasp of drama, Kennedy began by explaining that “the Constitution imposes upon me the obligation to ‘from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union.’ While this has traditionally been interpreted as an annual affair, this tradition has been broken in extraordinary times. These are extraordinary times.” (Document 4.14). Kennedy believed the role for the United States was simple and clear, but hardly easy. “No role in history could be more difficult or more important. We stand for freedom.” And Kennedy believed the United States had a responsibility to support freedom overseas. “The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the 249

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whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East—the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation. More than an end, they seek a beginning.” Kennedy believed the threat to freedom consisted of people who “send arms, agitators, aid, technicians and propaganda to every troubled area.” These people sought to manipulate the ferment of the “rising peoples” to undermine freedom.1 The Kennedy administration saw this statement as a middle ground in the dangerous political territory of the cold war. Kennedy believed he was responding to both the left and the right, defending the social movements of the developing world while criticizing the spread of communism. This speech and others like it have become the touchstones of cold war history. Even more than the questions of isolationism and internationalism during the interwar years, the broad strategies and major events of the cold war are familiar to many Americans. But that very familiarity can make it difficult to discern the struggle with empire during these eventful years. The familiar narrative can interfere with a focus on the specific ways that the United States went about governing foreign territory and foreign people. As a result, it is crucial to remember that, although this chapter is in large part about the cold war, it is primarily about the particular ways in which the cold war specifically informed the American struggle with empire, in some ways confirming and in other ways rejecting how Americans had responded in the past. The ongoing struggle with empire in the first two decades after World War II revealed the United States at both its best and its worst. In Europe and Asia, the United States created a system of postwar reconstruction that helped promote political democratization, economic development, and regional security in places that had rarely known any of those virtues. The United States also pressured old empires to surrender their colonies, helping to support modern independence movements around the globe. At the same time, the United States continued to shape the destiny of foreign countries in ways both direct and covert, often to the detriment of those countries. It helped establish dictatorships, undermined self-rule, and promoted its own economic benefit at the expense of others. The United States assumed the right to make decisions about foreign countries, sometimes displaying remarkable arrogance along the way. As a result, the concept of American empire became an increasingly loaded subject in the decades after World War II. It informed American policymaking, political debate, and popular culture. It framed the way people conceived of the United States, its allies, and its opponents. All this could occur because the United States enjoyed a power that was unprecedented in its own history and unrivaled in world history. That power took economic, political, diplomatic, and military forms. It enabled the United States to impose its own beliefs onto the world as never before, using new techniques even as the United States remained committed to age-old principles. Two particular examples reveal the contradictions of post–World War II U.S. policy. In the postwar governance of the Axis powers and the dissolution of their empires, the United States emerged as a model of democratization. In contrast, in Vietnam the United States entangled itself in the vagaries of cold war–era proxy conflicts. In the case of postwar occupation, Americans celebrated what they saw as a unique

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capacity to govern others for the better. In the case of Vietnam, critics charged the United States with the worst forms of deceit and abuse (Document 4.13). Accordingly, the peoples of different countries saw the United States in very different ways. So, too, did Americans, who struggled to make sense of the world around them. By the late 1960s, those tensions exploded both at home and abroad. For the twenty years after World War II, however, most Americans were able to hold those tensions in check. The federal leadership certainly did, as it deployed the newfound power of the United States to engage in the direct governance of foreign countries as never before.

THE WORLD

IN

1945

In the years immediately after 1945, America’s new imperial identity emerged from three intersecting roles: dismantling the Axis empires, governing the defeated Axis powers, and confronting the Soviet Union. All three challenges provided both abstract models and practical experience for governing foreign territory and foreign people. Equally important, these circumstances confirmed principles that Americans had developed for a century and a half. All three policymaking arenas reinforced the criticism of traditional forms of imperial rule and celebrated systems of governance developed by the United States. Although the Axis surrender in 1945 forced these matters to the forefront of American policymaking, the challenge of empire had already been on the table in 1944 and early 1945 as the Allies began planning for a postwar world (Document 4.1). The poorly coordinated postwar planning process reflected the chaotic and competitive environment in Washington. This was partly the result of Franklin Roosevelt himself. The president had often followed a policy of divide and rule, pitting one cabinet office against another, all the while positioning himself as the one figure who could settle any dispute and determine policy. After winning an unprecedented third term in 1940, Roosevelt felt particularly confident in his power to shape policy. But Roosevelt’s political strategy promoted a growing number of disputes within the policymaking leadership. World War II itself exacerbated these conditions. The sudden and massive increase to the nation’s diplomatic and military structure created an inevitable level of confusion. Despite such uncertainty, certain principles connected American policymakers. First among these was the memory of World War I. Throughout the Second World War, the circumstances of 1918 continued to loom large in the American consciousness. Some concluded that the two wars together had demonstrated that Germans were an unredeemable people, possessing a culture of violence and evil. Some believed Nazism was an aberration in a longer German history. Meanwhile, other Americans focused their attention on the particular details of the Treaty of Versailles. Some Americans believed that if European leaders had simply followed the advice of Woodrow Wilson, a reconstructed rather than a conquered Germany could have reentered the community of nations without the social conditions that set the stage for the Nazi regime. Still others charged that, in the wake of World War I, world leaders were so appalled by the toll of war that they adopted a pacifist outlook that left western Europe unprepared to face the Fascist threats in Germany and Italy.

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All of these memories and concerns informed the initial stages of postwar planning. Americans initially focused their attention on Germany and western Europe, leaving Japan, the Pacific, and East Asia for later consideration. The most dramatic planning came from Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, who was convinced that the Germans had demonstrated they would always constitute a threat to the rest of the world. He believed that Germany deserved severe punishment as the primary agent of World War II. By 1944, he was prepared to recommend to Roosevelt that Germany be reduced to an agricultural society, stripped of its industrial capacity and, in turn, of its potential to mobilize for modern warfare. It was a short-lived plan, but it reflected the extent of American anger toward Germany and the belief that even a defeated Germany could remain a threat to world peace.2 Roosevelt dismissed the Morgenthau Plan and even disavowed rumors of its details. “No one wants to make Germany a wholly agricultural nation again,” he complained in September 1944, “and yet somebody down the line has handed this out to the press. I wish we could catch and chastise him.”3 Roosevelt knew that American policymakers had already opted for a different plan, first sketched out in September 1944 in a document known as JCS 1067 (Document 4.1). While this plan clearly sought to strip Germany of its capacity to make war, it also sought a rapid reconstruction that allowed for industrial redevelopment. Roosevelt was a physically weakened man by this time. He won a fourth term in 1944, but was suffering from severe hypertension and a variety of related illnesses. His sudden death from a stroke in April 1945 created tremendous uncertainty. After twelve years in office, even Roosevelt’s opponents had adapted themselves to his particular style. FDR’s vice president, former Missouri senator Harry Truman, had been a last-minute addition to the Democratic ticket in 1944, and Roosevelt himself had excluded Truman from much of the high-level planning for the war and its aftermath. As Truman struggled to take charge and the Axis powers teetered on the verge of collapse, policymakers sought to advance their own plans for a postwar world. Much of this discussion emerged within the State Department and the War Department, but they were hardly alone. The Treasury, the navy, and numerous other government agencies saw a role for themselves. Meanwhile, different departments within these agencies expressed competing plans for the future.4 By the time Germany surrendered in 1945, American policymakers had agreed on a few general principles to guide a postwar policy. In the short term, they would pursue the immediate demilitarization of the Axis powers. That did not mean going so far as the Morgenthau Plan suggested, but it did mean eliminating the key sectors of German industry necessary for remilitarization. American policymakers also remained committed to eliminating the German and Japanese empires. What would become of the people and places recently governed by the Axis was less certain. Second, the United States advocated a program of immediate humanitarian assistance and economic development. The Axis in general, and Germany and Japan in particular, had been at the receiving end of the largest military bombardment in history. As in the effort to rehabilitate Europe in 1918 after World War I (or, for that matter, in the effort to reconstruct the former Confederacy in 1865), American policymakers concluded that it was not in the long-term interest of the United States to leave a conquered foe in a state of utter devastation.

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Third, while the United States planned to assume the leading role in this process, the other major Allied powers would have varying degrees of involvement. In Germany and Austria, the United States would share both the burdens and the benefits of occupation with Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. In the Pacific, the United States proclaimed its right to be the sole occupying force in Japan. In return, the United States relented to Soviet demands for control over the German satellite countries in Eastern Europe. Both decisions proved controversial and were emblematic of the emerging cold war. Not only did the cold war create two spheres of influence dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, but some nations were quite literally torn apart. The United States, Britain, and France consolidated their zones in Germany while the Soviet Union established its own regime in the eastern part of Germany and Eastern Europe. After the Allies removed Japanese control over the Korean Peninsula, U.S. and Soviet leaders soon created their own zones of control. These short-term plans were all supposed to support a series of long-term goals. The United States sought a policy that would achieve far-reaching political, social, and cultural change in the former Axis powers. Initially convinced that there were deep-seated causes for the totalitarian empires of the Axis, American policymakers believed the occupation needed to transform these inherently dictatorial societies into modern democracies. Everyone would benefit from this state of affairs, not least the United States. Convinced that democracies made natural allies, American policymakers hoped that eventually Germany, Italy, and Japan would cease to be threats to American security. As tensions rose with the Soviet Union, Americans even began to believe that these nations might be allies against a Soviet threat. These goals were exemplified in two specific initiatives. The European Recovery Program, a broad-based system of economic and humanitarian aid, sought to alleviate suffering throughout Western Europe. Soon popularly renamed for George C. Marshall, army chief of staff during World War II, the nation’s first secretary of defense, and from 1947 to 1949 the secretary of state, the Marshall Plan specifically sought to stem communism, which many policymakers believed was particularly attractive at moments of social and economic turmoil. In 1949, American officials played the lead role in forging the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a strategic alliance connecting North America and Western Europe. Designed as the primary military instrument of containment, NATO also promised a defensive structure for Britain and France against communist East Germany, where cold war tensions had become so severe that American leaders even advocated limited rearmament of West Germany soon after World War II.5 Although these discussions reflected the concerns of the 1940s and repeated arguments people had made at Versailles in 1919, the American policy toward postwar occupation had its origins not in Europe but in the United States, and those origins were not in the twentieth century but in the eighteenth. The planning and execution of the American occupations, the Marshall Plan, and the creation of NATO extended principles that Americans had first articulated in the territorial system, seeking the same goals and using the same strategies. Creating institutions of representative government, replacing despotic empires with self-governing republics, and establishing alliances through affection rather than force had been the

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foundations of the territorial system. Americans had specifically treated this system as their own response to the European system of empires. Even the structure of governance in former Axis nations mirrored the territorial system as it had taken shape in North America. The federal leadership dispatched trusted subordinates with a broad mandate to pursue both military security and civil administration. The titles of these representatives were never so uniform as the “territorial governors” of North America, and they were all senior military leaders rather than the civil officials who controlled much of the territorial regime, but the generals and the territorial governors would have understood each other well. The occupation leaders saw themselves as a liberating force, bringing American freedoms to people who had never known them. After brief periods of military rule, the American occupation leadership set in motion a series of political reforms very similar to the structure of territorial rule. They identified allies in the local political elite who could assume an initial series of appointed offices. They sought wholesale changes to governing institutions and educational systems, hoping to create a culture that would provide the peoples of the Axis with a daily education in the realities of representative government. As in the territorial system, constitution writing was supposed to be a landmark in this process of transformation. Crafting new constitutions—especially in Germany and Japan—was supposed to institutionalize freedom and preclude a totalitarian resurgence. Equally important, it was supposed to demonstrate a capacity for self-government along an American model. Again and again throughout the nineteenth century, American territories had done the same thing. Constitution writing was not only the necessary last act before statehood, it also provided proof of a politically mature society. Did Americans actually make these connections to the past during the 1940s, as Teddy Roosevelt had done in his speech to the Republican Convention in 1900? Probably not, but the lessons of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were so deeply embedded in the nation’s culture that by the mid-twentieth century Americans needed little prompting to return to those principles (Document 4.9). For all the continuities that linked the postwar occupations to the American territorial past, there was one truly remarkable difference. Nowhere was the United States more resolute in its commitment to the principles of self-government, constitution writing, and institutional development than in Japan. This constituted a profound transformation and a complete rejection of nineteenth-century territorial policy in the United States. Since 1787, when Americans crafted the Constitution and the Northwest Ordinance, territorial governance had always been based on white supremacy. At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans had established various forms of self-rule for the nonwhite majorities of the territories acquired through the Spanish-American War, but always with the caveat that the United States needed to preserve a role in guiding those people they perceived to be racially inferior. These principles of racial supremacy were almost entirely missing from postwar Japan. That does not mean that American policymakers—or, for that matter, the Japanese people they governed—ignored racial differences. Anger over the attack on Pearl Harbor and the need to preserve a consensus in support of the war fueled a potent, racially based demonization of the Japanese people throughout the war. This attitude was on display in

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the racial stereotypes at work in American popular culture and in the government’s decision to relocate and place in internment camps Japanese Americans during World War II. Although the federal government did indeed relocate or intern close to 11,000 German Americans, most of these were foreign born and usually had not yet secured their U.S. citizenship. In stark contrast, more than ten times that number of Japanese Americans, the majority of them U.S. citizens, were interned. Likewise, Japanese Americans entered the United States Army facing deep suspicions of their loyalty, while Dwight Eisenhower, a German American, became the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe. Beyond the specific experience of Japanese Americans, racial prejudice was alive and well in the United States. Indeed, African Americans, Latinos, and veterans from other minority groups asked whether they could fight a war for democracy overseas when inequality remained a reality at home. They saw direct connections between inequality at home and imperialism around the globe (Document 4.11). What accounted for the American policy in Japan? First and foremost, American policymakers considered Japan a modern, civilized society. Japan’s democratic potential might be in doubt, but its capacity for self-government was not. Federal leaders treated the Japanese as an advanced civilization, something they had rarely done with Filipinos, native Hawaiians, or Puerto Ricans. Equally important, after basing its war effort on claims that the Axis had created dictatorial empires throughout the world, the United States was confined by its own rhetoric. In the years that followed, Americans looked on Germany and Japan with amazement. During the war, Americans had seen abundant evidence that the regimes in both countries were founded on tyranny at home and imperialistic brutality abroad. After the war, both nations seemed to undergo complete transformations. The people of Germany and Japan publicly rejected their totalitarian pasts. They embraced representative government, creating parliamentary democracies and institutionalizing civil liberties. Most important, this all seemed to be the work of an enlightened American leadership.6 Unlike every previous experience with governing foreign territory and foreign people, there were no substantive areas of resistance to American leadership in West Germany and Japan. Unlike the Indians of the North American West, the Hispanic residents of the Southwest, the Hawaiian monarchists, or the Filipino nationalists, the people of Germany and Japan seemed to embrace the United States. In Louisiana, the Southwest, Hawaii, and the Philippines, the United States had likewise found local populations who quickly embraced what they saw as the benefits of U.S. rule. There were, of course, limitations to this image. Contrary to American public opinion, the histories of Germany and Japan were not entirely tales of despotism and individual suffering. Both nations had political cultures that could rapidly develop the institutions of representative self-government. Likewise, American civil administration was never so benign as Americans liked to believe. The occupation forces suppressed any political movements—peaceful or not—that showed any communist inclinations. The people of Germany and Japan were never fawning acolytes of American democracy, despite how they might have been presented to the people of the United States. The occupations of Germany and Japan were the sources of constant tension between occupiers and occupied.

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Those tensions notwithstanding, the occupations were remarkably peaceful and successful. Not only did they achieve the economic and political reconstruction of the Axis, but they also successfully institutionalized representative democracy in countries that became steadfast allies of the United States. More important, from an American perspective, any problems were almost invisible. As Americans considered the struggle with empire, the rehabilitation of Germany and Japan seemed to confirm everything they believed about how best to avoid the pitfalls of empire.

OCCUPATION

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CONTAINMENT

The Axis was hardly the only territory that concerned the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The United States continued to govern territory that policymakers considered “foreign” in one way or another. These territorial acquisitions took various forms, and they came to the United States as the result of numerous factors. By the mid1950s, however, most of them served the role of providing the United States with a global presence that American policymakers had concluded the cold war required. The United States preserved its old territorial possessions and established itself in new ways around the world. The bureaucratic chaos of 1945 slowly gave way to an increasingly focused response to what many American policymakers perceived as the mounting threat from the Soviet Union. The Truman administration increasingly focused on the notion of “containment,” a term invented and most thoroughly developed by a State Department official named George Kennan. This policy quite literally sought to contain the reach of the Soviet Union. That meant preventing the Soviet Union from extending direct control over foreign countries or from creating ready allies through the formation of communist governments. Containment also sought to avoid direct military confrontation—or a hot war—with the Soviet Union, a goal that became all the more important after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949. Realizing the goals of containment became the task of a reorganized federal government. In the same way that governing the West had transformed the federal system in the nineteenth century, confronting the Soviet Union transformed the federal apparatus after 1945. Both tasks convinced federal leaders of the need for a larger, more expensive, more elaborate, and more aggressive federal government. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the State Department and the War Department, joined later by the Interior Department, had taken the lead in federal governance. In the twentieth century, a much larger constellation of agencies confronted the cold war. In 1947, the United States created new government agencies: an independent air force, the Central Intelligence Agency, an expanded State Department structure. Equally important, the United States sought to impose greater coordination through the creation of a Department of Defense that would oversee all military operations and a National Security Council that was supposed to provide a cohesive overview of world affairs for the president. In the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, the occupation of Germany and Japan provided benefits that soon exceeded the costs of the occupation itself.

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The vast military contingent that the United States first installed to establish American authority over a conquered Germany and Japan soon became a defense force against communism. In Germany, Americans joined with other Western European armies in defending against the massive buildup of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe (Document 4.12). In Japan, American forces stood ready to defend against Soviet expansion in East Asia; and after the revolutionary government of Mao Zedong took power in 1949, American forces in the Pacific assumed the additional task of containing communist China. Japan became all the more important in 1950, when forces from North Korea invaded South Korea. Soviet leaders saw this as an opportunity to consolidate control in East Asia. American policymakers saw this as a provocative communist assault. But as had so often been the case, the people affected by these decisions had their own concerns. Some Koreans had long demanded the creation of a single, independent Korean nation free from foreign intervention. Koreans were also divided in their support of communism and capitalism. As regional and global ambitions collided, the Korean Peninsula was consumed by a war that lasted more than three years. Throughout the Korean War, Japan was the most reliable ally and strategic outpost for the United States in the western Pacific. The United States also flooded billions of dollars into the Japanese economy, further propelling that nation’s recovery. But Germany and Japan were only the most pronounced examples of a broader effort by the United States to establish overseas outposts that could serve the cold war strategy. By the late 1940s, American policymakers were opting for a more aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union (Document 4.6). This meant creating military bases around the world that would enable the United States to encircle the Soviet Union and confront any other nation that threatened to join with the Soviets. The Pacific islands that the United States had acquired during the Spanish-American War as ship coaling stations and trading outposts now offered locations for ports and airfields. The United States also secured treaty agreements with foreign nations to create military installations. These nations included the once-grand imperial powers of Western Europe, many of whose governments shared the American fear of Soviet expansionism. These strategic goals coincided with American economic goals. Much as Americans looked to lessons of World War I and the rise of Hitler in shaping postwar foreign policy, they looked for lessons from the Great Depression in shaping postwar economic policy. As the United States entered an era of unprecedented economic prosperity, American policymakers reaffirmed their commitment to preserving the nation’s overseas markets. They also committed themselves to promoting domestic consumption to fuel the nation’s economy, which in turn required access to raw materials and cheap labor overseas.

AN OLD AMERICAN EMPIRE

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With the advent of the cold war, the United States and its overseas dependencies sought to redefine their relationships. These changes were most pronounced in U.S. relations with the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Yet Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Americans continued to ask the same question: Were those islands American or foreign? More important, what constituted “independence”?

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When the Japanese invaded the Philippines in 1941, the commander of the islands’ defenses, General Douglas MacArthur, fled the islands but pledged “I will return.” Three years later, he landed at the head of a massive U.S. force that defeated the Japanese. But what would become of the Philippines? Throughout the war, Philippine rebels had worked with the United States to undermine the Japanese occupation. Those rebels joined forces with MacArthur’s invasion force. The question was whether the American forces constituted a liberation or simply a reconquest. American troops remained on the islands; Filipinos remained steadfast in their commitment to the timetable for independence established in 1934 through the Tydings-McDuffie Act. Before the Japanese surrendered, advocates of an independent Philippines were making their case in Washington. For its part, the Truman administration expressed little desire to govern in the Philippines and bear all the costs that went with such a commitment. Nonetheless, the United States was entirely unwilling to surrender access to such a strategically vital location. After considerable debate and negotiation within and between countries, the Philippines became independent on July 4, 1946 (Documents 4.3 and 4.4). The date was hardly coincidental, coming 170 years after the U.S. Declaration of Independence. But the United States had already secured agreements that guaranteed not only preferential commercial relationships but also exclusive rights to establish military installations in perpetuity (Document 4.5). In the years that followed, the Philippines remained a vital strategic outpost in the western Pacific. Meanwhile, the Philippine economy became increasingly dependent on the United States. These circumstances notwithstanding, both Filipinos and Americans could celebrate what they had done in 1946. Filipinos had peacefully secured their own independence from the most powerful nation on earth. Americans could claim they had avoided the pitfalls of empire, allowing foreign peoples to govern themselves without compromising either national security or the global struggle against communism (Document 4.16). Circumstances were different in Puerto Rico. Rather than allow Puerto Rico to take steps toward independence, the United States sought a means to institutionalize the unique situation in which Puerto Ricans enjoyed U.S. citizenship but Puerto Rico itself was not fully American. In 1946, Truman appointed the first native-born governor. In 1950, the people of Puerto Rico voted in favor of a constitutional convention; however, unlike U.S. territories that petitioned for statehood upon completion of a constitution, in 1952 the federal government afforded the island the status of commonwealth. This was the constitutional condition of the Philippines only a few decades earlier. Puerto Rico could govern itself but was neither independent nor fully incorporated within the United States (Document 4.8). The situation in Puerto Rico was more than a mere constitutional squabble. The island continued to suffer from widespread poverty, and Puerto Ricans argued whether the relationship with the United States provided desperately needed economic support or merely preserved Puerto Rico in a condition of permanent underdevelopment and dependency. Thousands of Puerto Ricans, eager to realize the rights and opportunities they expected as U.S. citizens, moved to the mainland. As residents of U.S. states, they immediately had congressional representation and they could vote in presidential elections. But many faced racial prejudice as well as the

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widespread belief among Anglo-Americans that Puerto Ricans were, in fact, foreign nationals. The largest community of Puerto Ricans congregated in New York City, where they struggled against both economic injustice and a dual identity as Puerto Ricans and Americans. These relationships between the United States and Puerto Rico and the Philippines were very much the result of the ruling elites in all three governments. That the United States wanted to preserve its influence in Puerto Rico and the Philippines was no surprise. But the official willingness to consent to that relationship in the Philippines and Puerto Rico is more complicated. The governments in both places were firmly under the control of leaders friendly to the United States, leaders who had complex personal, domestic, and international reasons for preserving important aspects of the status quo. Some Puerto Ricans believed that only through statehood could they overcome both underdevelopment on the island and discrimination on the mainland. Puerto Rican nationalists countered that only through total independence from the United States could Puerto Rico flourish in political or economic terms (Document 4.7). The federal government and the Puerto Rican government threatened and imprisoned nationalist leaders in an effort to suppress the broader nationalist movement. The independence movement, in turn, took various forms, including some radical manifestations. In November 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists almost succeeded in assassinating President Truman. In 1954, three Puerto Ricans opened fire in the House of Representatives, injuring five members of Congress. Although some Puerto Ricans continued to oppose the status quo, the constitutional order in Puerto Rico became a model for the Pacific island of Guam, which in 1950 became a self-governing polity whose residents enjoyed U.S. citizenship. Like Puerto Rico, Guam was too valuable to become independent. It remained a vital military outpost, and visitors to the island required special security clearance from the federal government. Even as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam experienced the friction between growing autonomy and ongoing U.S. authority, there was no talk of independence for smaller possessions the United States had acquired during the preceding half century. American policymakers remained convinced that the smaller island possessions of the central and southern Pacific (Samoa, the Marianas, Micronesia) were incapable of selfgovernment. Unlike a half century before, these claims were based less on simple assertions of racial inferiority than on the isolation, small populations, and limited resources of the places in question. The federal government preserved these islands as political dependencies, allowing highly specific forms of local self-rule. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, even these small island possessions served important roles in the cold war. Some islands that were too small to support major military outposts instead served as testing ranges for American nuclear weapons. Bikini Island alone was the location for twenty-three nuclear tests. One of these, the Castle Bravo test of 1954, produced an explosion of fifteen megatons, more than twice what scientists had predicted and the largest explosion by an American nuclear device. The radiation from these tests made the island uninhabitable, and the federal government forcibly removed the residents of Bikini to a neighboring island.

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As a result, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the United States had both extended its power and surrendered its authority on an unprecedented scale. The Allied occupation of Italy ended in 1947, and Austria exercised extensive self-government long before the occupation formally ended in 1955. In 1952, the United States restored full political autonomy to a Japanese government operating under the constitution developed during the American occupation. The circumstances in Germany were more complicated. The United States, Great Britain, and France combined their occupation zones into a single polity called the Federal Republic of Germany, which became a self-governing entity in 1949. The Soviet Union established a separate government for the German Democratic Republic. Soon known simply as West Germany and East Germany, these two countries came to symbolize to Americans the way the United States had surrendered its authority over others even as the Soviet Union tightened its grip. Regardless, the American occupation in West Germany formally came to an end in 1955. If Americans believed that Germany and Japan exemplified the possibilities of democracy and self-determination, the Soviet Union likewise confirmed long-standing beliefs about linkage between empires and despotism. Indeed, the situation in Eastern Europe did more than propel the cold war; it reinforced the way many Americans understood empires. To many American observers, Eastern Europe had exchanged one dictatorship for another. The old German satellites—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary— had become Soviet satellites, and the same sort of government was in place. Once again, a distant capital (Moscow replacing Berlin) imposed its own leaders onto these countries and shut down any form of domestic dissent. The function of these satellites was similar: to benefit the imperial centers. Refugees from Eastern Europe confirmed American fears. Americans believed that the Soviet Union’s goal was to create a global empire that would serve Soviet interests at the expense of local interests. Communist expansion was perceived as a threat to both the United States and the rest of the world. In stark contrast to the Soviet policy of control, the United States could claim that it had promoted independence. In Germany, Japan, Austria, and Italy, the United States had created self-governing societies. Echoing a claim Americans had made about the creation of new states in western North America, this independence created unity, forging alliances that now faced an unprecedented test as the United States attempted to realize a global policy of containment.

DISMANTLING EMPIRES The cold war left the United States in a strange situation when it came to the empires of the world. The United States condemned the Soviet Union as an empire, but the Soviet Union found a new crop of allies in social movements around the world that appropriated claims rooted in American political rhetoric. The United States continued its campaign to dismantle the old empires of Western Europe, all the while trying to preserve its alliances with members of those empires and with the newly independent colonies. American policymakers celebrated independence, all the while cultivating new ways for the United States to control foreign territory and foreign peoples. It was in the midst of these

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circumstances that the United States finally closed the book on the territorial system, concluding the longest chapter of its own struggle with empire. Americans had complained about European empires since 1776. During the early republic, Americans proclaimed that European empires spread despotism and tyranny. Worse still, they seemed bent on subjugating the United States. Americans began the nineteenth century by protesting European efforts to meddle in American affairs, only to conclude by the end of the century that they could govern European imperial possessions better than the Europeans. Along the way, the United States established increasingly strong alliances with many of the empires in Western Europe, an alliance structure further forged by World War I. After the war, the United States dabbled in decolonization but later supported the efforts of the victorious Allies to preserve control over existing colonies and assume control over the colonies of the Central powers. During World War II, the United States changed course. American policymakers committed themselves not only to the elimination of the Axis empires but also to rethinking and, in some cases, dismantling the colonial holdings of its closest allies.7 Colonial residents sought much the same goal, but for very different reasons. At first glance, colonial residents made many of the same decisions during World War II that they had during World War I. They sided with the Allies, including their imperial rulers. Few colonials sided with the Axis, and, although some colonial residents hoped the war would lead to their independence, few of them made those demands during the war. Nonetheless, colonial residents proved far less trusting than they had been a generation earlier. Many considered themselves betrayed by imperial leaders who had promised political reform and local autonomy as the reward for assistance and participation in World War I, only to find the old order of things restored after 1918. During World War II, these same local elites and their successors considered new options. Some made independence an explicit requirement of wartime assistance. Others claimed they would not support the Axis, but they could not actively support the Allies. Throughout the war, colonial residents formed a chorus proclaiming that a war fought to preserve freedom against tyranny needed to apply to them.8 They began to mobilize in force as soon as the war was over. After World War II, American policymakers vacillated in their attitude toward European colonies. In 1945, with victory in sight, FDR had expressed his own desire to avoid getting sucked into the dispute brewing in French Indochina (Document 4.2). The United States initially supported its allies in their desperate bids to retain their colonies. This support from the United States emerged despite the fact that these warravaged nations could no longer afford their dependencies, despite the powerful arguments against imperial rule unleashed by World War II, and despite collapsing support for the idea that the white nations of Europe could or should “civilize” the nonwhite peoples of the world. Advocates of colonial independence occasionally found ready allies in the United States. Some of these were old-style anti-imperialists: Americans who had mobilized against the Spanish-American War or who later advocated Puerto Rican independence. But organized anti-imperialism in the United States had always enjoyed limited support. More striking was the shift among policymakers. In the twenty years after World War II, the United States pressured many of its World War II allies to

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abandon their imperial possessions. Americans concluded that the nations of Western Europe could not afford the cost of maintaining colonies that no longer generated revenue. They believed that money was better spent on the mutual defense of Western Europe against the Soviet threat. The State Department regularly urged European empires to accept faster timetables for the independence of their colonial possessions. Great Britain was first to feel the pressure. In 1947 it granted independence to India, perhaps its most cherished colony. Soon thereafter Britain gave up most of its other colonies. This change was never entirely the result of the United States. Many Britons had come to question imperialism on moral and economic grounds, and residents of British colonies launched effective independence campaigns. But in an era when the United States had a growing capacity to support or undermine the policies of its old wartime allies, American pressure helped initiate and accelerate the formal process of decolonization. During the 1960s, much of Africa was transformed from clusters of British, French, and Belgian colonies into a continent of independent republics. But the United States alternated between support for imperial powers and support for independence movements. The tipping point was usually the American understanding of the domestic political movements within the colonies. Eager to create new allies and deathly afraid of increasing Soviet power, American policymakers delayed independence at the slightest sign that a socialist, communist, or Soviet-friendly government might take power. Nowhere was the American approach to European empires more clear than in Indochina, the territory constituting most of Southeast Asia. After centuries in which China had sought to secure control of the area, France established its own colonial rule in the 1880s. By the turn of the twentieth century, an Indochinese nationalist movement had arisen. In 1918, nationalists sent a delegation to Versailles, joining the large cohort of colonial residents who hoped that Woodrow Wilson would support their claims for independence and selfdetermination. The leader of that delegation was a young man who called himself Nguyen Ai Quoc. He returned to Indochina, convinced that the communist government taking shape in the Soviet Union was more committed than the United States to anticolonialism. Eventually rejecting the term Indochina altogether, he claimed the peninsula was home to various distinct peoples. Nguyen Ai Quoc claimed to speak on behalf of the Vietnamese people, who were a nation independent from European rule and separate from the Laotian and Cambodian people who also lived in Southeast Asia. He eventually changed his name to Ho Chi Minh, and he formed a militant resistance to French rule. During World War II, the Japanese easily conquered the French and established their own colony in Indochina. Local residents fought the Japanese just as they had against the imperial powers. After the Japanese surrendered, both the hereditary monarchy and nationalists like Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnamese independence. The emperor soon abdicated, and Ho Chi Minh took office as head of state. He had modeled the Vietnamese declaration of independence on the American declaration of independence, and he called on the United States, a nation that had long condemned empires, to endorse Vietnam’s call for self-determination. In Washington, the decision was easy. Convinced that Ho Chi Minh was a communist, American policymakers refused to recognize the new regime in Vietnam and immediately helped to restore French colonial rule. The response from Vietnam was a feeling of

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betrayal and a commitment to resistance. In the decade that followed, Vietnamese nationalists under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh organized a guerilla resistance to France, slowly grinding away at the French army and the colonial administration. In 1954, when colonial rule seemed on the verge of collapse, the United States withdrew its support for France. The subsequent Geneva Conference of 1954 formally ended French colonialism and created two polities, North Vietnam and South Vietnam. In an era when the United States was pressuring European powers to abandon their imperial pretensions, support for France via military advisers, naval logistics, and covert intelligence was motivated by a desire to prevent the creation of a communist state rather than an effort to preserve the French empire. This sort of unofficial, often secret involvement became increasingly common during the 1950s. It provided a means for the United States to exert its power on a global scale without engaging in the sort of direct governance the United States had exercised during the postwar occupations or, for that matter, in 1898 in the old Spanish colonies. The United States supported friendly regimes with a dizzying array of policymaking tools, products of recent developments in both technology and government operations. Intelligence gathering and covert operations had come into their own. Communications technology made it easier for the United States to snoop on other countries and transmit that information to Washington. Policymakers believed they had unprecedented means to involve themselves in other countries, and the bureaucratic language of cold war necessity justified these activities. Not only did the United States possess tremendous military power, but in the 1950s the United States also enjoyed unprecedented and unrivaled wealth. The federal government could spread billions of dollars around the globe as needed. Distributed through government programs, this money could unobtrusively support allies and undermine opponents. American leaders believed that their allies should be democratic at best, anticommunist at least. The two did not always go together. Indeed, this anticommunist litmus test led the United States to support a growing number of dictatorial regimes. During the 1950s, the United States moved from supporting existing governments to installing new regimes friendly to the United States in countries that threatened U.S. interests. In 1953, the United States and Britain brought down the government of Iranian prime minister Muhammad Mossadegh when he nationalized British oil companies. In 1954, the United States orchestrated a coup d’état in Guatemala that toppled the government of President Jacobo Arbenz, whose only transgressions had been that he removed certain limitations on the Guatemalan Communist Party and nationalized land owned by American businesses (Document 4.10). In each case, national security and economic policy overlapped to justify these actions. To policymakers in the Department of State and Department of Defense, nationalization of foreign-owned business assets seemed like an intentionally provocative act. It also appeared as the first move toward the development of a communist government. To policymakers in the Treasury and Commerce departments, nationalizing those assets had a direct impact on U.S. trade. Officials in Washington had ready allies across the United States. American business leaders had been eager to exploit both the natural resources and low labor costs in the developing world. They saw communism as a direct threat to

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these efforts and applied tremendous pressure on the administration to act in defense of American businesses, but it hardly took much pushing because policymakers were already inclined to reach the same conclusions. South Vietnam initially became a showcase of these new policymaking techniques. The Geneva Conference mandated a referendum to determine whether North Vietnam and South Vietnam would reunify and what kind of government would take shape. As it became clear that Ho Chi Minh would be the victorious leader of a unified Vietnam, the United States ignored the mandate for a referendum and threw its support behind a permanent government in South Vietnam under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem. In the 1950s the governments in Saigon and Washington found themselves increasingly intertwined, with the South Vietnamese government relying on the United States for support and Washington acceding to most South Vietnamese requests in order to preserve an anticommunist ally in Southeast Asia. During the 1950s, the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower concluded that, although involvement in South Vietnam might be messy, it was nonetheless useful. In a situation eerily similar to the divided Korean Peninsula, the United States sustained South Vietnam to contain communism without risking the kind of confrontation with the Soviet Union that might ensue by directly attacking North Vietnam. Eisenhower and his advisers shared the Truman administration’s commitment to containment. In the 1950s, that policy entailed an increasingly aggressive policy of anticommunism throughout Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. At first glance, the cold war diplomacy of the United States may seem like something new. The world of covert operatives and coded transmissions, economic development, and mutual defense agreements certainly was. Many of the attempts to reinforce friendly regimes and to oust others required the work of the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies that wielded new technologies and new techniques. The rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as the two reigning superpowers had replaced the old imperial balance of power situated in Western Europe. But the broad strategy of installing or preserving governments that supported U.S. interests was a tradition that preceded the 1950s. Previously, in Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua, the United States had interceded when local governments defied U.S. interests. In each case, the United States managed to install friendly governments that satisfied both foreign policy makers and business leaders. By the 1950s, this long history of U.S. involvement came to play an increasingly important role throughout the developing world. To the advocates of independence in the remaining European colonies, the United States was propping up the collapsing imperial regimes. In Latin America and the Middle East, the United States was engaged in its own imperial project, shaping the destinies of foreign people and foreign territory without ever proclaiming its sovereignty over those territories. Eventually these critics employed two terms to describe U.S. policy: imperialism (an old term) and neocolonialism (a new term used for the process of establishing control over a people or place without formally declaring sovereignty or publicly announcing any involvement). The United States had engaged in these projects to promote its domestic economy and to contain Soviet power. In many cases, however, the belief that the United States

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was engaged in a grand project of neocolonialism provided fertile ground for Soviet engagement. Convinced that the policies promoted by the United States offered nothing more than foreign intervention and social inequality, critics throughout the developing world increasingly looked to the Soviet Union and China for a different model of development. Communist leaders responded in kind, making anti-imperialism against the United States and its allies a standard refrain of their foreign policies. These arguments about empires and colonies, superpowers and developing nations, self-interest and global relations reached their zenith in 1959. In that year the United States experienced a crowning achievement in its long struggle with empire and also underwent one of its most humiliating defeats in its efforts to shape the postwar world. In 1959, both Hawaii and Alaska entered the union. These were immensely important moments for each state but perhaps an even more important moment for the nation. It marked the end of the territorial system. Since 1803, when Ohio became the first new state created through the formal mechanism of territorial governance, thirty-five states had joined the union through this process. The system had been remarkably effective, avoiding the extremes of chaotic disorganization and tyrannical centralization, both of which had seemed like real possibilities over the life of the territorial system. In Hawaii, statehood also indicated a dramatic shift in the racial function of territorial rule. According to the 1960 census, the state of Hawaii was home to 632,772 people. White residents and people of Japanese ancestry each constituted about one-third of the population. The rest of the population consisted primarily of people with origins in other parts of Asia and the Pacific. The result was a state with a two-thirds nonwhite majority, one in which the nonwhite population had produced much of the leadership for the territorial administration. Unlike any other state in the union, nonwhite control of state and federal elected offices seemed assured for Hawaii. In 1960 one Anglo-American and one Chinese American became senators from Hawaii. Hawaii’s one member of Congress was Daniel Inouye, a Japanese American who had lost an arm fighting in World War II before he emerged as a leading figure in territorial politics. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1962, he has served ever since. The situation in Hawaii hardly indicated a wholesale change in the American racial outlook. When Hawaii became a state in 1959, for example, African Americans were still mobilizing to oppose the long-standing systems of racial inequality codified in law and sustained through daily habit. Rather, the situations in Hawaii and the Philippines suggested particular areas of change in American policy as well as the limitations of federal involvement overseas. In 1959, Hawaii seemed distinctively American. Hawaiians saw themselves as fully incorporated Americans. While they might be separated from the mainland by thousands of miles, they demanded that they be recognized as full members of the national union. In sharp contrast, a decade earlier Filipinos had rejected those claims. That they were located farther away from the American mainland than Hawaii is less important than the fact that Filipinos thought of themselves as an independent people. Hawaiians demanded closer integration, but Filipinos demanded distance and autonomy. Equally important, the majority of Hawaii’s population was of Chinese and Japanese ancestry. Anglo-Americans accepted both as civilized people. Hadn’t Japan itself just demonstrated its capacity for democratic self-government in the aftermath of World War II?

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The status of Hawaii and the Philippines also suggested how much had changed. A generation earlier, powerful nations proclaimed their right to govern people and places they considered foreign. More than any other nation, the United States celebrated selfdetermination. As that principle spread, the United States in particular could no longer govern foreign peoples with same ease that Americans had shown in the nineteenth century. Puerto Rico and the Pacific island protectorates continued to occupy a nebulous status within the federal system, but in the rest of the world the United States used indirect means to establish or to preserve its power. Those circumstances collided in Cuba. Despite receiving formal independence in 1902, Cuba very much existed in an American imperial orbit. American investment was vital to the island’s economy, but critics decried this form of economic dependence. To preserve its business interests and political influence, the United States supported the government of Fulgencio Batista, a perennial figure in Cuban politics who seized power in a 1952 coup and soon consolidated control through increasingly dictatorial means. Batista’s critics saw the United States as his protector and controller. When Cuban revolutionaries deposed Batista in 1959, they initially made overtures of a renewed relationship with the United States. They proclaimed the virtues of self-determination and denounced imperialism. Only now the imperialism they saw came from the United States and the self-determination would be for the peoples of the Caribbean and Latin America who had long suffered at the expense of U.S. political and economic interests. By 1960, the new regime in Cuba was committed to ending U.S. influence once and for all. The leader of the new government, Fidel Castro, condemned the United States and began to nationalize U.S.-owned businesses. Castro effectively consolidated authority within Cuba and quickly forged an alliance with the Soviet Union. In Washington, the Eisenhower administration began its final year in office horrified that a communist regime was securely in place in the Western Hemisphere.

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When John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth president of the United States, he inherited both the glories and the challenges of the American struggle with empire. As a senator from Massachusetts, he had helped to welcome the congressional delegations from Alaska and Hawaii. As the Democratic nominee for president, he had criticized his opponent, Richard Nixon, for the Republicans’ failure to prevent a communist takeover in Cuba. Unlike Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Wilson, Kennedy reflected the possibilities and problems of the American struggle with empire rather than shape or redefine its goals. Before they were inaugurated, Jefferson and Roosevelt had each played a crucial role in forging the foreign policies of the United States. For his own part, Woodrow Wilson had written extensively on the issue, his own commentary informing federal policy. As presidents, all three men were crucial players in defining the practicalities of governing foreign territory. Kennedy simply had less time. Forty-three years old when he took the oath of office in 1961, he was the youngest man elected president (Theodore Roosevelt was younger

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when he took office, but he inherited the office after the McKinley assassination). Kennedy served less than three years before he, too, was assassinated in 1963. In that brief period, Kennedy deployed all of the tools for engaging in foreign countries that the United States had developed since World War II, using a structure and a set of ideas that were already in place. Drawing on the experience of postwar reconstruction and the Marshall Plan, Kennedy concluded that the best way for the United States to engage other nations was through forms of economic and cultural support. For example, the administration showcased the Peace Corps and the Agency for International Development as examples of how the United States could shape other countries without interfering. Of course, U.S. support never came without strings attached. The administration targeted development funding for nations with a proven track record of alliance with the United States or as a means of safeguarding against communism. At the same time that the Kennedy administration publicly offered incentives, it also made use of punishments. Using the covert techniques developed during the Eisenhower administration, the United States helped suppress any political movement that Americans considered communist, no matter what the actual intentions of that movement might have been. Throughout the developing world, the United States supported a growing list of brutal dictatorships and hatched various unsuccessful plans to depose the new regime in Cuba. In Cuba and South Vietnam, these forms of quiet persuasion gave way to increasingly loud assertions that the United States had a right to dictate affairs in other countries. In both countries, however, Americans always justified their actions by claiming that they were promoting or preserving self-determination and independence. When the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles in Cuba, Kennedy invoked elements of the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary to condemn the move and later to justify the U.S. embargo. On October 22, 1962, at the height of a conflict that seemed likely to drag the United States and the Soviet Union into a nuclear war, Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address in which he referred to Cuba as “that imprisoned island.” Members of Congress had done the same, charging that the Cuban government was a mere dictatorship acting at the behest of the Soviet Union. Even when the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles and tensions between the superpowers eased, the Kennedy administration was steadfast in its claims that it had the right to seek a regime change in Cuba that would restore self-determination for a suffering population. In South Vietnam, the Kennedy administration likewise claimed to be engaging in another country’s domestic life in order to preserve that country’s independence. When the United States supported the Diem regime in rejecting a referendum over reunification, the government in North Vietnam launched a guerrilla war against the South. Now called the Viet Cong, the movement was led by veterans of the Viet Minh movement against the Japanese and the French. The Viet Cong found support within South Vietnam from people who opposed the Diem regime or who remained committed to the nationalist goal of a single, unified Vietnam. As the conflict escalated in the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration dispatched a growing number of military advisers to help oversee a South Vietnamese military that enjoyed both equipment and funding from the United States.

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In a 1962 photo, an American military adviser instructs South Vietnamese villagers in the use of rifles. Source: The Granger Collection, New York

The Diem regime soon learned the price of relying on the United States for support. By 1963, the Kennedy administration had run out of patience with Diem, convinced that his particular approach to anticommunism was unsuccessful. The Kennedy administration actively supported a coup that deposed the regime and executed Diem (Document 4.15). Led by a cohort of South Vietnamese generals, the coup promised a new, more aggressive policy against Vietnamese communism but little in the way of benefit for the average citizens of South Vietnam. The United States had again sided with dictatorship in the interest of anticommunism. Only weeks after Diem’s death, Kennedy himself was dead. Assassinated in November 1963, Kennedy left behind an administration that shared his particular vision of an American role in the world. In the years that followed, Kennedy’s advisers and their successors found that the world around them had changed and their particular approach to the struggle with empire no longer applied.

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Document 4.1 Planning for Post-War Germany, 1944 At the same time that Americans were imagining a postwar world in which Germany and Japan were stripped of their imperial possessions, they were also making plans for what to do with the Axis powers after they were defeated. In September 1944 defeat for the Axis was still a long way away, but as these documents show, policymakers were already making plans based on the assumption of Allied victory. Allied leaders floated numerous ideas about how best to govern postwar Germany. The following document, labeled JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) 1067, was among the most important to circulate. Consisting of a directive to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force (SCAEF), and a series of related appendices, JCS 1067 outlined the U.S. assumption of a leadership role in supervising postwar Germany. Critical to this plan was demilitarization and de-Nazification combined with a recovery effort that would reintegrate Germany into a European community.

Directive to SCAEF Regarding the Military Government of Germany in the Period Immediately Following the Cessation of Organized Resistance (Post-Defeat) [Washington] September 22, 1944 . . . 2. Prior to the defeat or surrender of Germany the primary objective of your civil affairs administration has been to aid and support your military objective: the prompt defeat of the enemy. Your objective now is primarily the occupation and administration of a conquered country with such military operations as are necessary for the complete elimination of all resistance. 3. Pending the receipt of directives containing long range policies, your objectives must be of short term and military character, in order not to prejudice whatever ultimate policies may be later determined upon. Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation. The clear fact of German military defeat and the inevitable consequences of aggression must be appreciated by all levels of the German population. The German people must be made to understand that all necessary steps will be taken to guarantee against a third attempt by them to conquer the world. Your aim is not oppression, but to prevent Germany from ever again becoming a threat to the peace of the world. In the accomplishment of this objective the elimination of Nazism and militarism in any of their forms and the immediate apprehension of war criminals for punishment are essential steps. 4. Your occupation and administration will be just but firm and distant. You will strongly discourage fraternization between Allied troops and the German officials and population.

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5. You will establish military government over all parts of Germany under your command. Your rights, powers and status in Germany are based upon the unconditional surrender or the complete defeat of Germany. 6. a. By virtue of your position you are clothed with supreme legislative, executive and judicial authority in the areas occupied by forces under your command. This authority will be broadly construed and includes authority to take all measures deemed by you necessary, desirable or appropriate in relation to military exigencies and the objectives of a firm military government . . . 8. Representatives of civilian agencies of the U.S., U.K. and U.S.S.R. governments shall not participate unless and until you consider such participation desirable. Representatives of the civilian agencies of other Allied Governments or of UNRRA may participate only upon your recommendation and the approval of the Combined Chiefs of Staff . . . 11. Military administration shall be directed toward the promotion of the decentralization of the political structure of Germany. In the administration of areas under your command, all dealings in so far as possible should be with municipal and provincial government officials rather than with Central government officials . . .

Top Secret, [Washington] September 22, 1944 Appendix “A” Political Directive 1. You will search out, arrest, and hold, pending receipt by you of further instructions as to their disposition, Adolf Hitler, his chief Nazi associates, all persons suspected of having committed war crimes, and all persons who, if permitted to remain at large, would endanger the accomplishment of your objectives. The following is a list of the categories of persons to be arrested in order to carry out this policy. If after you have entered the country and in the light of conditions which you encounter there you do not believe all of these persons should be subjected immediately to this treatment, you should report back giving your recommendations and the reasons therefor . . . Of equal if not greater importance in the ultimate destruction of German Militarism is the elimination of the German Professional Officer Corps as an institution. All General Staff Corps officers who are not taken into custody as prisoners of war should therefore be arrested and held pending receipt of further instructions as to their disposition. You will receive further instructions as to how to deal with other members of the German Officers Corps. 2. If in your opinion it would be of aid in carrying out the above program and the other purposes of your occupation, you may issue such regulations dealing with the registration and identification of persons within Germany as you deem advisable. 3. You will issue a proclamation dissolving the Nazi party and its affiliates. Every possible effort should be made to prevent any attempts to reconstitute them in underground or disguised form. You will abrogate the laws establishing the political structure of National Socialism and will take all necessary measures to uproot and discredit Nazi doctrines. No secret organizations or societies of any kind shall be permitted. Property, real and personal, of the Nazi party and its affiliates, wherever

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found, shall be taken into custody and may be used for such purposes as you may direct. You may require health or welfare organizations which were set up by the Party but which are of direct benefit to the people to transfer their functions and personnel, purged of Nazi elements and practices, to new organizations formed to carry out such functions. 4. You will make special efforts to preserve from destruction all records and plans of the following: (a) The central German government, German military organizations, organizations engaged in military research, and such other governmental agencies as you may deem advisable. (b) The Nazi party and affiliated organizations. (c) All police organizations, including security and political police. (d) Nazi economic organizations and industrial establishments. (e) Institutes and special bureaus established in Germany, devoting themselves to race, political, or similar research. You may seize and remove such of these records as you may deem desirable or as you may be instructed by subsequent directive. 5. You will take immediate steps to abrogate all laws, decrees, regulations or aspects thereof, which discriminate on the basis of race, color, creed, or political opinions. All persons who are detained or placed in custody by the Nazis on these grounds will be released, subject to the interests of the individuals concerned. You will take steps to insure that such people, if not released, are provided with adequate clothing, food and quarters. 6. The criminal and civil courts of Germany will be closed. After the elimination of all Nazi elements, at such time and under such regulations, supervision and control as you may determine, you may permit the courts to resume functioning. You will retain full power of review and veto of all courts which are allowed to function. All politically objectionable courts; e. g., People’s Courts, will be abolished. Criminal and ordinary police, and such others as it may be proper to retain, under appropriate supervision, must be purged of Nazi or otherwise undesirable elements who will also be arrested and held for disposition. 7. No person in Germany, other than United Nations nationals as authorized by you, shall be permitted to possess arms of any character except that such local police as you may utilize to maintain order may be armed with such law enforcement weapons as you may deem appropriate. 8. a. All members of the Nazi party and ardent supporters of Naziism will be removed immediately from all government positions (other than clerks and non-policy making functionaries) and from all leading positions in industry, banking, education, judiciary, and other public services. Under no circumstances shall such persons be retained in such offices for the purpose of administrative convenience or expediency . . . 9. Subject to the provisions of paragraph 11 and to the extent that military interests are not prejudiced, freedom of speech and press, and of religious worship, will be permitted. Consistent with military necessity, all religious institutions will be respected and all efforts will be made to preserve historical archives, classical monuments and fine

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arts, except that all archives, monuments and museums of Nazi inception, or which are devoted to the perpetuation of German militarism shall be seized, closed, and their properties held pending further instructions . . . 11. a. Propagation of Nazi doctrines and Nazi propaganda in any form shall be prohibited. All schools and universities will be closed. Elementary schools should be reopened as soon as Nazi personnel have been eliminated and text-books and curricula provided which are free of Nazi or militaristic doctrines. Steps should be initiated to prepare satisfactory text-books and curricula and obtain teaching personnel free of any taint of Naziism or militarism for secondary schools. You should report to the C.C.S. prior to reopening secondary schools. Further guidance on German education and schools will be given to you in a separate directive. b. No political activities of any kind shall be countenanced unless authorized by you. No political personalities or organized political groups shall have any part in determining the policies of the military administration. It is essential to avoid any commitments to any political elements. c. The publication of all newspapers, magazines, journals and other publications and the operation of all German radio stations and the dissemination of news or information by mail, movies, telephone, cable or other means throughout the area under your command will be suspended. Thereafter, you will permit the dissemination of news or information subject to such censorship and control as you consider necessary in the interests of military security and intelligence and to carry out the principles laid down in this directive. 12. No person shall be permitted to leave or enter the area under your command without your authority. 13. No German parades, military or political, civilian or sports, shall be permitted anywhere in Germany. No German military music, or German national or Nazi anthems shall be played or sung in public or before any groups or gatherings. Public display of German national or Nazi flags and other paraphernalia of Nazi or affiliated organizations shall be prohibited. All flags, publications, other paraphernalia, records, documents and publications in the offices of the Nazi party or affiliated organizations shall be seized and amounts shall be set aside to distribute to approved foreign museums and the remainder will be held for disposition under the direction of the Combined Chiefs of Staffs . . .

[Appendix “B,” entitled “Financial Directive,” concerned technical management of German currency, banking, and related financial institutions.]

Top Secret, [Washington] September 22, 1944 Appendix “C” Economic Directive 1. You shall assume such control of existing German industrial, agricultural, utility, communication and transportation facilities, supplies, and services, as are necessary for the following purposes:

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a. Assuring the immediate cessation of the production, acquisition or development of implements of war; b. Assuring, to the extent that it is feasible, the production and maintenance of goods and services essential (1) for the prevention or alleviation of epidemic or serious disease and serious civil unrest and disorder which would endanger the occupying forces and the accomplishment of the objectives of the occupation; and (2) for the prosecution of the war against Japan (but only to the extent that specific directives of higher authority call for such goods or services). c. Preventing the dissipation or sabotage of German resources and equipment which may be required for relief, restitution, or reparation to any of the allied countries, pending a decision by the appropriate Allied governments whether and to what extent German resources or equipment will be used for such purposes. Except for the purposes specified above, you will take no steps; looking toward the economic rehabilitation of Germany nor designed to maintain or strengthen the German economy. Except to the extent necessary to accomplish the purposes set out above, the responsibility for such economic problems as price controls, rationing, unemployment, production, reconstruction, distribution, consumption, housing or transportation will remain with the German people and the German authorities. 2. You will make a survey to determine the extent to which local productive capacity and local supplies are or can be made available for export for relief and rehabilitation in the devastated areas of Europe or for such other purposes as may later be determined. 3. You will take such steps as are necessary to protect from destruction by the Germans, and maintain for such ultimate disposition as you may be directed to make by the Combined Chiefs of Staff, all plants, property, patents and equipment and all books and records of large German industrial companies and trade and research associations that have been essential to the German war effort and the German economy. In this connection you will pay particular attention to research and experimental establishments of such concerns. 4. You should take measures to prevent transfers of title of real and personal property intended to defeat, evade or avoid the orders, proclamations or decrees of the military government or the decision of the courts established by it. 5. Substantial amounts of private and public property of various categories have been seized, looted or otherwise improperly acquired by various Nazi officials and organizations. While it is contemplated that a suitable commission will ultimately deal with this problem, you should take such steps as may be practicable to collect any available information as to property of this kind and to preserve any such property found in the area under your control. 6. a. All property in the German territory belonging to any country with which any of the United Nations are, or have been at war may be controlled, subject to such use thereof as you may direct.

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b. Your responsibility for the property of the United Nations, other than U.K. and U.S., and their nationals, in areas occupied by Allied forces shall be the same as for the property of U.K. and U.S. and their nationals, except where a distinction is expressly provided by treaty or agreement. Within such limits as are imposed by the military situation you should take all reasonable steps necessary to preserve and protect such property.

Top Secret [Washington] September 22, 1944 Appendix “D” Relief Directive 1. You will be responsible for the provision and distribution of supplies for civilian relief only to the extent necessary to prevent disease and such disorder as might endanger or impede military occupation. For this purpose you will make maximum use of supplies, stockpiles and resources available within Germany in order to limit the extent to which imports, if any, will be required. German import requirements shall be strictly limited to minimum quotas of critical items and shall not, in any instance, take precedence over fulfillment of the supply requirements of any liberated territory. 2. German food and other agricultural supplies will be utilized for the German population. However, it will be necessary to hold German consumption to a minimum so as to increase to the maximum the surplus of agricultural products which can be made available to the devastated countries of Europe. You will report on any surpluses that may be available with regard for which separate instructions will be issued. 3. You will permit the German authorities to maintain or reestablish such health services and facilities as may be available to them under the circumstances. In the event that disease and epidemics should threaten the safety of Allied troops or endanger or impede military occupation, you shall take such steps as you deem necessary to protect the health of Allied troops and to eradicate sources of contamination . . . F[ranklin] D. R[oosevelt] Source: Foreign Relations of the United States: Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), 143–154.

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Document 4.2 FDR and Entanglements of Empire, 1945 This simple note, drafted by Franklin Roosevelt on New Year’s Day 1945, captured all the difficulties that Americans knew lay ahead of them as they contemplated the American role in shaping the future of the world’s empires. The French government, which had returned to Paris only a few months earlier after four years in exile following the German invasion, was already eager to secure promises that the United States would help reconstruct the French empire after the war. That request included restoring the French colony of Indochina, which in 1945 was still under Japanese control. In this note to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, FDR sought to postpone any decision on the matter. Although the subsequent Vietnam War now looms large over any reading of this note, it is important to realize that in 1945 the United States was still struggling to imagine a postwar world, and the colony of Indochina seemed a peripheral concern in a world that was still at war.

Memorandum by President Roosevelt for the Secretary of State Washington, January 1, 1945. I still do not want to get mixed up in any Indochina decision. It is a matter for post-war. By the same token, I do not want to get mixed up in any military effort toward the liberation of Indochina from the Japanese. You can tell Halifax that I made this very clear to Mr. Churchill. From both the military and civil point of view, action at this time is premature. F[ranklin] D. R[oosevelt] Source: Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1945, vol. 6, The British Commonwealth, The Far East (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 293.

Document 4.3 The Rocky Road to Philippine Independence, 1945 Even as the Japanese hold on the Philippines was collapsing in the winter of 1944–1945, Philippine and U.S. officials were already arguing over the future of the islands. The following correspondence suggests how the nationalist goal of Philippine independence intersected and occasionally conflicted with American strategic goals in the Pacific. Meanwhile, the final excerpt, a memorandum from Paul P. Steintorf, the U.S. consul general in the Philippines, reflects the emerging American fear that any nationalist movement that criticized American diplomatic or economic interests might be a mere front for communist agitation.

Notes for Conversation with Secretary of War Henry Stimson on February 27 Relative to Philippine Affairs (1) It is understood that the Interior Department will make a strong effort to have the President appoint a High Commissioner to the Philippines. In view of legislation which

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authorizes the President to advance the date of independence there is strong probability that the interim period between cessation of hostilities and restoration of normal constitutional government in the Philippines will be short for which reason it is doubtful whether it would be advisable to appoint a High Commissioner, especially since it is believed that such appointment would lead the Filipino people to feel that the old order had been restored whereas actually they are probably expecting the President to declare the Philippines free before the date July 4, 1946, fixed by the Tydings-McDuffie Act. Secretary Stimson’s views on this subject are not known, but he has always been extremely sympathetic with Filipino aspirations. If Secretary Stimson and/or the military authorities in the Philippines feel that conditions in the Islands will not warrant independence before July 4, 1946, the Department would give consideration to the question of whether it would be preferable to recommend that a Special Representative of the President be appointed instead of the appointment of a High Commissioner who would function under the jurisdiction of the Secretary of the Interior. Mr. Francis B. Sayre has expressed the belief that a High Commissioner should not be appointed for the interim period whether it be a long or short one. In general the Department feels that the Government’s commitment, which has been made both by legislative act and by the President himself, to give the Philippines early independence should be fulfilled. (2) There is reason to believe that there is great need for closer working relations between General MacArthur and President Osmeña. It is felt that Osmeña should have active American support in administering Commonwealth affairs and that nothing should be done which would cause Osmeña to lose prestige among the Filipino people or cause him to fail to regain control of civil administration affairs. Frank P. Lockhart

The Consul General at Manila to the Secretary of State

[Extracts] No. 1 Manila, March 21, 1945 Concerning civil government, General MacArthur stated that it was his desire to withdraw from civil affairs as quickly as possible, and to confine his activities to “purely military affairs.” He said that he was opposed to military control of civil affairs, and did not want to see a military government established in the Philippines. He implied, however, that it would continue to be necessary for the Army to exercise considerable supervision over civil government, since this country was destined to become the principal staging area for the Pacific war, with possibly a million American troops stationed here. Military security would demand extensive Army supervision over civil government. General MacArthur made it very clear that up to the present time practically all important decisions with respect to the local government had been made by the Army; although great care had been taken to ensure that the nominal authority for enforcement was given to the

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Commonwealth Government. He stated that he had avoided any appearance of dictating to the Commonwealth Government, and that matters had been handled very tactfully, protecting the political interest and self-respect of the Filipino officials . . . General MacArthur said that he was enthusiastically in favor of the plan to grant independence to the Philippine Islands on August 13, 1945. He implied that he had originated the plan, and would support it fully. He said that he had told President Osmeña to remain in Washington until he obtained a definite promise of independence, and the necessary economic concessions from the American Government . . . Very truly yours, Paul P. Steintorf

The Secretary of State to the Consul General at Manila Washington, April 14, 1945–1 p. m. 61. Your 84, April 13, noon, and 85, April 13, 2 p m. Information regarding action of Cabinet is timely and greatly appreciated by Department. Osmeña conferred with President at Warm Springs, April 5, and later in the day the latter at a press conference expressed the hope that he would be able to proclaim complete independence for the Philippines by autumn. Osmeña was present at press conference when President made statement. The President stated that he did not know precisely when it would be possible to determine that “constitutional processes and normal functions of Government” have been restored in the Philippines but that he was hopeful he could issue the proclamation by autumn in as much as he expected organized Japanese resistance to end by then even though Japanese guerrilla activity might still continue. Mr. Roosevelt said that the war had not changed in the least our promise to make the Philippines a separate and selfgoverning nation and that he favored the continuation of tariff preferential treatment by the United States until the Islands have had an opportunity to rebuild economically. In the interview the President also stated that the United States and other United Nations must accept trusteeships over Japanese mandated islands and construct new naval and air bases in the Pacific as a move towards stamping out Japanese militarism. For security reasons President asked that his views be withheld from publication until he returned to Washington. White House authorized publication evening April 12. President Osmeña, who has recently undergone an operation at Jacksonville, Florida, is arriving in Washington today to attend President Roosevelt’s funeral. If and when the information requested in the last paragraph of your 85, April 13, 2 p.m. can be obtained it will be telegraphed to you. [Edward] Stettinius

Statement by President Truman on Independence for the Philippines, May 5, 1945 I have had several discussions with President Osmeña on the subject of Philippine independence. These discussions were started by President Roosevelt.

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As a result of the discussions I have had with the President of the Philippines, I am prepared to endorse and carry through to their conclusion the policies laid down by President Roosevelt respecting the Islands and the independence of the Filipino people. The date of independence will be advanced as soon as practicable in pursuance of the policy outlined by Congress in S. J. Resolution 93. The Filipino people, whose heroic and loyal stand in this war has won the affection and admiration of the American people, will be fully assisted by the United States in the great problem of rehabilitation and reconstruction which lies ahead. In view of the special relationship between the United States and the Philippines as created by S. J. Resolution 93, I believe that suitable reciprocal trade between the two countries should continue for such time, after independence, as may be necessary to provide the new Republic with a fair opportunity to secure its economic freedom and independence—a permanent blessing for the patriotic people of the Philippines . . .

Memorandum of Conversation, by the Acting Secretary of State [Washington], May 14, 1945.

Participants: The President; Secretary of War, Mr. Stimson; Secretary of the Navy, Mr. Forrestal; Senator Millard Tydings; Admiral Leahy; Admiral Richard Edwards; Acting Secretary, Mr. Grew; President of the Philippines, Mr. Sergio Osmeña. 1. I said to the President that he had approved the suggestion that the question of our needs with respect to the future control of bases in the Philippines could best be taken up by the President directly with President Osmeña. In the meantime the President had received from the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy their respective views regarding such bases and these views had now been incorporated into a document which the Secretary of the Navy then submitted. I said that I had suggested this meeting at ten o’clock for a preliminary canter before seeing President Osmeña who was coming at 10:15. The President concurred and read over the paper laid before him. At 10:15 President Osmeña came in, the President explained to him the nature of the document and handed it to President Osmeña. After reading it President Osmeña said that he was in accord with the proposals, whereupon President Truman signed the paper under the words “Agreed to May 14, 1945” and President Osmeña likewise signed the paper. The President asked me to have copies made for his use and to send also to

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President Osmeña, which I undertook to do. All present thereupon withdrew with the exception of Admiral Leahy and myself as I told the President that I had three or four urgent matters to take up with him. Joseph C. Grew

Preliminary Statement of General Principles Pertaining to the United States Military and Naval Base System in the Philippines to be Used as a Basis for Detailed Discussions and Staff Studies 1. The principle is agreed that the fullest and closest military cooperation will be observed between the U.S. and the Philippine Government and the military plans of the U.S. and the Philippine Government for the Philippines area will be closely integrated in order to ensure the full and mutual protection of the U.S. and the Philippines. 2. The military forces of the U.S. will be accorded free access to, and movement between, ports, U.S. bases, and U.S. installations in the Philippines, by land, sea, and air. 3. Military and Naval aircraft of the U.S. will be allowed to operate without restriction into and from U.S. bases and over surrounding territory. U.S. forces will be allowed to enter and depart from the Philippines, including territorial waters, at will. 4. The U.S. will have the right to import free of duty, materiel, equipment, and supplies requisite to the improvement, maintenance, operation, and defense of U.S. bases. 5. The U.S. will have the right to maintain such personnel as may be requisite for the operations and defense of bases and facilities. 6. Pending development of the detailed plan, the U.S. will retain all sites which were held by the U.S. Army as military reservations on 7 December 1941 and by the U.S. Navy except at Cavite and will be accorded rights to sites in the localities shown on the attached Appendix. 7. The U.S. will have the right to retain, or to exchange for sites listed in paragraph 6 above, those sites wherein are located bases, installations, or facilities which have been or may be developed in the course of the present war, to acquire additional sites and to acquire such sites in the future as may be required by changes in the means and methods of warfare, including the development of new weapons. The U.S. will have the right to acquire sites and install, maintain and operate thereon, the required communication and navigation facilities and radar installations. 8. The U.S. will retain U.S. military cemeteries and sites of historical significance to the U.S. in the Philippines. 9. Consideration will be given to Filipino participation in certain U.S. bases and vice versa as indicated by the military situation. 10. No nation other than the U.S. or the Philippines is to be permitted to establish or make use of any bases in the Philippines without the prior agreement of both the U.S. and Philippine Governments. Agreed to May 14, 1945 Harry Truman S[ergio] Osmeña

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The Consul General at Manila to the Secretary of State No. 392 Manila, September 19, 1945. [Received October 2.] Subject: Nationalization of Trade and Labor. SIR: I have the honor to report that the current session of the Philippine Congress has under consideration bills providing for the nationalization of retail trade and for the nationalization of labor. Both of these measures restrict participation to Philippine nationals subject to the proviso that citizens of the United States are exempt from the law. Present indications are that both bills will be approved during the present session. Attention is invited also to my telegram No. 584, August 29, 1945 concerning a ruling of the Secretary of Justice which will restrict ownership of all classes of property to Philippine nationals, including business and residential property which were formerly excluded from the nationalization clauses of the Philippine constitution. It may be noted also that the agitation against the Chinese holders of licenses to operate stalls in public markets has again been renewed despite the ruling by President Osmeña that Chinese stallholders were to be permitted to continue their operations until the end of 1946. All of these measures are symptomatic of the present trend toward extreme nationalization in the Philippine Islands. The measures are aimed primarily against the Chinese merchants but there is also considerable resentment against Spanish and BritishIndian merchants. It is quite obvious that these measures would affect all alien residents of the Philippine Islands with the exception of citizens of the United States who are either specifically excluded or automatically exempt under provisions of the Philippine constitution. The underlying reasons for the present nationalistic trend are (1) there is to some extent a real and spontaneous resentment against alien domination of Philippine resources which has been in existence a long time but has grown as a result of war experiences and resentment of alien profiteering during the Japanese occupation; (2) to a large extent the movement has been supported and encouraged by the Roxas group for purely political ends. Roxas is shrewdly capitalizing on the age-old resentment of the Filipinos against the Chinese merchants to enhance his popularity with the masses and possibly sponsored the two bills mentioned, in the hope that President Osmeña would be compelled to veto them on the grounds that they constituted international discrimination. The Roxas group could then say that Osmeña, who is half Chinese, was supporting the Chinese at the expense of native Filipinos. Mr. M. L. Tuan, the Chinese Consul General, is very much disturbed over the present discrimination and persecution of Chinese residents and in a recent informal conversation stated that he was protesting these measures to the Chinese Embassy in Washington and that he was prepared to recommend that the Chinese Consulate General in Manila be closed in protest and that the protection of Chinese interests be turned over to the Government of the United States.

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In the course of a recent conversation with President Osmeña I pointed out the unfortunate implications of the proposed legislation and stated that in my opinion it would be prejudicial to the best interests of the country to indulge in unbridled nationalism at this time. I said that although American interests are specifically excluded from the provisions of these laws we must be concerned over the trend towards Philippinezation of all aspects of the country’s economy and feel that the campaign might be extended to the United States after independence. I said that I felt that at least it would have the effect of discouraging long-term American investments in the Philippines since capital is notoriously sensitive to influences of this sort. I ventured the opinion that it was unwise to antagonize China which was a good neighbor and customer. The Chinese merchants in the Philippines in my opinion provide an important and in fact an essential element of Philippine economy. The aspirations of the Filipinos towards greater participation in retail trade were entirely commendable but this should be attained through their own efforts possibly with constructive assistance from the Commonwealth Government and not through discriminative punitive legislation. President Osmeña expressed entire agreement with my statements and said that he greatly deplored the present campaign which he felt was primarily a cheap political means of arousing the masses and thereby obtaining votes. President Osmeña said that he was not in favor of either of the laws but was noncommittal concerning the action which he would take on them. He intimated that a veto might have unfortunate political effects while this type of legislation does not require prior submission to the President of the United States before becoming law. There was some inconclusive discussion of the possibility of action by the President of the United States under the interim provision of the Philippine constitution which provides that the “President of the United States shall have authority to suspend the taking effect of or the operation of any law, contract, or executive order of the Government of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, which in his judgment will . . . violate international obligations of the United States.” It was quite apparent that President Osmeña had reached no definite decision as to vetoing these measures and was unwilling to make any commitment concerning suspension of operation of these laws by the President of the United States. There can be no doubt that the proposed laws do in fact constitute direct and deliberate discrimination against Chinese and other alien residents of the Philippine Islands. The Department may wish to decide whether the measures do constitute a violation of the international obligations of the United States and if so what action should be taken. Respectfully yours, Paul P. Steintorf Source: Foreign Relations of the United States: Diplomatic Papers, 1945, vol. 6, The British Commonwealth, The Far East (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 1193– 1226.

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Document 4.4 Contrasting Editorial Commentary on Philippine Independence, 1946 In 1946, Philippine independence became a political reality. What it would mean in real terms, however, was up for interpretation. The two editorials that follow give an indication of why. The first editorial, from the New York Times, was published on July 4, 1946, in the same issue that featured a variety of articles covering events as the United States surrendered control and the new Philippine government took power. The author situated events in a distinctly American context, discussing the struggle with empire as it had played out over the long history of the United States. The second editorial, from the Philippine Free Press, appeared three months later. Discussing disputes that surrounded the U.S. military bases that remained in the Philippines, the author contemplated what it meant for a nation to be independent while another country nonetheless preserved a military presence. The author explored what would be a longstanding grievance by Filipinos: the perception that Americans should enjoy special privileges, the American belief in its own political superiority, and the specter of dependence that might emerge from the promise of American military and economic aid.

The Philippine Republic It is not inappropriate that hereafter we and the people of the Philippines should observe the same Day of Independence. When the Filipinos yesterday attained the status of an independent nation a precedent was set in international relations that may have more farreaching consequences than we can now foresee. It is the consummation of a bloodless revolution in colonial policy such as the world has not seen before. For the Filipinos it is the fulfillment of a dream that must go back the full 381 years since Spain first seized and proclaimed sovereignty over the Philippine Archipelago. The way to freedom has not been easy for the Filipinos—not even since their cession to us by Spain in the Treaty of Paris forty-eight years ago. But progress has been steady, if slow, since that time. And the Filipinos are more ready now than they were in 1898 to exercise properly their sovereignty in a world of powerful neighbors. Since 1935 they have been a Commonwealth. For many years before that they had enjoyed an autonomy that was revolutionary even then in colonial practice. The Jones Act of 1916, which drew the blueprint for future independence, said: “It is as it has always been, the purpose of the people of the United States to withdraw their sovereignty over the Philippine Islands and to recognize their independence as soon as a stable government can be established therein.” The war has left the Philippines in a far worse physical state than this country had imagined they would be when the Tydings-McDuffie Independence Act of 1934 was passed, setting July 4, 1946, as the date of independence. The Philippine Republic takes its place in the Parliament of Free and Independent Nations at a critical time in the world’s history and confronted with great and pressing internal problems. But this country has been generous in providing help toward their solution and we believe it to be the intent of the United States to continue and even increase that help if it is needed. This much we are

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sure we can promise the Filipinos in the name of the people of the United States: we shall watch your progress with understanding and sympathy and pride; you shall have here always a loyal friend, willing to lend a helping hand if one is needed, a friend who knows that by granting you your independence he has gained far more than he has lost. Source: New York Times, July 4, 1946.

“Filipinos Keep Out” By Leon O. Ty, Staff member October 5, 1946 OUR cover photo in this issue was taken in Tacloban, historic provincial capital of Leyte, two weeks ago today. The arresting signboard bearing the notice “FILIPINOS KEEP OUT—EWAS DEDA,” may still be standing where the FREE PRESS photographer snapped it—near a dump on the left side of the road leading to the PAL and FEATI landing fields in a barrio called San Jose, some seven kilometers away from the town proper. This writer inquired of a few friends from Tacloban if there were any other signboards in that locality bearing the same notice. “Lots of them before but now no more,” replied a young lawyer from Tacloban, “except that one you saw on the way to the airstrip. We do not bother about it because it’s too far from town anyway. “When those signboards were first placed here, we started a rumpus and demanded of the local American provost marshal that either the wording be changed or the signs be removed. Sensing that we were really hurt and that we meant business, the officer lost no time in having the wording altered. As you go around Tacloban today, you will notice that the notice has been changed to ‘MILITARY RESERVATION—CIVILIANS KEEP OUT.’” The people of Tacloban as well as those of nearby municipalities will readily tell you that they and the American GIs there, especially the Military Police, are not on friendly terms. And for a good reason. The Americans know that they are not welcomed there and the Leyteños make no bones about their detestation for the GIs. “We American soldiers know that the people here hate us,” a young GI from Chicago who introduced himself to the writer as Bob, remarked in a conversation. “One night while sitting in a jeep in Tacloban, a Filipino hit me on the head with something hard and I became unconscious. I was not robbed, just clubbed. And I ended in the hospital.” It may be recalled that two years or so ago, the Americans and the Leyteños were the best of friends. General MacArthur’s boys who landed there on October 20, 1944, to strike the first blow in the liberation of the Philippines were welcomed with songs and flowers upon their arrival. Had they been as the Prodigal Son, they could not have been received with more rejoicing. The people, figuratively killed the fatted calf for the Liberators and the latter responded with a demonstration of incredible generosity, genuine American acts of tolerance and a deep sense of understanding of local habits and customs.

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Contrast “Those boys were real heroes in every way,” remarked a prominent citizen . . . in the course of a lengthy conversation on the subject of American MPs and their reprehensible conduct in many places in the Philippines. “Nothing can make us forget them or diminish our love and respect for them. They were the Americans we have read of in books. They freed us from a savage enemy, clothed and fed us soon after they landed and took care of our sick. We owed them life and all, but inspite of that, they did not so much as attempt to abuse us or give us the slightest cause to dislike them. “In contrast, look at these MPs and newly arrived GIs today. Though we owed them absolutely nothing, they look down upon us, as though we were objects of derision and contumely. The MPs raid Filipino homes without search warrants from the civil courts on the pretext of looking either for GI goods or ‘stolen Army firearms.’ They hurl epithets at Filipinos, especially the ignorant ones, and call them such highly insulting names as ‘gooks, flips, and monkeys.’” But the GIs, it may be said, also that their stay here has not been a picnic. Many of them have been shot and nobody knows by whom. Others had been badly beaten up. If these new replacements persist in making a nuisance of themselves in this town and continue to entertain the idea that because they have a white skin they belong to a superior class of human being, hence, privileged to abuse us, they will be, as they are now, disappointed. We shall show them any time, anywhere, what monkeys can do when grossly abused and insulted beyond endurance.” Indicative of the bad blood that exists between American GIs and many people of Leyte is the following incident related to the writer by a government official of Tacloban: One night not long ago there was a heated altercation between a GI and a bar owner which arose over a disagreement on prices of drinks. Before long, the slightly tipsy American soldier started shouting. “You Filipinos are ungrateful dog,” cried the GI. “We liberated you from the Japs but you do not show any appreciation for what we have done. If I had my way, I would give you back to those yellow savages.”

A hot reply “So you liberated us from the Japs,” snarled back the bar owner with sarcasm in his voice. “Not your kind. You are not the type that can liberate a people, at least not a drunken fool like you. And remember, Yank, those who liberated us did not talk like you do. Those boys were gentlemen. And we are grateful to them. We fought with them, suffered and died with them because they proved to us that they were good. And we would still do anything for them. But not for you who came here only a month ago. Not for your kind who belittle and insult us as though you were any better. Get out of my place before I stick a knife in your belly. You need not pay for the drinks if you can’t afford it.” The strained relations between American GIs and Filipino civilians in Leyte, southern Samar, Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Zambales, and other places where American air, naval and military reservations are located is bound to continue and worsen as time goes on.

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The cause of the difficulties is not, however, hard to explain, if one would but dig deep into the root of the matter. The following conversation with a young enlisted American connected with the airforce in Leyte may shed some light on the question. “I have heard that you Americans here are quite unpopular with the Filipino civilians. What’s the reason?” the writer asked. “It’s a long story, bud,” he replied. “But if you are willing to listen, I’ll explain it. In the first place, I hate to stay in your country. I didn’t like to come to the Philippine Islands. And I can’t understand why I am here when the war was over long ago. Besides, you are an independent people now. You aren’t a part of us anymore, are you? I had a good job back home and a sweet girl I wanted to marry as soon as I had enough savings. “My heart is not here. I’m always thinking of the folks back in America. I can’t help it. I want to go back to school, wear nice civilian clothes instead of this damn uniform. But how can I go home when the Army has got me tied up here? So, what do I do to keep me from thinking of home? I drink and drink liquor, any kind of liquor and then get into trouble with your people. Why do my buddies get into all kinds of mess here? Same reason. “I know that some GIs are really first-class heels but the majority of the boys here are swell kids. Believe me. Don’t mind the snobs among us who call you all sorts of dirty names. They are not educated. They do not represent the real American people. They are the scum of America. That’s why they get into trouble often and when they get beaten up, they deserve it.” The defiant and resentful attitude among Filipinos towards any act of prejudice and discrimination from local American soldiers has, in recent months, served notice on U.S. military and civil officials here that the former hate to be told to “KEEP OUT” IN THEIR OWN COUNTRY. Source: Philippine Free Press, October 5, 1946.

Document 4.5 The Visiting Bases Agreement, 1947 By 1947, the Philippines was a self-governing polity independent of the United States. But in 1947 the United States was taking preliminary steps toward a policy of containing the Soviet Union in particular and communism in general. Meanwhile, American businesses worried that they might lose out on Philippine markets and labor if the United States disengaged entirely. The Philippine government was worried as well after decades in which an economy had taken shape on the islands that depended on U.S. investment and the U.S. export market. These security concerns resulted in the following agreement, one of the first major treaties to follow Philippine independence. The treaty granted broad-reaching powers for the United States to establish military installations in the Philippines and to protect American citizens from Philippine law. But the treaty also created the possibility for Philippine citizens to work on those bases and for Philippine businesses to supply the American military. The result was an agreement that generated unending debate among Filipinos as security concerns, economic development, and the desire for independence collided.

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Agreement between the United States of America and the Republic of the Philippines Concerning Military Bases Whereas, the war in the Pacific has confirmed the mutuality of interest of the United States of America and of the Republic of the Philippines in matters relating to the defense of their respective territories and that mutuality of interest demands that the Governments of the two countries take the necessary measures to promote their mutual security and to defend their territories and areas; Whereas, the Governments of the United States of America and of the Republic of the Philippines are desirous of cooperating in the common defense of their two countries through arrangements consonant with the procedures and objectives of the United Nations, and particularly through a grant to the United States of America by the Republic of the Philippines in the exercise of its title and sovereignty, of the use, free of rent, in furtherance of the mutual interest of both countries, of certain lands of the public domain; Whereas, the Government of the Republic of the Philippines has requested United States assistance in providing for the defense of the Philippines and in developing for such defense effective Philippine armed forces; Whereas, pursuant to this request the Government of the United States of America has, in view of its interest in the welfare of the Philippines, indicated its intention of dispatching a military mission to the Philippines and of extending to her appropriate assistance in the development of the Philippine defense forces; Whereas, a Joint Resolution of the Congress of the United States of America of June 29, 1944, authorized the President of the United States of America to acquire bases for the mutual protection of the United States of America and of the Philippines; and Whereas, Joint Resolution No. 4 of the Congress of the Philippines, approved July 28, 1945, authorized the President of the United States of America to negotiate with the President of the Philippines for the establishment of bases provided for in the Joint Resolution of the Congress of the United States of America of June 29, 1944, with a view to insuring the territorial integrity of the Philippines, the mutual protection of the United States of America and the Philippines, and the maintenance of peace in the Pacific; Therefore, the Governments of the Republic of the Philippines and of the United States of America agree upon the following terms for the delimitation, establishment, maintenance and operation of military bases in the Philippines:

Article I Grants of Bases 1. The Government of the Republic of the Philippines (hereinafter referred to as the Philippines) grants to the Government of the United States of America (hereinafter referred to as the United States) the right to retain the use of the bases in the Philippines listed in Annex A attached hereto. 2. The Philippines agrees to permit the United States, upon notice to the Philippines, to use such of those bases listed in Annex B as the United States determines to be required by military necessity.

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3. The Philippines agrees to enter into negotiations with the United States at the latter’s request, to permit the United States to expand such bases, to exchange such bases for other bases, to acquire additional bases, or relinquish rights to bases, as any of such exigencies may be required by military necessity. 4. A narrative description of the boundaries of the bases to which this Agreement relates is given in Annex A and Annex B. An exact description of the bases listed in Annex A, with metes and bounds, in conformity with the narrative descriptions, will be agreed upon between the appropriate authorities of the two Governments as soon as possible. With respect to any of the bases listed in Annex B, an exact description with metes and bounds, in conformity with the narrative description of such bases, will be agreed upon if and when such bases are acquired by the United States.

Article II Mutual Cooperation 1. It is mutually agreed that the armed forces of the Philippines may serve on United States bases and that the armed forces of the United States may serve on Philippine military establishments whenever such conditions appear beneficial as mutually determined by the armed forces of both countries. 2. Joint outlined plans for the development of military bases in the Philippines may be prepared by military authorities of the two Governments. 3. In the interest of international security any bases listed in Annexes A and B may be made available to the Security Council of the United Nations on its call by prior mutual agreement between the United States and the Philippines.

Article III Description of Rights 1. It is mutually agreed that the United States shall have the rights, power and authority within the bases which are necessary for the establishment, use, operation and defense thereof or appropriate for the control thereof and all the rights, power and authority within the limits of territorial waters and air space adjacent to, or in the vicinity of, the bases which are necessary to provide access to them, or appropriate for their control. 2. Such rights, power and authority shall include, inter alia, the right, power and authority: (a) to construct (including dredging and filling), operate, maintain, utilize, occupy, garrison and control the bases; (b) to improve and deepen the harbors, channels, entrances and anchorages, and to construct or maintain necessary roads and bridges affording access to the bases . . .

Article V Exemption from Customs and Other Duties No import, excise, consumption or other tax, duty or impost shall be charged on material, equipment, supplies or goods, including food stores and clothing, for exclusive

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use in the construction, maintenance, operation or defense of the bases, consigned to, or destined for, the United States authorities and certified by them to be for such purposes.

Article VI Maneuver and Other Areas The United States shall, subject to previous agreement with the Philippines, have the right to use land and coastal sea areas of appropriate size and location for periodic maneuvers, for additional staging areas, bombing and gunnery ranges, and for such intermediate airfields as may be required for safe and efficient air operations. Operations in such areas shall be carried on with due regard and safeguards for the public safety.

Article VII Use of Public Services It is mutually agreed that the United States may employ and use for United States military forces any and all public utilities, other services and facilities, airfields, ports, harbors, roads, highways, railroads, bridges, viaducts, canals, lakes, rivers and streams in the Philippines under conditions no less favorable than those that may be applicable from time to time to the military forces of the Philippines . . .

Article XII Internal Revenue Tax Exemption 1. No member of the United States armed forces, except Filipino citizens, serving in the Philippines in connection with the bases and residing in the Philippines by reason only of such service, or his dependents, shall be liable to pay income tax in the Philippines except in respect of income derived from Philippine sources. 2. No national of the United States serving in or employed in the Philippines in connection with the construction, maintenance, operation, or defense of the bases and residing in the Philippines by reason only of such employment, or his spouse and minor children and dependent parents of either spouse, shall be liable to pay income tax in the Philippines except in respect of income derived from Philippine sources or sources other than the United States sources. 3. No person referred to in paragraphs 1 and 2 of this Article shall be liable to pay to the Government or local authorities of the Philippines any poll or residence tax, or any import or export duty, or any other tax on personal property imported for his own use; provided that privately owned vehicles shall be subject to payment of the following only: when certified as being used for military purposes by appropriate United States authorities, the normal license plate fee; otherwise, the normal license plate and registration fees. 4. No national of the United States, or corporation organized under the laws of the United States, resident in the United States, shall be liable to pay income tax in the Philippines in respect of any profits derived under a contract made in the United States with the Government of the United States in connection with the construction,

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maintenance, operation and defense of the bases, or any tax in the nature of a license in respect of any service or work for the United States in connection with the construction, maintenance, operation and defense of the bases.

Article XIII Jurisdiction 1. The Philippines consents that the United States shall have the right to exercise jurisdiction over the following offenses: (a) Any offense committed by any person within any base except where the offender and offended parties are both Philippine citizens (not members of the armed forces of the United States on active duty) or the offense is against the security of the Philippines; (b) Any offense committed outside the bases by any member of the armed forces of the United States in which the offended party is also a member of the armed forces of the United States; and (c) Any offense committed outside the bases by any member of the armed forces of the United States against the security of the United States. 2. The Philippines shall have the right to exercise jurisdiction over all other offenses committed outside the bases by any member of the armed forces of the United States. 3. Whenever for special reasons the United States may desire not to exercise the jurisdiction reserved to it in paragraphs 1 and 6 of this Article, the officer holding the offender in custody shall so notify the fiscal (prosecuting attorney) of the city or province in which the offense has been committed within ten days after his arrest, and in such a case the Philippines shall exercise jurisdiction. 4. Whenever for special reasons the Philippines may desire not to exercise the jurisdiction reserved to it in paragraph 2 of this Article, the fiscal (prosecuting attorney) of the city or province where the offense has been committed shall so notify the officer holding the offender in custody within ten days after his arrest, and in such a case the United States shall be free to exercise jurisdiction. If any offense falling under paragraph 2 of this Article is committed by any member of the armed forces of the United States (a) while engaged in the actual performance of a specific military duty, or (b) during a period of national emergency declared by either Government and the fiscal (prosecuting attorney) so finds from the evidence, he shall immediately notify the officer holding the offender in custody that the United States is free to exercise jurisdiction. In the event the fiscal (prosecuting attorney) finds that the offense was not committed in the actual performance of a specific military duty, the offender’s commanding officer shall have the right to appeal from such finding to the Secretary of Justice within ten days from the receipt of the decision of the fiscal and the decision of the Secretary of Justice shall be final . . .

Article XIV Arrest and Service of Process 1. No arrest shall be made and no process, civil or criminal, shall be served within any base except with the permission of the commanding officer of such base; but should the

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commanding officer refuse to grant such permission he shall (except in cases of arrest where the United States has jurisdiction under Article XIII) forthwith take the necessary steps to arrest the person charged and surrender him to the appropriate authorities of the Philippines or to serve such process, as the case may be, and to provide the attendance of the server of such process before the appropriate court in the Philippines or procure such server to make the necessary affidavit or declaration to prove such service as the case may require. 2. In cases where the service courts of the United States have jurisdiction under Article XIII, the appropriate authorities of the Philippines will, on request, give reciprocal facilities as regards the service of process and the arrest and surrender of alleged offenders . . .

Article XXIX Term of Agreement The present Agreement shall enter into force upon its acceptance by the two Governments and shall remain in force for a period of ninety-nine years subject to extension thereafter as agreed by the two Governments. Signed in Manila, Philippines, in duplicate this fourteenth day of March, nineteen hundred and forty-seven. On behalf of the Government of the United States of America: Paul V. McNutt [Seal] Ambassador, Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States of America to the Republic of the Philippines. On behalf of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines: Manuel Roxas [Seal] President of the Philippines Source: Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949, compilation directed by Charles I. Bevans, vol. 11, Philippines–United Arab Republic (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968–1976), 55–69.

Document 4.6 NSC 68, 1950 Beginning with the simple line, “A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950,” this innocuous-sounding title belies the content of what became one of the most important documents in U.S. foreign policy. In an era of increasing organization and systemization within the federal government, the document became National Security Council (NSC) report number 68. Commissioned at the behest of Harry Truman and his closest advisers, the report was supposed to offer an overall assessment of the threats and opportunities facing the United States in the rapidly escalating cold war. NSC 68 described an almost intractable conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union in which the United States needed to pursue a more aggressive policy to prevent

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the expansion of Soviet power. Initially disregarded as alarmist by some within the Truman administration, NSC 68 received a widespread reappraisal after the start of the Korean War only a few months later. NSC 68 had profound implications for the American struggle with empire. In its call for a global policy of containment, NSC 68 provided a rationale for the United States to maintain existing strategic bases and acquire new ones. In its characterization of communism as a global conspiracy against the United States headquartered in Moscow, NSC 68 justified U.S. intervention in foreign countries. Finally, in its characterization of American democracy and a Soviet empire, NSC 68 extended into policymaking the familiar language that Americans had constructed about the evils of empire and the benefits of self-government.

I. Background of the Present Crisis Within the past thirty-five years the world has experienced two global wars of tremendous violence. It has witnessed two revolutions—the Russian and the Chinese—of extreme scope and intensity. It has also seen the collapse of five empires—the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, German, Italian, and Japanese—and the drastic decline of two major imperial systems, the British and the French. During the span of one generation, the international distribution of power has been fundamentally altered. For several centuries it had proved impossible for any one nation to gain such preponderant strength that a coalition of other nations could not in time face it with greater strength. The international scene was marked by recurring periods of violence and war, but a system of sovereign and independent states was maintained, over which no state was able to achieve hegemony. Two complex sets of factors have now basically altered this historic distribution of power. First, the defeat of Germany and Japan and the decline of the British and French Empires have interacted with the development of the United States and the Soviet Union in such a way that power increasingly gravitated to these two centers. Second, the Soviet Union, unlike previous aspirants to hegemony, is animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world. Conflict has, therefore, become endemic and is waged, on the part of the Soviet Union, by violent or non-violent methods in accordance with the dictates of expediency. With the development of increasingly terrifying weapons of mass destruction, every individual faces the ever-present possibility of annihilation should the conflict enter the phase of total war. On the one hand, the people of the world yearn for relief from the anxiety arising from the risk of atomic war. On the other hand, any substantial further extension of the area under the domination of the Kremlin would raise the possibility that no coalition adequate to confront the Kremlin with greater strength could be assembled. It is in this context that this Republic and its citizens in the ascendancy of their strength stand in their deepest peril. The issues that face us are momentous, involving the fulfillment or destruction not only of this Republic but of civilization itself. They are issues which will not await our

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deliberations. With conscience and resolution this Government and the people it represents must now take new and fateful decisions.

II. Fundamental Purpose of the United States The fundamental purpose of the United States is laid down in the Preamble to the Constitution: “. . . to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In essence, the fundamental purpose is to assure the integrity and vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual. Three realities emerge as a consequence of this purpose: Our determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life, for which as in the Declaration of Independence, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

III. Fundamental Design of the Kremlin The fundamental design of those who control the Soviet Union and the international communist movement is to retain and solidify their absolute power, first in the Soviet Union and second in the areas now under their control. In the minds of the Soviet leaders, however, achievement of this design requires the dynamic extension of their authority and the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority. The design, therefore, calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the nonSoviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design . . .

V. Soviet Intentions and Capabilities A. Political and Psychological The Kremlin’s design for world domination begins at home. The first concern of a despotic oligarchy is that the local base of its power and authority be secure. The massive fact of the iron curtain isolating the Soviet peoples from the outside world, the repeated political purges within the USSR and the institutionalized crimes of the MVD [the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs] are evidence that the Kremlin does not feel secure at home and that “the entire coercive force of the socialist state” is more than ever one of seeking to impose its

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absolute authority over “the economy, manner of life, and consciousness of people” (Vyshinski, The Law of the Soviet State, p. 74). Similar evidence in the satellite states of Eastern Europe leads to the conclusion that this same policy, in less advanced phases, is being applied to the Kremlin’s colonial areas. Being a totalitarian dictatorship, the Kremlin’s objectives in these policies is the total subjective submission of the peoples now under its control. The concentration camp is the prototype of the society which these policies are designed to achieve, a society in which the personality of the individual is so broken and perverted that he participates affirmatively in his own degradation. The Kremlin’s policy toward areas not under its control is the elimination of resistance to its will and the extension of its influence and control. It is driven to follow this policy because it cannot . . . tolerate the existence of free societies; to the Kremlin the most mild and inoffensive free society is an affront, a challenge and a subversive influence. Given the nature of the Kremlin, and the evidence at hand, it seems clear that the ends toward which this policy is directed are the same as those where its control has already been established. The means employed by the Kremlin in pursuit of this policy are limited only by considerations of expediency. Doctrine is not a limiting factor; rather it dictates the employment of violence, subversion, and deceit, and rejects moral considerations. In any event, the Kremlin’s conviction of its own infallibility has made its devotion to theory so subjective that past or present pronouncements as to doctrine offer no reliable guide to future actions. The only apparent restraints on resort to war are, therefore, calculations of practicality. With particular reference to the United States, the Kremlin’s strategic and tactical policy is affected by its estimate that we are not only the greatest immediate obstacle which stands between it and world domination, we are also the only power which could release forces in the free and Soviet worlds which could destroy it . . .

VI. U.S. Intentions and Capabilities—Actual and Potential A. Political and Psychological Our overall policy at the present time may be described as one designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish. It therefore rejects the concept of isolation and affirms the necessity of our positive participation in the world community. This broad intention embraces two subsidiary policies. One is a policy which we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat. It is a policy of attempting to develop a healthy international community. The other is the policy of “containing” the Soviet system. These two policies are closely interrelated and interact on one another. Nevertheless, the distinction between them is basically valid and contributes to a clearer understanding of what we are trying to do . . . As for the policy of “containment,” it is one which seeks by all means short of war to (1) block further expansion of Soviet power, (2) expose the falsities of Soviet pretensions, (3) induce a retraction of the Kremlin’s control and influence, and (4) in general, so

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foster the seeds of destruction within the Soviet system that the Kremlin is brought at least to the point of modifying its behavior to conform to generally accepted international standards. It was and continues to be cardinal in this policy that we possess superior overall power in ourselves or in dependable combination with other likeminded nations. One of the most important ingredients of power is military strength. In the concept of “containment,” the maintenance of a strong military posture is deemed to be essential for two reasons: (1) as an ultimate guarantee of our national security and (2) as an indispensable backdrop to the conduct of the policy of “containment.” Without superior aggregate military strength, in being and readily mobilizable, a policy of “containment”—which is in effect a policy of calculated and gradual coercion—is no more than a policy of bluff. At the same time, it is essential to the successful conduct of a policy of “containment” that we always leave open the possibility of negotiation with the USSR. A diplomatic freeze—and we are in one now—tends to defeat the very purposes of “containment” because it raises tensions at the same time that it makes Soviet retractions and adjustments in the direction of moderated behavior more difficult. It also tends to inhibit our initiative and deprives us of opportunities for maintaining a moral ascendancy in our struggle with the Soviet system. In “containment” it is desirable to exert pressure in a fashion which will avoid so far as possible directly challenging Soviet prestige, to keep open the possibility for the USSR to retreat before pressure with a minimum loss of face and to secure political advantage from the failure of the Kremlin to yield or take advantage of the openings we leave it. We have failed to implement adequately these two fundamental aspects of “containment.” In the face of obviously mounting Soviet military strength ours has declined relatively. Partly as a byproduct of this, but also for other reasons, we now find ourselves at a diplomatic impasse with the Soviet Union, with the Kremlin growing bolder, with both of us holding on grimly to what we have, and with ourselves facing difficult decisions. In examining our capabilities it is relevant to ask at the outset—capabilities for what? The answer cannot be stated solely in the negative terms of resisting the Kremlin design. It includes also our capabilities to attain the fundamental purpose of the United States, and to foster a world environment in which our free society can survive and flourish. Potentially we have these capabilities. We know we have them in the economic and military fields. Potentially we also have them in the political and psychological fields. The vast majority of Americans are confident that the system of values which animates our society—the principles of freedom, tolerance, the importance of the individual, and the supremacy of reason over will—are valid and more vital than the ideology which is the fuel of Soviet dynamism. Translated into terms relevant to the lives of other peoples—our system of values can become perhaps a powerful appeal to millions who now seek or find in authoritarianism a refuge from anxieties, bafflement, and insecurity. Essentially, our democracy also possesses a unique degree of unity. Our society is fundamentally more cohesive than the Soviet system, the solidarity of which is artificially

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created through force, fear, and favor. This means that expressions of national consensus in our society are soundly and solidly based. It means that the possibility of revolution in this country is fundamentally less than that in the Soviet system . . .

IX. Possible Courses of Action Introduction. Four possible courses of action by the United States in the present situation can be distinguished. They are: a. Continuation of current policies, with current and currently projected programs for carrying out these policies; b. Isolation; c. War; and d. A more rapid building up of the political, economic, and military strength of the free world than provided under a, with the purpose of reaching, if possible, a tolerable state of order among nations without war and of preparing to defend ourselves in the event that the free world is attacked . . . 2. Political aspects. The Soviet Union is pursuing the initiative in the conflict with the free world. Its atomic capabilities, together with its successes in the Far East, have led to an increasing confidence on its part and to an increasing nervousness in Western Europe and the rest of the free world. We cannot be sure, of course, how vigorously the Soviet Union will pursue its initiative, nor can we be sure of the strength or weakness of the other free countries in reacting to it. There are, however, ominous signs of further deterioration in the Far East. There are also some indications that a decline in morale and confidence in Western Europe may be expected. In particular, the situation in Germany is unsettled. Should the belief or suspicion spread that the free nations are not now able to prevent the Soviet Union from taking, if it chooses, the military actions outlined in Chapter V, the determination of the free countries to resist probably would lessen and there would be an increasing temptation for them to seek a position of neutrality. Politically, recognition of the military implications of a continuation of present trends will mean that the United States and especially other free countries will tend to shift to the defensive, or to follow a dangerous policy of bluff, because the maintenance of a firm initiative in the cold war is closely related to aggregate strength in being and readily available. This is largely a problem of the incongruity of the current actual capabilities of the free world and the threat to it, for the free world has an economic and military potential far superior to the potential of the Soviet Union and its satellites. The shadow of Soviet force falls darkly on Western Europe and Asia and supports a policy of encroachment. The free world lacks adequate means—in the form of forces in being—to thwart such expansion locally. The United States will therefore be confronted more frequently with the dilemma of reacting totally to a limited extension of Soviet control or of not reacting at all (except with ineffectual protests and half measures). Continuation of present trends is likely to lead, therefore, to a gradual withdrawal under the direct or indirect pressure of the Soviet Union, until we discover one day that we have sacrificed positions of vital interest. In other words, the United States would have chosen, by lack of the necessary decisions and

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actions, to fall back to isolation in the Western Hemisphere. This course would at best result in only a relatively brief truce and would be ended either by our capitulation or by a defensive war—on unfavorable terms from unfavorable positions—against a Soviet Empire compromising all or most of Eurasia. (See Section B.) . . . B. The Second Course—Isolation Continuation of present trends, it has been shown above, will lead progressively to the withdrawal of the United States from most of its present commitments in Europe and Asia and to our isolation in the Western Hemisphere and its approaches. This would result not from a conscious decision but from a failure to take the actions necessary to bring our capabilities into line with our commitments and thus to a withdrawal under pressure. This pressure might come from our present Allies, who will tend to seek other “solutions” unless they have confidence in our determination to accelerate our efforts to build a successfully functioning political and economic system in the free world. There are some who advocate a deliberate decision to isolate ourselves. Superficially, this has some attractiveness as a course of action, for it appears to bring our commitments and capabilities into harmony by reducing the former and by concentrating our present, or perhaps even reduced, military expenditures on the defense of the United States. This argument overlooks the relativity of capabilities. With the United States in an isolated position, we would have to face the probability that the Soviet Union would quickly dominate most of Eurasia, probably without meeting armed resistance. It would thus acquire a potential far superior to our own, and would promptly proceed to develop this potential with the purpose of eliminating our power, which would, even in isolation, remain as a challenge to it and as an obstacle to the imposition of its kind of order in the world. There is no way to make ourselves inoffensive to the Kremlin except by complete submission to its will. Therefore isolation would in the end condemn us to capitulate or to fight alone and on the defensive, with drastically limited offensive and retaliatory capabilities in comparison with the Soviet Union. (These are the only possibilities, unless we are prepared to risk the future on the hazard that the Soviet Empire, because of over-extension or other reasons, will spontaneously destroy itself from within.) Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, vol. 1, National Security Affairs, Foreign Economic Policy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), 235–280.

Document 4.7 Debating Puerto Rico’s Future, 1950 and 1955 The question of Puerto Rico’s future reached a fever pitch in the early 1950s. The two speeches that follow not only present the views of two of the island’s leading political voices but also capture the choices facing Puerto Ricans. José Luis Alberto Muñoz Marín was a journalist and poet who eventually became the dominant figure in Puerto Rican politics. After he served in the Puerto Rican Senate, he became the first elected governor of the island in 1949. He stayed in that office for sixteen

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years, all the while opposing independence. He believed that only the economic investment promised by the United States could promote the island’s development. In sharp contrast, Pedro Albizu Campos was a passionate voice for independence. After spending his childhood in Puerto Rico, he came to the mainland, studying first at the University of Vermont and then at Harvard, where he received a law degree. He then returned to Puerto Rico, where he helped organize the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party before becoming its president in 1930. Albizu Campos argued that Puerto Rico would always suffer from poverty and underdevelopment so long as it remained part of the United States. He added that the very investment championed by Muñoz Marín was merely another form of dependency. Imprisoned repeatedly for his political activities, he died in 1965. The speech by Albizu Campos also has an important backstory. The transcription that follows is the work of agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and was part of a broader effort by the federal government to observe and, eventually, to subvert the independence movement in Puerto Rico. The transcription itself is fragmented, and the translation is imperfect.

Pedro Albizu Campos, Speech Delivered September 23, 1950, in Lares, Puerto Rico It is not easy to make a speech when one’s mother is kept on a bed and an assassin is lying in wait for her life. Such is the present-day situation of our native land, our mother— Puerto Rico. The assassin is the power of the United States of North America. A speech cannot be made when our sons, those who were born recently in our native land, are dying of hunger, when the adolescents of our native land have been poisoned with the worst virus, that of slavery; when the adults have to leave their homes terrified. They have to go to the United States to become slaves of the economic powers of the tyrants . . . Our blood boils and patience, the beat of our heart, tells us that patience must end . . . That the day of Lares must be . . . the day of the revolution of Puerto Rico. The United States feels itself defeated by our rights. The recent decision of the American Commission of Independent Territories, the recognition of Puerto Rico as a nation controlled by the power of the United States. The United States did not dare to attend and inter-American conference for the first time in the history of America. Why? The United States has the right to a sear there. Why did it not attend? Because entities from Puerto Rico were going to attend in their own right. This is the work of the Nationalist Party, which, in Bogota, successfully brought it about that direct participation be given interested entities. The Nationalist Party met there with the flag of independence of Puerto Rico . . . The Yankees have spent fifty-two years of war here, war, and war against the nation of Puerto Rico. They have never acquired a right in Puerto Rico, nor does a legal government exist in Puerto Rico. All the political right in the world would have to be crumbled away, all the international right to confirm the invasion of the United States in Puerto Rico and the pretended military occupation of the United States . . . They are looking for a legalized basis to tell the world, faced with the accusation of the Nationalist Party . . . that in fifty-two years we have not been Puerto Ricans, we are

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Yankee citizens, and that we acquiesce to the imposition of the United States, and that we renounce our right of being Puerto Rican. The law says that they want to pull the wool over the eyes of this country, that the Puerto Ricans cannot aspire to being a province of the United States, a so-called state; this no, because in the United States . . . no negro can enter there nor anyone who is suspected of having a negro grandfather. These are the great democrats. They cannot go to the Senate. He cannot be an independent citizen. Puerto Rico submits to being a possession of the United States, in which the United States can dispose arbitrarily of its women to them WACS, or its sons to they can be Yankee soldiers . . . to cripple Puerto Rico . . . they can decree that Puerto Rico is a forest of the United States, that it is a Yankee property administered by Yankees, and above all that we are Yankees. . . . I invite PONS, I invite all its health officers, MUNOZ MARIN, the defenders of the Yankee flag in Puerto Rico, to study this continual infection which is flying over our native land. Moreover, this constitution has been written which they want, by which the Puerto Ricans will become crazy because of their foolishness. The boss never trusts his slaves. He trusts a free enemy. But a slave gives his signature, it is not worth anything. This constitution, which they are going to bring to Puerto Ricans in fifty-two, has already been written. When the electors here draw up the constitution, it does not become a law because they are slaves. This is going to be approved first by the President of the United States. The President has to say that it is good. The President has to approve it, and if the President approves it, then Congress. . . . Why all this eagerness? One thing which is to affirm the despotism in Puerto Rico. All this has to be opposed and has to be opposed as the mean of Lares opposed despotism with the revolution. Source: FBI Files on Puerto Ricans, City University of New York, Center for Puerto Rican Studies, www.pr-secretfiles.net.

Luis Muñoz Marín, Speech Delivered at the University of Kansas City, April 23, 1955 I should like to speak to you about the Commonwealth Status of Puerto Rico, a new form of free and voluntary association with the United States; its meaning to the Puerto Rican people; the significance it is attaining in the outside world, especially the Latin American world, as a sample of what the United States means to freedom, good-will and understanding among free men. The Commonwealth idea is the political counterpart of our effort in the economic field, Operation Bootstrap. The story of both is the story of a long, hard job. The Commonwealth idea has developed excellently. It is very good as it is. It can be better as what couldn’t, and it should be better, as what shouldn’t. We hope to make it better, and on that too, I shall dwell on this occasion. Let us look first into the historical background, and then, let us see what Commonwealth means to those that, because they oppose it in Puerto Rico, interpret it meagerly, or who, because they interpret it meagerly, oppose it. After that, I would like to tell you what it is in the view of those of us who have helped

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to create it. And, finally, since we believe it is a dynamic political conception, how it may tend to grow. For fifty years the people of Puerto Rico, while facing extremely difficult economic problems, has also been torn by a divided opinion as to what their ultimate political status should be. Some wanted it to be independence; some, federated statehood. It was inconceivable to everyone that it could, without grave moral deterioration, continue to be a political colony. A colony it had been for many, far too many years before . . . In spite of . . . gradual advances, the status of Puerto Rico still had a colonial imprint. It was not the result of free agreement, but of unilateral decision, however fair or generous. Our laws could still, theoretically, be annulled by Congress; even our own charter of government could itself be voided or changed without our consent. Congress had plenary legislative power over Puerto Rico, not subject to many of the constitutional limitations which apply to legislation over the states. The status of Puerto Rico was accordingly described as that of a possession or unincorporated territory of the United States. As I stated before a committee of Congress in 1952, when the Constitution of the Commonwealth was up for ratification, “Although colonial status has been in practice gradually disappearing, there has been lacking the basic moral element of freedom, which is consent on the basis of free agreement. Kindness, or even justice, unilaterally bestowed, may denote an anti-coloniastic spirit, but it does not finally and decisively create an anticolonial status.” Colonialism, as you in the states know well from your great history, is a festering sore in the human spirit. The feeling that a man has a right to do to you without your consent what he has not the right to do to others unless with their authorization, is not conducive to the free play of constructive energies. In Puerto Rico for years there was an anguish, a quite deadening anguish about this ... The people groped for a break-through. Beleaguered within the walls of the statehood-independence-colonialism triangle, pressed by the need of tackling other urgent problems, they first adopted the device of ignoring deliberately that there was a siege. This was more or less where I came in. I said, “Let’s pretend for a while that there is no problem of political status, but only economic and social matters to grapple with. Since a whole generation has managed somehow to pretend that there is no economics but only politics, let’s see what can be done by following the same procedure on a reserved premise.” It worked. It turned out to be a profoundly realistic method as well as an artificial device. It was the birth of Operation Bootstrap. Energy was concentrated on what to do about land, industrial expansion, agricultural modernization, health conditions, insufficient educational opportunities, planning and budgeting techniques, civil service, up-to-date labor legislation. Progress was made along all these lines. It still has a long way to go; but out of hopelessness, hope has arisen and that is a great natural resource . . . Public Law 600, as you know, was overwhelmingly accepted by the people of Puerto Rico, the Constitution drafted and adopted, and the Commonwealth which it created formally established on July 25, 1952 . . .

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As we see it, Puerto Rico is a new kind of state, both in the sense of the U.S. Federal System and in the general sense of a people organized to govern themselves. It is a system of government and it is a new manner of relationship to the United States, as it could be to any large union or confederation of political societies. The relationship can no longer be said to be based on a military occupation or a treaty of peace ending a war between two other nations. The “idea of compact” determines a basic change in the relationship. It takes away from the very basis of the relationship—although perhaps not yet from some of its terms—the nature and onus of colonialism. It can not be revoked or changed unilaterally. Even if it were legally possible, it can not be conceived as morally possible. A body with the record of the Congress of the United States could not do so. After all, we know that the world of order and justice is not a nakedly legal world and that the ingredient of morals is a vital part of it—although I have not yet been made a doctor of morals, I venture to speak of this also. So the political status of Puerto Rico is one of free association with the American Union. It is a new way of abolishing a colonial status under the constitutional system of the United States. I do not say that the details of our relationship can not be improved, both from the point of view of the American Union and that of Puerto Rico; but the principle that such relationship, however it may change, is one of free agreement, makes the step we have taken the definite one in self-government. Source: Fundación Luiz Muñoz Marín, www.flmm.org/.

Document 4.8 Creating the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, 1952 Despite the demands for independence by nationalists like Pedro Albizu Campos, Puerto Rican voters approved and Congress enacted the commonwealth system. The following is the joint resolution from Congress proclaiming the creation of that commonwealth and justifying the action by asserting the support of Puerto Ricans and the federal leadership.

Joint Resolution Approving the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico which was adopted by the people of Puerto Rico on March 3, 1952. Whereas the Act entitled “An Act to provide for the organization of a constitutional government by the people of Puerto Rico,” approved July 3, 1950, was adopted by the Congress as a compact with the people of Puerto Rico, to become operative upon its approval by the people of Puerto Rico; and Whereas the people of Puerto Rico overwhelmingly approved such Act in a referendum held on June 4, 1951, and a constitution for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico was drafted by a constitutional convention held as provided by such Act from September 17, 1951, to February 6, 1952; and

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Whereas such constitution was adopted by the people of Puerto Rico, by a vote of three hundred seventy-four thousand six hundred and forty-nine to eighty-two thousand nine hundred and twenty-three, in a referendum held on March 3, 1952; and Whereas the President of the United States has declared that the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico conforms fully with the applicable provisions of such Act of July 3, 1950, and of the Constitution of the United States, that it contains a bill of rights, and provides for a republican form of government, and has transmitted the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to the Congress for its approval; and Whereas the Congress has considered the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and has found it duly to conform to the above requirements: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico which was drafted by the selected delegates to the Constitutional Convention of Puerto Rico and adopted by the people of Puerto Rico in a referendum of March 3, 1952, in accordance with the Act entitled “An Act to provide for the organization of a constitutional government by the people of Puerto Rico,” approved July 3, 1950 (64 Stat. 319; 48 U.S.C., secs. 731b–731e), is hereby approved by the Congress of the United States, except section 20 of article II of said constitution: Provided, That section 5 of article II thereof shall have no force and effect until amended by the people of Puerto Rico under the procedure prescribed by article VII of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico by adding to such section 5 the following declaration: “Compulsory attendance at elementary public schools to the extent permitted by the facilities of the state as herein provided shall not be construed as applicable to those who receive elementary education in schools established under nongovernmental auspices”: Provided further, That except for the purpose of adopting the amendments to section 5 of article II and to section 3 of article VII as herein provided, article VII of said constitution likewise shall have no force and effect until amended by the people of Puerto Rico under the terms of said article by adding to section 3 of article VII the following new sentence: “Any amendment or revision of this constitution shall be consistent with the resolution enacted by the Congress of the United States approving this constitution, with the applicable provisions of the Constitution of the United States, with the Puerto Rican Federal Relations Act, and with Public Law 600, Eighty-first Congress, adopted in the nature of a compact”: And provided further, That the constitution of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico hereby approved shall become effective when the Constitutional Convention of Puerto Rico shall have declared in a formal resolution its acceptance in the name of the people of Puerto Rico of the conditions of approval herein contained, and when the Governor of Puerto Rico, being duly notified by the proper officials of the Constitutional Convention of Puerto Rico that such resolution of acceptance has been formally adopted, shall issue a proclamation to that effect. Approved July 3, 1952. Source: Statutes at Large, 82d Cong., 2d sess. (1952), 327–328.

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Document 4.9 America, Land of Freedom, 1952 Since the earliest days of the Republic, textbooks had attempted to explain the American struggle with empire to schoolchildren. These textbooks had long celebrated territorial acquisition and white settlement. The authors had little to say about the empires that lost territory to the United States and allowed only brief space to lament the suffering of American Indians. The following comes from a typical textbook of postwar America. Gertrude Hartman had long written books for American schoolchildren on subjects ranging from civics to grammar. America, Land of Freedom was a standard one-volume history of the United States. In both explicit and implicit ways, Hartman connected her celebratory history of expansion and governance in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the freedom the United States spread overseas in the twentieth century. Likewise, she contrasted this history to the recent actions of the Soviet Union.

Settlements Reach the Mississippi . . . The Northwest Ordinance which was passed by Congress in 1787 provided laws for the government of the whole Northwest Territory. The settlers were to be allowed to speak, to write, and to worship as they wished. Education was to be encouraged. Good faith was to be kept with the Indians. There were to be no slaves in the territory. The Ordinance also provided that when the population became sufficiently large the territory might be divided into not less than three nor more than five states. When a state had a population of sixty thousand, it was to be admitted to the Union on an equal footing with the thirteen original states. Settlements in this territory grew rapidly. People came from all sections of the Atlantic coastal plain, following the trails marked out by early pioneers. For years the Ohio River bore thousands of people to their new homes in the Northwest Territory. During one year nearly a thousand flatboats passed Marietta on their way to new settlements. By 1803 Ohio had a population of sixty thousand and was therefore admitted to the Union as a state . . .

Population What did this never-ceasing struggle in the wilderness teach the pioneer? It taught him to have courage and to be self-reliant. Almost entirely by his own efforts, the frontier dweller had to feed, clothe, and shelter himself and his family and protect them from the attacks of hostile Indians prowling about the forests. All this developed in him a feeling of self-confidence and faith in himself. The wild freedom of the wilderness also gave him a feeling of independence. His life was hard, but he was his own master . . .

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At first the people beyond the Alleghenies had little influence in the national government. Politics was largely controlled by the East. Then, as settlements grew, the people of the West wanted men in the government like themselves, men who could understand their needs and problems. The population in the new states increased rapidly. By 1830 nearly one third of the people of the United States were living west of the Appalachians. With this growth of population the political influence of the inhabitants of the newly settled land could hardly fail to be felt . . . In 1874 gold was found in the Black Hills of Dakota and there was a rush of people to that region. This crowding in by the white people brought trouble with the Indians. The land where gold was found had been given by the government to the Sioux and the Cheyenne Indians for use as hunting grounds by a treaty made in 1868. The government now tried to persuade the Indians to give up their hunting grounds to the gold hunters and retire to a reservation, but the Indians insisted upon their rights. The chiefs of the Sioux held a conference with the generals. “I want peace,” warned Sitting Bull, chief of the Sioux, “but if troops come out to me I will fight them. I want to hunt buffalo and to trade. I don’t want rations and annuities. I want to live as an Indian.” The government decided to send General George Custer, a noted Indian fighter, and a force of cavalrymen against the Indians. Discontented Indians from other tribes joined Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, a chief of the Cheyennes, and prepared for battle with the United States troops. They occupied ground which was surrounded by the Bad Lands, a region of deep ravines, quicksands, and rocks carved in queer shapes, dangerous to horses and riders. On June 23, 1876, General Custer, with about two hundred and fifty cavalrymen, was sent against the Indians. They thought that they were opposed by only a small force of redmen, but in reality hundreds of Indians were hiding in the wild ravines on both sides of Custer and his men. There were altogether about three thousand Indian warriors. Gradually they closed in on the soldiers and in a battle which lasted for about four hours General Custer and all of his men were killed. That year the government sent a mission to the Sioux Indians to hear the story of their wrongs and attempt to make peace. Most of the tribes accepted the offer of life on the reservation under the care of the government . . .

New Possessions By the year 1848, the boundaries of the United States had reached the Pacific Ocean, but the nation had not yet come to the end of its growth. Before the close of the century it was to acquire large possessions beyond its continental boundaries. In 1867 Alaska was purchased from Russia for seven million dollars. At first the government was severely criticized for buying what was considered by many Americans a “frozen wilderness.” However, this huge stretch of land with its rich natural resources has proved to be a valuable territory of the United States. Alaska is governed by a legislature elected by the people and by a governor appointed by the President of the United States. It sends a delegate to the national House of Representatives but has no voting power.

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Toward the end of the nineteenth century events occurred which resulted in the acquisition of islands in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. In most cases they were added because of the Spanish-American War . . . By 1850 Cuba and Puerto Rico were all that remained of Spain’s once vast American empire. Spanish rule in Cuba was not satisfactory to the Cubans. Many of the people wished to throw off the rule of Spain and become independent. Several times there were revolutions. In 1895 there was a rebellion against the government which the Spanish soldiers on the island found difficult to put down . . . The treaty of peace between Spain and the United States was signed in December, 1898. It provided that Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the small islands of Wake and Guam in the Pacific Ocean should be ceded to the United States. In return for the Philippines the United States paid Spain twenty million dollars. The United States pledged itself to make Cuba an independent nation as soon as the people were ready to govern themselves. Much was done to better conditions on the island. Sanitary conditions were improved and efforts were made to rid the island of yellow fever. In 1902 the United States turned over the government to the Cubans . . . The acquisition of Puerto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands, and the Philippines brought the United States the responsibility of governing them. In general these islands have been governed like our territories. The governor is appointed by the President of the United States, but it has been the policy of the United States to give the people as large a share in the government as possible. Members of the legislature and local officers are elected by the people. Good roads and railroads have been built, new school systems have been introduced, the health of the people has been cared for, and industries have been developed. The Filipinos wanted to have a government of their own. This was discussed in Congress many times, but not until 1934 was the Philippine Independence Act signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. This act provided for complete independence for the Filipinos at the end of ten years. In 1944, however, the Philippines were held by Japan. Thus it was not until 1946 that these islands became an independent republic with Manuel Roxas as the first president . . .

Germany and Japan After the surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945, a most important task was to work out plans for these countries so that in the future they would be acceptable members of the world community of nations. To lay the groundwork for these plans Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill held important conferences during the war. It was agreed that Germany should be divided into four zones, each of which was to be governed by one of the victorious powers. Russia was to control the eastern part, England the north and northwest, France the southwest, and the United States the south. Berlin, the former capital of Germany, which was a hundred miles within the Russian sector, was to be divided, Russia having control of the eastern part of the city, and England, France, and the United States controlling the western part. It was hoped that the four nations could work together to rebuild Germany. However, the division of the country caused trouble. As time passed, bitterness between Russia and the Western Powers increased. There were many disheartening experiences . . .

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All military and government officials who had led the Japanese people before the war were removed from office. The Emperor, Hirohito, was allowed to remain, but he was to have little power. General MacArthur, who had led the American forces to victory in the East, was given control of the country. He acted with the advice of an Allied Council and a Far Eastern Commission which was set up to decide on policies for the reconstruction of the nation. In dealing with the Japanese people General MacArthur was firm but just, and he won their respect and admiration . . . Far-reaching changes were made in Japan’s political system. In 1946 a democratic constitution was adopted and became the supreme law of the land. The new Constitution gave the Japanese people many rights and freedoms they had never had before. They were to have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” which our Declaration of Independence states is the “unalienable right” of every free people. Freedom of thought and action, freedom of religion, the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively are all guaranteed. The nation pledged itself to peaceful cooperation with all nations . . . One of the most important tasks is to educate younger generations of Japanese so that they will understand the meaning of democracy. Great changes are being made in the educational system. Teachers with militaristic ideas were excluded from the schools. Old textbooks were revised and new texts are being written. Libraries are being established. Thus, with the help of the United States, the Japanese people are building up a new Japan on the ruins of the old . . .

East and West After the war, Soviet troops occupied part of Austria, and Russia had control of eastern Germany and Finland. Russian influence spread rapidly in other nations of eastern Europe, as Communist leaders in those countries took over the governments. Poland, Rumania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, all became Communist nations. In all those countries the people were deprived of the freedoms possessed by people in democratic countries. As Russia did not wish to reveal information about her own country or those under her control, communication with the outside world was almost entirely cut off. No one was allowed to leave, and no one from the West was allowed to enter, except by special permission. What was called an “iron curtain” divided the two parts of Europe . . . Source: Gertrude Hartman, America, Land of Freedom (Boston: D. C. Heath, 1952).

Document 4.10 Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1954 The situation in Guatemala in 1954 reads like fiction, which is an important factor in understanding the events. The United States helped organize a coup d’état against the government of Jacob Arbenz, installing Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas at the head of a military junta. The Eisenhower administration feared both the spread of communism into

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Guatemala and the nationalization of American businesses. This event and others like it soon contributed to the notion that the federal government, and especially the Central Intelligence Agency, could depose any government that opposed it. Latin America would become the location for similar coups, in both the real world and a growing number of spy thrillers that filled American bookstores and movie theaters. What follows is a series of documents showing both public and private reactions within the administration. The diary of Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagerty, shows how the administration saw direct connections between the spread of communism in Latin America and in Southeast Asia. His brief entry of June 18 shows how CIA director Allen Dulles quietly informed the administration of the coup without acknowledging his own organization’s role in the affair. Subsequent memos show how American officials viewed the threats against American fruit companies and American national security. Finally, the “balance sheet” from the State Department’s Office of Middle American Affairs underscores that this was never a one-way process. The proxy governments installed or supported by the United States had their own agendas, and they made their loyalty to the U.S. contingent on a give-and-take relationship.

Excerpt from the Diary of James C. Hagerty, Press Secretary to the President [Washington], April 26, 1954. Monday, April 26—Legislative leaders meeting at 8:30 . . . The President started the meeting with a discussion of Guatemala and Indo China—On Guatemala the President said that it was the usual Red penetration with a small minority which is gradually taking over the country. He said that he gave the present Foreign Minister, when he was Ambassador here “unshirted hell, but he’s playing along with the Communists.” He said that the Caracas decision had been helpful in stopping Communism in this hemisphere and that consequently we would have all Latin and South American countries helping us “whenever the Reds make a move”—he said that we have a good man in Guatemala and that he is watching the situation very closely and giving us constant reports—In Guatemala, however, the Reds are in control and they are trying to spread their influence to San Salvador as a first step of the breaking out in Guatemala to other South American countries . . .

Memorandum by the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs (Holland) to the Secretary of State SECRET [Washington] May 14, 1954. Subject: Recommendation that the U.S. Invoke Consultative Procedure under Rio Treaty to Consider Problem of International Communism in Guatemala. It is recommended that promptly the United States invoke the Organ of Consultation specified in Article VI of the Rio Treaty to consider the problem of the penetration of Guatemala by International Communism.

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The Problem From time to time around the world frontal tests of strength between the force of the free nations and that of the Communist organization arise. One occurred in Korea. Another is in progress in Indochina. A less publicized collision is now reaching its crisis in Guatemala. In this last situation the test is whether the world Communist organization has the strength to establish a satellite nation in this hemisphere and, conversely, whether the free nations have the power to resist that attempt.

Importance of Problem This contest is of crucial importance in the global struggle between free nations and the Communist forces. The reason is twofold. 1. It has been asserted that Moscow cannot establish a satellite state save where the weight of the Red Army can be brought to bear directly or indirectly. Obviously, Russia recognizes, therefore, that establishment of a satellite state in this hemisphere would mark a victory which would strengthen the power of Communist forces in every free nation of the world. Establishment of a satellite state in this hemisphere, and particularly so close to the United States, would enable Russia to claim throughout the world that the power of Communism lies in its appeal to men’s minds and not in fear or force. 2. The greatest significance of the Guatemalan test lies in its effect on all regional organizations similar to the Organization of American States . . . Free states throughout the world are relying in their fight against International Communism upon the collective security afforded by these regional organizations. This grand strategy gives small nations exposed to invasion the courage to resist. By combining the individual strength of separate states into a massive aggregate it becomes possible to match and surpass the force which Russia can bring to bear at any time and at any point in the world. Obviously, a major policy of this Government is to bring all of the free states of the world into strong and determined regional organizations, contributing to them the maximum force and purpose of which we are capable . . . The people of Guatemala are overwhelmingly Catholic and anti Communist. However, they are unorganized and entirely helpless to resist the well-planned and executed campaign directed against them from Moscow. It was precisely for the protection of a small nation in such a situation that the policy of collective security through regional organizations was devised.

Alternative Courses of Action The three most obvious courses of action for this Government are the following: 1. We can continue to express our concern about the rapid expansion of international Communism in Guatemala. This course has been entirely ineffective thus far, and it seems certain that it will continue to be. 2. We can notify the other American States of our intention to move unilaterally in Guatemala to defeat Moscow’s purpose there. Such a course of action would be

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inconsistent with our treaty obligations and the firm policy which we have followed in this hemisphere for more than 20 years. 3. We can attack the problem through the Organization of American States, utilizing the mechanisms specifically designed for problems of this nature. In my judgment the latter course is clearly that which we must follow. It is my conclusion and that of the experts who are following this problem that, while there are some anti-Communist elements left in Guatemalan political institutions, they have lost their independence of action. These anti-Communist elements can be eliminated by the Communists whenever they consider it desirable. Therefore, we must recognize that the political institutions of that American State are now dominated and controlled by the international Communist organization. Therefore, I recommend to you that this Government request that the Organ of Consultation of the Organization of American States be requested to meet and consider this problem. Because of the great rapidity with which anti-Communist elements are being eliminated from all political institutions, I feel that this move should be taken with the greatest urgency . . .

Memorandum by Louis J. Halle, Jr., of the Policy Planning Staff to the Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Bowie) TOP SECRET

[Washington] May 28, 1954.

Our Guatemalan Policy Major decisions affecting our Latin American policy are being made in an atmosphere of urgency generated by (a) the outbreak of a strike among United Fruit Company and Standard Fruit Company workers in Honduras, and (b) the delivery at a Guatemalan port of a cargo of arms from behind the Iron Curtain. The consequent haste in decision involves certain dangers which are already being realized and may be realized further in the absence of precaution: (a) There is no time for preliminary staff-work to provide an adequate basis of information and thought; (b) The concentration on what appears to be a local emergency may result in inadequate attention to larger considerations that are not local or short-range; (c) The atmosphere of emergency breeds a disposition to exaggerate dangers, and this disposition is strengthened by the necessity of “making a case” in order to get effective action. The purpose of this memorandum is to put into your hands (a) such intelligence with respect to the Guatemalan situation as can be assembled at short notice, (b) a brief account of the historic inter-American context in which the situation arises, including the complex of international commitments within the terms of which it has been our policy and pledge to act; and (c) opinion on the consequences of alternative policies . . .

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I. The Guatemalan Situation. . . . This typical underdeveloped country is now undergoing the social revolution that typifies underdeveloped countries generally in our time. That revolution is an expression of the impulse to achieve equality of status (a) for individuals and groups within the national society, and (b) for the nation-state within the international community. Social reform and nationalism are its two principal manifestations. We see the same revolution at various stages of development in Asia and Africa. On our own side of the globe it has taken various acute forms in Argentina, Bolivia, and Mexico—less acute forms elsewhere. It has hardly manifested itself at all, as yet, in Honduras (before May 1), Paraguay, or Haiti. In Guatemala historic conditions provide substantial fuel to fire the revolution. Foreign ownership of the elements of Guatemala’s economic life, together with the pattern of its international trade, gives the Guatemalans a vivid and unwelcome sense of dependence on foreigners. This is not too galling with respect to foreign ownership of coffee plantations, for the owners are scattered individuals of various nationalities who lack collective means of exercising control over the country’s economic and social life. The case is different with the utilities, the vital transportation and communication facilities, and the banana empire of the United Fruit Company (which is a monopoly). U.S. ownership is overwhelmingly predominant here. Up to twenty years ago the United Fruit Company and the International Railways of Central America (now controlled by United Fruit) still practiced marked discrimination against native employees in favor of U.S. employees. Today the Fruit Company is, as it was becoming then, an agent of social betterment; but its past is not forgotten and what really counts is that, whether beneficent or maleficent in its practices, it remains the expression of Guatemala’s economic colonialism. The international Communist movement is certainly not the cause of the social revolution in Guatemala, but it has made the same effort there that it has made everywhere else to harness the revolutionary impulses—nationalism and social reform alike—and exploit them for its own purposes. In Guatemala this effort has been less successful than in Vietnam and perhaps no more successful than it was in Mexico twenty years ago under the regime of Lazaro Cardenas. It has, however, been impressive in its success, all the circumstances considered. It has achieved a high degree of covert control over the reformist regime of President Arbenz and is dominant in the national labor movement . . .

III. Policy Alternatives. The key to a wise choice among these broad alternatives lies in the answer to two questions: (1) What is the magnitude and imminence of any danger that the present situation holds for us? and (2) How much support for collective action can we expect from the rest of the inter American community? . . . We could be quite complacent about the Indochinese situation if only we could afford to let it get worse until the corresponding alarm in India and Indonesia made it possible to deal with that situation by really effective united action. Unfortunately, our danger there is extreme and we cannot be complacent about allowing it to get worse.

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The Guatemalan situation, however, can safely get worse and, if one leaves historical caprice out of account, cannot get better until it does get worse. If we should adopt, instead, the second alternative of intervening unilaterally with whatever force was necessary we would, in effect, be making a colony of Guatemala that we could maintain only by continued force, and by so doing we would turn all of Latin America against us to the advantage of the international Communist movement. If our intervention was less than decisive the Argentine experience would be repeated and we would have strengthened Communism in Guatemala while antagonizing Latin America generally. It would seem to me wise for us to countermand the present orders to our naval forces in the Caribbean and, for the rest, to take a more relaxed attitude generally. In this connection we ought also avoid needlessly alarming and arousing our own public, for that would end by making the pursuit of a considered policy impossible . . .

Excerpt from the Diary of James C. Hagerty, Press Secretary to the President [Washington], June 18, 1954. In at 8:15. Allen Dulles called early in the morning to tell me that his organization expected there would be an anti-Communist uprising in Guatemala very shortly. Officially we don’t know anything about it. The story broke late Friday night . . .

The Ambassador in Guatemala (Peurifoy) to the Department of State . . . I stressed again that I could neither speak for Castillo nor commit my government, but that if Diaz assumed power and ousted Communists, I would strongly recommend that US attempt to bring about cease-fire until arrangement could be made. Once again Diaz and colleagues insisted that truce, at least cessation of airraids, would be essential before they could act against Arbenz. They said there were only 500 regular troops in city, plus 2,500 reservists with two years previous service who had just been called up. Latter were armed and equipped. Unfortunately, there were also about 2,000 peasants who had just been brought in for training. They would be disarmed. I simply repeated that when I knew Diaz was in control I would recommend cease-fire . . . Throughout discussion, I emphasized necessity of acting quickly to round up leading Communists before they could mobilize forces. All agreed this was essential and Sanchez was designated to give necessary orders. I pointed out that Major Rosenberg, chief of detectives, undoubtedly had report of Diaz telephone call to Embassy since all our telephones were tapped and might well be making his own plans. Strangely enough, this idea apparently had not occurred to Diaz. He said he would act as soon as possible to replace Rosenberg and Cruz Wer, chief of police. I then told Diaz I felt very deeply necessity of implanting democracy as far as local conditions permitted and that all sectors of population, including those who have followed Castillo Armas anti-Communist movement, be allowed participate in political life of country. Diaz and associates gave most categorical assurances that they would issue general

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amnesty, release all political prisoners and allow persons in asylum in diplomatic missions to come out. They said Castillo Armas could return if he wished but added feeling against him was high because of bombings and they could not guarantee his safety. At one point Diaz asked whether any members of present Cabinet were unacceptable to US. I said I could not attempt to dictate his Cabinet and that if he appointed reasonable men I was sure all our secondary problems could be worked out, such as difficulties of American Companies. I emphasized strongly I represented US Government and people, not individual companies. At conclusion, it was agreed Diaz would telephone me after seeing Arbenz and inform me of outcome. Peurifoy

Memorandum by John W. Fisher of the Office of Middle American Affairs CONFIDENTIAL

Balance Sheet—December 31, 1954 Guatemala Guatemala Wants: 1. Faster implementation of economic and technical assistance promised by U.S. 2. Grant of 12,000 metric tons of corn to relieve shortage. 3. Cash assistance to get Inter-American Highway work accelerated pending reimbursement from U.S. funds. 4. Reimbursement for services of Elmer Batzell, petroleum adviser contracted by Guatemalan Government. 5. Renegotiation of U.S.-Guatemalan Trade Agreement. 6. A Bilateral Military Assistance Agreement with the U.S. United States Wants: 1. Acceptance of sound advice in fiscal and development policy. 2. Coordination of technical advice received from U.S. and that received from Venezuela (petroleum), IBRD and IMF (financial and economic development), and any other nonU.S. sources. 3. Encouragement by Guatemala of repatriation of its own private capital abroad. 4. Discussion of an Investment Guarantee Treaty with the U.S. 5. Conclusion of Air and Military Mission Agreements. [There is no indication of a drafting date on the source text.] Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954, vol. 4, The American Republics (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1984), 1101–1102, 1107–1110, 1139–1149, 1173, 1190–1191, 1239.

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Document 4.11 Martin Luther King Jr., “Birth of a New Nation” Sermon, April 7, 1957 Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King offered some of the most cohesive and compelling arguments against global imperialism. In 1957, he was still a young minister at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Only two years earlier, he had helped coordinate the Montgomery bus boycott, in the process becoming one of the most visible figures in the African American civil rights movement. The title of this sermon is a conscious reference to Birth of a Nation, a 1915 film that was avowedly racist in its celebration of secession and the Ku Klux Klan.

I want to preach this morning from the subject: “The Birth of a New Nation.” And I would like to use as a basis for our thinking together a story that has long since been stenciled on the mental sheets of succeeding generations. It is the story of the Exodus, the story of the flight of the Hebrew people from the bondage of Egypt, through the wilderness, and finally to the Promised Land. It’s a beautiful story . . . Prior to March the sixth, 1957, there existed a country known as the Gold Coast. This country was a colony of the British Empire. This country was situated in that vast continent known as Africa. I’m sure you know a great deal about Africa, that continent with some two hundred million people and it extends and covers a great deal of territory. There are many familiar names associated with Africa that you would probably remember, and there are some countries in Africa that many people never realize. For instance, Egypt is in Africa. And there is that vast area of North Africa with Egypt and Ethiopia, with Tunisia and Algeria and Morocco and Libya. Then you might move to South Africa and you think of that extensive territory known as the Union of South Africa. There is that capital city Johannesburg that you read so much about these days. Then there is central Africa with places like Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo. And then there is East Africa with places like Kenya and Tanganyika, and places like Uganda and other very powerful countries right there. And then you move over to West Africa, where you find the French West Africa and Nigeria, and Liberia and Sierra Leone and places like that. And it is in this spot, in this section of Africa, that we find the Gold Coast, there in West Africa. You also know that for years and for centuries, Africa has been one of the most exploited continents in the history of the world. It’s been the “Dark Continent.” It’s been the continent that has suffered all of the pain and the affliction that could be mustered up by other nations. And it is that continent which has experienced slavery, which has experienced all of the lowest standards that we can think about, and its been brought into being by the exploitation inflicted upon it by other nations . . . And there was a big scramble for power in Africa. With the growth of the slave trade, there came into Africa, into the Gold Coast in particular, not only the Portuguese but

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also the Swedes and the Danes and the Dutch and the British. And all of these nations competed with each other to win the power of the Gold Coast so that they could exploit these people for commercial reasons and sell them into slavery. Finally, in 1850, Britain won out, and she gained possession of the total territorial expansion of the Gold Coast. From 1850 to 1957, March sixth, the Gold Coast was a colony of the British Empire. And as a colony she suffered all of the injustices, all of the exploitation, all of the humiliation that comes as a result of colonialism. But like all slavery, like all domination, like all exploitation, it came to the point that the people got tired of it. And that seems to be the long story of history. There seems to be a throbbing desire, there seems to be an internal desire for freedom within the soul of every man. And it’s there—it might not break forth in the beginning, but eventually it breaks out. Men realize that freedom is something basic, and to rob a man of his freedom is to take from him the essential basis of his manhood. To take from him his freedom is to rob him of something of God’s image. To paraphrase the words of Shakespeare’s Othello: Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing; twas mine, ’tis his, has been the slave of thousands; but he who filches from me my freedom robs me of that which not enriches him, but makes me poor indeed. There is something in the soul that cries out for freedom. There is something deep down within the very soul of man that reaches out for Canaan. Men cannot be satisfied with Egypt. They tried to adjust to it for awhile. Many men have vested interests in Egypt, and they are slow to leave. Egypt makes it profitable to them; some people profit by Egypt. The vast majority, the masses of people never profit by Egypt, and they are never content with it. And eventually they rise up and begin to cry out for Canaan’s land . . . And so these people got tired. It had a long history. As far back as 1844, the chiefs themselves of the Gold Coast rose up and came together and revolted against the British Empire and the other powers that were in existence at that time dominating the Gold Coast. They revolted, saying that they wanted to govern themselves. But these powers clamped down on them, and the British said that we will not let you go . . . And this was the struggling that had been going on for years. It was now coming to the point that this little nation was moving toward its independence. Then came the continual agitation, the continual resistance, so that the British Empire saw that it could no longer rule the Gold Coast. And they agreed that on the sixth of March, 1957, they would release this nation. This nation would no longer be a colony of the British Empire, that this nation would be a sovereign nation within the British Commonwealth. All of this was because of the persistent protest, the continual agitation on the part of Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and the other leaders who worked along with him and the masses of people who were willing to follow . . . Then came Tuesday, [March] the fifth, many events leading up to it. That night we walked into the closing of Parliament—the closing of the old Parliament, the old Parliament, which was presided over by the British Empire. The old Parliament which designated colonialism and imperialism. Now that Parliament is closing. That was a great sight and a great picture and a great scene. We sat there that night, just about five

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hundred able to get in there. People, thousands and thousands of people waiting outside, just about five hundred in there, and we were fortunate enough to be sitting there at that moment as guests of the prime minister. At that hour we noticed Prime Minister Nkrumah walking in with all of his ministers, with his justices of the Supreme Court of the Gold Coast, and with all of the people of the Convention People’s Party, the leaders of that party. Nkrumah came up to make his closing speech to the old Gold Coast. There was something old now passing away . . . And then at twelve o’clock that night we walked out. As we walked out we noticed all over the polo grounds almost a half-a-million people. They had waited for this hour and this moment for years. As we walked out of the door and looked at that beautiful building, we looked up to the top of it and there was a little flag that had been flowing around the sky for many years. It was the Union Jack flag of the Gold Coast, the British flag, you see. But at twelve o’clock that night we saw a little flag coming down, and another flag went up. The old Union Jack flag came down, and the new flag of Ghana went up. This was a new nation now, a new nation being born. And when Prime Minister Nkrumah stood up before his people out in the polo ground and said, “We are no longer a British colony. We are a free, sovereign people,” all over that vast throng of people we could see tears. And I stood there thinking about so many things. Before I knew it, I started weeping. I was crying for joy. And I knew about all of the struggles, and all of the pain, and all of the agony that these people had gone through for this moment. After Nkrumah had made that final speech, it was about twelve-thirty now. And we walked away. And we could hear little children six years old and old people eighty and ninety years old walking the streets of Accra crying, “Freedom! Freedom!” They couldn’t say it in the sense that we’d say it—many of them don’t speak English too well—but they had their accents and it could ring out, “Free-doom!” They were crying it in a sense that they had never heard it before, and I could hear that old Negro spiritual once more crying out: Free at last! Free at last! Great God Almighty, I’m free at last! They were experiencing that in their very souls. And everywhere we turned, we could hear it ringing out from the housetops. We could hear it from every corner, every nook and crook of the community: “Freedom! Freedom!” This was the birth of a new nation. This was the breaking aloose from Egypt . . . Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there, and he never voluntarily gives it up. And that is where the strong resistance comes. Privileged classes never give up their privileges without strong resistance. So don’t go out this morning with any illusions. Don’t go back into your homes and around Montgomery thinking that the Montgomery City Commission and that all of the forces in the leadership of the South will eventually work out this thing for Negroes, it’s going to work out; it’s going to roll in on the wheels of inevitability. If we wait for it to work itself out, it will never be worked out. Freedom only comes

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through persistent revolt, through persistent agitation, through persistently rising up against the system of evil. The bus protest is just the beginning. Buses are integrated in Montgomery, but that is just the beginning. And don’t sit down and do nothing now because the buses are integrated, because, if you stop now, we will be in the dungeons of segregation and discrimination for another hundred years, and our children and our children’s children will suffer all of the bondage that we have lived under for years. It never comes voluntarily. We’ve got to keep on keeping on in order to gain freedom. It never comes like that. It would be fortunate if the people in power had sense enough to go on and give up, but they don’t do it like that. It is not done voluntarily, but it is done through the pressure that comes about from people who are oppressed. If there had not been a Gandhi in India with all of his noble followers, India would have never been free. If there had not been an Nkrumah and his followers in Ghana, Ghana would still be a British colony. If there had not been abolitionists in America, both Negro and white, we might still stand today in the dungeons of slavery. And then because there have been, in every period, there are always those people in every period of human history who don’t mind getting their necks cut off, who don’t mind being persecuted and discriminated and kicked about, because they know that freedom is never given out, but it comes through the persistent and the continual agitation and revolt on the part of those who are caught in the system. Ghana teaches us that . . . There’s another thing that Ghana reminds us. I’m coming to the conclusion now. Ghana reminds us that freedom never comes on a silver platter. It’s never easy. Ghana reminds us that whenever you break out of Egypt, you better get ready for stiff backs. You better get ready for some homes to be bombed. You better get ready for some churches to be bombed. You better get ready for a lot of nasty things to be said about you, because you’re getting out of Egypt, and, whenever you break aloose from Egypt, the initial response of the Egyptian is bitterness. It never comes with ease. It comes only through the hardness and persistence of life. Ghana reminds us of that. You better get ready to go to prison. When I looked out and saw the prime minister there with his prison cap on that night, that reminded me of that fact, that freedom never comes easy. It comes through hard labor and it comes through toil. It comes through hours of despair and disappointment . . . But finally Ghana tells us that the forces of the universe are on the side of justice. That’s what it tells us, now. You can interpret Ghana any kind of way you want to, but Ghana tells me that the forces of the universe are on the side of justice. That night when I saw that old flag coming down and the new flag coming up, I saw something else. That wasn’t just an Ephemeral, evanescent event appearing on the stage of history, but it was an event with eternal meaning, for it symbolizes something. That thing symbolized to me that an old order is passing away and a new order is coming into being. An old order of colonialism, of segregation, of discrimination is passing away now, and a new order of justice and freedom and goodwill is being born. That’s what it said: that somehow the forces of justice stand on the side of the universe, and that you can’t ultimately trample over God’s children and profit by it . . .

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And the power of Great Britain is no more. I looked at France. I looked at Britain. And I thought about the Britain that could boast, “The sun never sets on our great Empire.” And I said now she had gone to the level that the sun hardly rises on the British Empire—because it was based on exploitation, because the God of the universe eventually takes a stand. And I say to you this morning, my friends, rise up and know that, as you struggle for justice, you do not struggle alone, but God struggles with you. And He is working every day. Somehow I can look out, I can look out across the seas and across the universe, and cry out, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” Then I think about it, because His truth is marching on, and I can sing another chorus: “Hallelujah, glory hallelujah! His truth is marching on.” . . . For I can look out and see a great number, as John saw, marching into the great eternity, because God is working in this world, and at this hour, and at this moment. And God grants that we will get on board and start marching with God, because we got orders now to break down the bondage and the walls of colonialism, exploitation, and imperialism, to break them down to the point that no man will trample over another man, but that all men will respect the dignity and worth of all human personality. And then we will be in Canaan’s freedom land. Moses might not get to see Canaan, but his children will see it. He even got to the mountaintop enough to see it and that assured him that it was coming. But the beauty of the thing is that there’s always a Joshua to take up his work and take the children on in. And it’s there waiting with its milk and honey, and with all of the bountiful beauty that God has in store for His children. Oh, what exceedingly marvelous things God has in store for us. Grant that we will follow Him enough to gain them. [recording interrupted] Source: Reprinted by arrangement with the Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor, New York, N.Y.

Document 4.12 Elvis in Germany, 1958 In March 1958, the King of Rock and Roll became Private Elvis Aaron Presley. Later that year, he joined the thousands of U.S. troops serving in Germany. For music fans who had come to idolize Elvis, it was a devastating blow. Presley himself worried his career would never survive the hiatus from recording and public attention. In the two years that followed, both Elvis and the United States Army sought to keep him in the public eye, but for very different reasons. For Presley, it was an effort to avoid being forgotten as other musicians commanded the airways and record stores. For the U.S. government, Elvis Presley became a poster boy (quite literally) for the American military presence in Western Europe. The photo that follows is one of many showing Elvis during his two years of military service. These photos cast Elvis as a typical service member, in this case as a part of the Third Armored Division defending Western Europe against the mounting Soviet threat.

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Source: AP Images

Document 4.13 The Ugly American, 1958 American global power and global intervention were reflected in numerous forms of culture, some of them serious and some of them absurd. Within this realm of discussion, some of the most thoughtful and prescient commentary emerged in The Ugly American. Published in 1958, the novel is set in various locales of Southeast Asia, focusing primarily on the fictional country of Sarkhan. Circumstances in the novel were clearly based on real-life developments in Southeast Asia, primarily on the American effort to combat communism and to secure popular support even as American diplomatic and business interests intersected in ways that created their own set of problems. But the novel was also idealistic in its notion that if Americans only had greater understanding of the countries in which they worked, the local population would learn from American models of government and economic development and would benefit as a result. The following passage concerns Gilbert MacWhite, a rational and well-intentioned man who becomes ambassador to Sarkhan. Increasingly disillusioned by American policy, his complaints eventually find their way to Washington, where they are repeated by a senator in a public hearing.

Ambassador MacWhite expected the letter long before it arrived. The day Senator Brown had attacked his testimony on the Senate floor, representatives from the AP, UP, and all of the foreign news services had descended upon the U.S. Embassy in Haidho. It had

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been a grim afternoon. MacWhite had assumed that his testimony would be secret because it had been given in an executive session of the Senate Committee; but obviously the newspapers had the complete text. There was nothing to do but defend what he had said about Vietnam, and this MacWhite did to the best of his ability. Washington was thunderously silent for three weeks. MacWhite knew he would hear something eventually—but when he did, he was surprised. He got a long, hand-written note from the Secretary of State. Dear Gilbert: As you know, Gilbert, I was one of those who persuaded you to join the Foreign Service. I have watched your career with great pride. You are, I have always thought, the kind of American of whom we can be proud. You have always put the security and future of your country ahead of personal benefit. I was pleased when you were given the post at Sarkhan. I had envisaged it as the first of a number of illustrious ambassadorships that you would hold. I would be less than honest, however, if I did not tell you I have felt grave doubts in the last months . . . Let me make myself clear, Gilbert. I am not asking for your resignation. Nor am I suggesting that you leave Sarkhan. But, I must have some assurance that your future behavior will conform to what we expect of foreign service officers. Please believe me when I tell you that I am using this informal means of communicating with you in an effort to save the Department embarrassment, and to aid your career.

MacWhite put the letter down. MacWhite knew that the Secretary was a deeply religious and profoundly dedicated man. He was a man who traveled endlessly and relentlessly, and he had great courage. MacWhite thought a long time before he wrote a reply directly to the Secretary . . . He would make one last effort to tell the Secretary his thoughts on American policy, and would let the matter rest there. If the Secretary did not agree, MacWhite would resign. Dear Mr. Secretary: I am most grateful for the frankness of your note to me. I should like to respond in the same vein. As you might have guessed, nothing in my previous experience had prepared me for the silent desperation with which the battle between the Communist world and our world is being fought here. I was not prepared for the fact that in this area politics is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. I had never been really aware that Lenin’s remark, “The road to Paris leads through Peking” also meant that the same road runs through Saigon, Tokyo, Bangkok, Djakarta, and even Haidho. But it does. I do not think that the Russians will ever resort to thermonuclear warfare. They won’t have to. They are winning much too easily to run the risk of annihilation by retaliation. Since the end of World War II they have not suffered a major defeat. As you have said often in your public speeches, we will never be the first to launch the bomb. What this means is that the Russians will win the world by their successes in a multitude of tiny battles. Many of these will be fought around conference tables, in the rice fields of Asia, at village meetings, in schools; but mainly they will take place in the minds of men. Only occasionally will the battles be violent; but the sum of these tiny battles will decide whether our way of life is to perish or to persist.

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I apologize for this extravagant language; but there is no other way to say what I feel I must: The United States must either prepare itself to win these many tiny conflicts, which are the substance of competitive coexistence; or go down in defeat. What are we to do? I am not sure I know the whole picture. Perhaps no man does. But a handful of personal experiences have shown me part of the way out of the dreadful dilemma in which we find ourselves. In my tenure here at Haidho perhaps three hundred Americans have passed through the Embassy in one capacity or another. Only five of them were at all valuable in our struggle against Communism. One of them was a Catholic priest, one was an engineer, one an Air Force Colonel, one a Major from Texas, and one a private citizen who manufactures powdered milk. From this tiny handful of effective men I learned some principles. I am not sure that they are applicable in all countries around the world in which the battle is taking place; but I suspect that they are. The little things we do must be moral acts and they must be done in the real interest of the peoples whose friendship we need not just in the interest of propaganda. The men I mentioned above, men who have sacrificed and labored here, are not romantic or sentimental. They are tough and they are hard. But they agree with me that to the extent that our foreign policy is humane and reasonable, it will be successful. To the extent that it is imperialistic and grandiose, it will fail. In any case, I am now prepared to ask you in all humility to allow me to do several things in Sarkhan. If you do not see your way clear to permit these actions, I shall regretfully resign from the Foreign Service. If you are able to grant them, I think there is a better than even chance that I can save Sarkhan from Communism. If I am successful, perhaps my experience will serve as a model. (1) I request that every American (and his dependents) sent to Sarkhan be required to be able to both read and speak Sarkhanese. I am satisfied that if the motivation is high enough, any person can learn enough of the language in twelve weeks so that he can get along. This should be required of both military and civilian personnel. (2) I request that no American employee be allowed to bring his dependents to Sarkhan unless he is willing to serve here for at least two years. If he does bring his family, it should be with the understanding they will not be given luxurious quarters, but will live in housing which is normal to the area; their housing should certainly not be more luxurious than they are able to afford in America. They should also subsist on foods available in local stores—which are wholesome and ample. (3) I request that the American commissary and PX be withdrawn from Sarkhan, and that no American supplies be sold except for toilet articles, baby food, canned milk, coffee, and tobacco. (4) I request that Americans not be allowed to bring their private automobiles to this country. All of our official transportation should be done in official automobiles. Private transportation should be taxi, pedicab, or bicycle. (5) I request that all Americans serving in Sarkhan, regardless of their classification, be required to read books by Mao Tse-tung, Lenin, Chou En-lai, Marx, Engels, and leading Asian Communists. This reading should be done before arrival. (6) I request that in our recruiting program we make all of these conditions clear to any prospective government employee, so that he comes here with no illusions. It has been my experience that superior people are attracted only by challenge. By setting our standards low and making our life soft, we have, quite automatically and unconsciously, assured ourselves of mediocre people. I know, sir, that these are unusual demands. In a time of massive armament and in a battle between huge empires they may seem almost comical. But, I repeat, grand patterns are no more than the sum of their tiniest parts, and it is on this basic level that we are losing the struggle. As far as is legal and possible I have already made these demands on personnel new in Sarkhan. If we cannot get Americans overseas who are trained, self-sacrificing, and dedicated, then we will continue losing in Asia.

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The Russians will win without firing a shot, and the only choice open to us will be to become the aggressor with thermonuclear weapons. I look forward to your response.

For three weeks MacWhite heard nothing from Washington, but he was neither worried nor idle. He spent several days at a primitive camp observing Major Wolchek instruct Sarkhanese recruits in guerilla tactics. Next he visited the village of Chang Dong to inspect its thriving, although tiny, industrial complex. A Sarkhanese mechanic had designed and was manufacturing a simple machine for the canning of fish. The development of this machine had produced an entirely new industry of fish processing in Sarkhan. On the way back to Haidho Ambassador MacWhite had lunched at Finian’s Station, a small non-denominational college. Here 250 Sarkhanese scholarship students, none of whom was over 21, were being given a four-year education. Their curriculum included complete exposure to the writings of both Communist and Western leaders. Most of the students MacWhite talked to said that after they had graduated they intended to return and work in their own villages. As the ambassador’s car approached Haidho, he saw, in a hilly pasture, fifty reddish brown cattle. These cattle had been imported from America only six months before; but already they were beginning to change the eating habits of some sections of Sarkhan. For the first time in the history of the country, children were drinking fresh milk; and in half a dozen towns, the beginning of a leather industry was springing up. When a reply finally arrived from Washington, it was a cablegram—and it was brief and to the point. Reply negative to all suggestions your handwritten note X Such actions even though they have merit are highly impractical X We would not be able to get Americans to serve overseas under these conditions X Please return continental United States first available transportation X Anticipate substantial replacement your present staff X Please explore with Sarkhanese Government their attitude toward receiving Mr. Joseph Bing as new ambassador X We consider his extensive press and recruiting experience excellent qualification high position X Signed Secretary.

Three weeks later Gilbert MacWhite left Sarkhan. Source: William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: Norton, 1958), 264–270.

Document 4.14 John F. Kennedy’s Message to Congress, May 25, 1961 John F. Kennedy was inaugurated the thirty-fifth president of the United States on January 20, 1961. The question of American power overseas immediately took center stage. In April, a plan to depose the government of Cuba hatched by the Eisenhower administration and Cuban expatriates ended in disaster at the Bay of Pigs. The result publicly humiliated the new administration and heightened tensions with Cuba and the Soviet Union. What now seems like the more important conflict—the American commitment in South Vietnam—was

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a secondary concern to those few Americans who had actually heard of the conflict in Southeast Asia. But in the speech that follows, Kennedy himself situated Vietnam within a larger struggle for control of the developing world. Delivered only four months after taking office and barely five weeks after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy’s message to Congress addressed numerous issues. This was primarily an appeal for new appropriations to support both foreign and domestic policy as well as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, then only two years old. The following excerpts concern themselves with the conflict that Kennedy saw emerging in the developing world. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, my copartners in Government, gentlemen and ladies: The Constitution imposes upon me the obligation to “from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union.” While this has traditionally been interpreted as an annual affair, this tradition has been broken in extraordinary times. These are extraordinary times. And we face an extraordinary challenge. Our strength as well as our convictions have imposed upon this nation the role of leader in freedom’s cause. No role in history could be more difficult or more important. We stand for freedom. That is our conviction for ourselves—that is our only commitment to others. No friend, no neutral and no adversary should think otherwise. We are not against any man— or any nation—or any system—except as it is hostile to freedom. Nor am I here to present a new military doctrine, bearing any one name or aimed at any one area. I am here to promote the freedom doctrine.

I. The great battleground for the defense and expansion of freedom today is the whole southern half of the globe—Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East—the lands of the rising peoples. Their revolution is the greatest in human history. They seek an end to injustice, tyranny, and exploitation. More than an end, they seek a beginning. And theirs is a revolution which we would support regardless of the Cold War, and regardless of which political or economic route they should choose to freedom. For the adversaries of freedom did not create the revolution; nor did they create the conditions which compel it. But they are seeking to ride the crest of its wave—to capture it for themselves. Yet their aggression is more often concealed than open. They have fired no missiles; and their troops are seldom seen. They send arms, agitators, aid, technicians and propaganda to every troubled area. But where fighting is required, it is usually done by others—by guerrillas striking at night, by assassins striking alone—assassins who have taken the lives of four thousand civil officers in the last twelve months in Vietnam alone— by subversives and saboteurs and insurrectionists, who in some cases control whole areas inside of independent nations. [At this point the following paragraph, which appears in the text as signed and transmitted to the Senate and House of Representatives, was omitted in the reading of the message:

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They possess a powerful intercontinental striking force, large forces for conventional war, a well-trained underground in nearly every country, the power to conscript talent and manpower for any purpose, the capacity for quick decisions, a closed society without dissent or free information, and long experience in the techniques of violence and subversion. They make the most of their scientific successes, their economic progress and their pose as a foe of colonialism and friend of popular revolution. They prey on unstable or unpopular governments, unsealed, or unknown boundaries, unfilled hopes, convulsive change, massive poverty, illiteracy, unrest and frustration.] With these formidable weapons, the adversaries of freedom plan to consolidate their territory—to exploit, to control, and finally to destroy the hopes of the world’s newest nations; and they have ambition to do it before the end of this decade. It is a contest of will and purpose as well as force and violence—a battle for minds and souls as well as lives and territory. And in that contest, we cannot stand aside. We stand, as we have always stood from our earliest beginnings, for the independence and equality of all nations. This nation was born of revolution and raised in freedom. And we do not intend to leave an open road for despotism. There is no single simple policy which meets this challenge. Experience has taught us that no one nation has the power or the wisdom to solve all the problems of the world or manage its revolutionary tides—that extending our commitments does not always increase our security—that any initiative carries with it the risk of a temporary defeat—that nuclear weapons cannot prevent subversion—that no free people can be kept free without will and energy of their own—and that no two nations or situations are exactly alike. Yet there is much we can do—and must do. The proposals I bring before you are numerous and varied. They arise from the host of special opportunities and dangers which have become increasingly clear in recent months. Taken together, I believe that they can mark another step forward in our effort as a people. I am here to ask the help of this Congress and the nation in approving these necessary measures . . .

III. Economic and Social Progress Abroad I stress the strength of our economy because it is essential to the strength of our nation. And what is true in our case is true in the case of other countries. Their strength in the struggle for freedom depends on the strength of their economic and their social progress. We would be badly mistaken to consider their problems in military terms alone. For no amount of arms and armies can help stabilize those governments which are unable or unwilling to achieve social and economic reform and development. Military pacts cannot help nations whose social injustice and economic chaos invite insurgency and penetration and subversion. The most skillful counter-guerrilla efforts cannot succeed where the local population is too caught up in its own misery to be concerned about the advance of communism. But for those who share this view, we stand ready now, as we have in the past, to provide generously of our skills, and our capital, and our food to assist the peoples of the less-developed nations to reach their goals in freedom—to help them before they are engulfed in crisis.

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This is also our great opportunity in 1961. If we grasp it, then subversion to prevent its success is exposed as an unjustifiable attempt to keep these nations from either being free or equal. But if we do not pursue it, and if they do not pursue it, the bankruptcy of unstable governments, one by one, and of unfilled hopes will surely lead to a series of totalitarian receiverships. Earlier in the year, I outlined to the Congress a new program for aiding emerging nations; and it is my intention to transmit shortly draft legislation to implement this program, to establish a new Act for International Development, and to add to the figures previously requested, in view of the swift pace of critical events, an additional 250 million dollars for a Presidential Contingency Fund, to be used only upon a Presidential determination in each case, with regular and complete reports to the Congress in each case, when there is a sudden and extraordinary drain upon our regular funds which we cannot foresee—as illustrated by recent events in Southeast Asia—and it makes necessary the use of this emergency reserve. The total amount requested—now raised to 2.65 billion dollars—is both minimal and crucial. I do not see how anyone who is concerned— as we all are—about the growing threats to freedom around the globe—and who is asking what more we can do as a people—can weaken or oppose the single most important program available for building the frontiers of freedom.

IV. All that I have said makes it clear that we are engaged in a world-wide struggle in which we bear a heavy burden to preserve and promote the ideals that we share with all mankind, or have alien ideals forced upon them. That struggle has highlighted the role of our Information Agency. It is essential that the funds previously requested for this effort be not only approved in full, but increased by 2 million, 400 thousand dollars, to a total of 121 million dollars. This new request is for additional radio and television to Latin America and Southeast Asia. These tools are particularly effective and essential in the cities and villages of those great continents as a means of reaching millions of uncertain peoples to tell them of our interest in their fight for freedom. In Latin America, we are proposing to increase our Spanish and Portuguese broadcasts to a total of 154 hours a week, compared to 42 hours today, none of which is in Portuguese, the language of about one-third of the people of South America. The Soviets, Red Chinese and satellites already broadcast into Latin America more than 134 hours a week in Spanish and Portuguese. Communist China alone does more public information broadcasting in our own hemisphere than we do. Moreover, powerful propaganda broadcasts from Havana now are heard throughout Latin America, encouraging new revolutions in several countries. Similarly, in Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, we must communicate our determination and support to those upon whom our hopes for resisting the communist tide in that continent ultimately depend. Our interest is in the truth. Source: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts.

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Document 4.15 The United States and the South Vietnam Coup of 1963 By the summer of 1963, the administration of John F. Kennedy had become increasingly frustrated by the government of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam. Convinced that Diem’s regime was not taking adequate steps to crush the communist insurgency headquartered in the North and frustrated that Diem’s government would not follow instructions from Washington, the administration decided to withdraw its support. When U.S. officials learned that a cohort of senior officers in the South Vietnamese army was planning a coup d’état, not only did they choose not to inform Diem’s government, but they assured the plotters that the United States would recognize the new regime installed by the coup. In November, the army’s coup moved forward with immediate success. Diem and his entourage were captured while trying to escape, and they were summarily executed. The document that follows is both an indictment of U.S. involvement in the seizure of power and also a case study in the emerging language of espionage. Signed by Undersecretary of State George Ball, the telegram was drafted by Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. In its wording, the telegram has all the trademarks of secret government planning. With each page plastered “Top Secret” at top and bottom, the memo coldly and rationally dictates a U.S. policy that justifies U.S. involvement in the domestic affairs of other countries and welcomes efforts to topple the recognized leader of a sovereign nation. The telegram refers most often to Diem and to his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, whom American officials saw as the chief political architect of the Diem regime. This telegram was hardly the work of Hilsman alone; a number of high administration officials had helped craft the message, and Kennedy himself had approved the wording. The recipient of the memo was Henry Cabot Lodge, who had a long and complicated relationship with the Kennedy administration. Lodge had served as a senator from Massachusetts but was defeated for reelection in 1952 by John F. Kennedy. Appointed the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam in 1953, he left the post to serve as Richard Nixon’s vice presidential running mate in 1960, only to again face defeat by Kennedy and his running mate, Lyndon Johnson. Kennedy nonetheless reappointed Lodge as ambassador to South Vietnam in 1963, a post Lodge held as U.S. involvement in Vietnam escalated. Lodge left South Vietnam in 1967.

Eyes only Ambassador Lodge. For CINCPAC/POLAD exclusive for Admiral Felt. No further distribution. Re CAS Saigon 0265 reporting General Don’s views; Saigon 320 Saigon 316, and Saigon 329. It is now clear that whether military proposed martial law or whether Nhu tricked them into it, Nhu took advantage of its imposition to smash pagodas with police and Tung’s Special Forces loyal to him, thus placing onus on military in eyes of world and Vietnamese people. Also clear that Nhu has maneuvered himself into commanding position.

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US Government cannot tolerate situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands. Diem must be given chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie and replace them with best military and political personalities available. If, in spite of all of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate and refuses, then we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved. We now believe immediate action must be taken to prevent Nhu from consolidating his position further. Therefore, unless you in consultation with Harkins perceive overriding objections you are authorized to proceed along following lines: (1) First, we must press on appropriate levels of GVN following line: (a) USG cannot accept actions against Buddhists taken by Nhu and his collaborators under cover martial law. (b) Prompt dramatic actions redress situation must be taken, including repeal of decree 10, release of arrested monks, nuns, etc. (2) We must at same time also tell key military leaders that US would find it impossible to continue support GVN militarily and economically unless above steps are taken immediately which we recognize requires removal of the Nhus from the scene. We wish give Diem reasonable opportunity to remove Nhus, but if he remains obdurate, then we are prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem. You may also tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown central government mechanism. (3) We recognize the necessity of removing taint on military for pagoda raids and placing blame squarely on Nhu. You are authorized to have such statements made in Saigon as you consider desirable to achieve this objective. We are prepared to take same line here and to have Voice of America make statement along lines contained in next numbered telegram whenever you give the word, preferably as soon as possible. Reference is to telegram 244 to Saigon, August 24, 9:37 p.m., in which Hilsman provided the Embassy with a guidance for simultaneous play in Washington and Saigon. This guidance and the proposed VOA broadcast were supposed to separate in the public’s mind the South Vietnamese Army’s press imposition of martial law and the attacks by Tung’s Special Forces and the secret police on the pagodas and the large-scale arrests of Buddhist leaders and demonstrators. The guidance pointed out that the secret police and the Special Forces were not under the command of the Armed Forces. (Department of State, Central Files, SOC 14–1 S VIET) For text of the VOA guidance as actually broadcast, see Document 287. Concurrently with above, Ambassador and country team should urgently examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem’s replacement if this should become necessary. Assume you will consult with General Harkins re any precautions necessary protect American personnel during crisis period.

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You will understand that we cannot from Washington give you detailed instructions as to how this operation should proceed, but you will also know we will back you to the hilt on actions you take to achieve our objectives. Needless to say we have held knowledge of this telegram to minimum essential people and assume you will take similar precautions to prevent premature leaks. Source: Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 3, Vietnam (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1991), 628–629.

Document 4.16 Douglas MacArthur Tells His Story, 1964 Among the most famous and controversial generals in American history, Douglas MacArthur was shaped by the American struggle with empire. As a freshly minted West Point graduate, he went to the Philippines just as his father, General Arthur MacArthur, was announcing the military conquest of the Philippine resistance. When Douglas MacArthur retired from the army in 1934, he signed on to build an independent army for the commonwealth of the Philippines under the provisions of the Tydings-McDuffie Act, ensuring that the army and the Philippine government remained allied with the United States. MacArthur resumed active service in the U.S. Army in 1941 as war with Japan appeared inevitable. When Japanese troops invaded the Philippines in 1941, MacArthur became obsessed with liberating the islands, which he accomplished in October 1944. When Japan finally surrendered in 1945, MacArthur was the logical choice to take charge of the occupation because he was one of the few American generals with real expertise in East Asia. The text that follows comes from his 1964 memoir, Reminiscences. Published shortly before his death, the book shows MacArthur to be the embodiment of the shifting policies of conquest, paternalism, and liberation that the United States had pursued in the Pacific.

Philippine history is blotted with the blood of martyrs and patriots who have sacrificed their lives in the hope that their country might be free. Many flags have flown over Manila. Though Spain had held dominion from the day Magellan first saw the islands twenty-seven years after Columbus discovered America, China, Holland, and England all have launched periods of adventure with Manila as the central scene. But for Filipino leaders, their goal never changed. The taste of freedom is a heady wine that ultimately no human being can resist. America now planned to send its troops into the Philippines to help against Spain. Originally, there was little thought of long occupation; our one desire was to help those seeking independence. On June 1, 1898, my father was appointed a brigadier general of volunteers and ordered to the Philippines. I was anxious to pass up my coming cadetship and enlist, but his wise counsel prevailed. “My son,” said he, “there will be plenty of fighting in the coming years, and of a magnitude far beyond this. Prepare yourself.” My mother, too, just scoffed at the idea. As usual, they were right, although I did not think so then. At eighteen one wonders how little parents understand; years later, the wonder is how wise they were . . .

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Under the terms of the Treaty of Paris, Spain ceded the Philippines to the United States, the United States agreeing in return to pay 20-million dollars. The question of the possession of this distant land by our country was hotly debated . . . The shock to the Filipinos was tremendous. Their goal was not the future, but the present, not a period of tutelage, but immediate independence. Emilio Aguinaldo, having proclaimed himself dictator, reacted immediately. He issued a “declaration of independence of this beloved country,” and called for an assembly of the leaders to meet at Cavite. Various congresses were convened within the succeeding months to hammer out the terms of a modern constitution. Aguinaldo’s own title was changed from that of dictator to president of the Revolutionary Government of the Filipinos. The relationship between the Americans and Filipinos worsened, and on February 5, 1899, the situation exploded into war . . . The Filipinos have always been adept at applying guerrilla tactics against a superior enemy. They had shown their mettle in numerous revolts against the Spaniards. Their tenacity and courage, applied against my father and his Americans, was forty years later to be used to good advantage for my father’s son and in support of his Americans . . . With the cessation of hostilities, the U.S. was faced with not only the rehabilitation of the war-torn country, but its preparation for future independence. My father felt that sovereignty was the only possible solution for this freedom loving people—sovereignty with a special friendship binding our own country with theirs. The greatest difficulty would be to convert the hatreds engendered by the war into mutual respect and good will. [MacArthur soon left the Philippines, beginning a series of stateside military appointments. After becoming a young brigadier general in World War I, MacArthur rose quickly in the army’s high command. He commanded troops in the Philippines during 1922–1925 and 1928–1930. The following passage begins as MacArthur leaves to take charge of the Philippine army.] I sailed from San Francisco in the fall of 1935, on the President Hoover, accompanied by my mother and a small staff. I was bound again for the Philippines. It was my fifth tour in the Far East—but this one was for keeps . . . [MacArthur was still in the Philippines when the Japanese attacked the United States in 1941. By then, MacArthur had returned to the United States Army. The following passage offers his assessment of the strategic situation immediately before the outbreak of war.] The Japanese strategic objectives (later determined by captured war records) were complete hegemony in Asia and unchallenged supremacy in the western Pacific. This involved the immediate conquest and subjugation of the Philippines and the capture of the immense natural resources of the Netherlands East Indies and Malaya. The islands represented America’s single hope of effective resistance in Southeast Asia, and, given the time and resources, the Philippine Defense Plan would accomplish its long-range objective of making them too costly in men and dollars to attack . . . During one of my staff conferences I had once called the Philippines “the Key that unlocks the door to the Pacific.” The Japanese understood this completely, for the Philippines, although not economically necessary to Japan’s grandiose scheme, were close to South China and the island stronghold of Formosa, forming not only an obstacle to Japan’s international ambitions, but depriving the Rising Sun of a powerful strategic

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springboard for their drive south and eastward. Flanking the vital sea routes to the south, they were the hub of the transportation system to Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific and a direct line of communication to Java, Malaya, Borneo, and New Guinea . . . [After the Japanese invasion, MacArthur moved to Australia, where he commanded Allied forces in the southwestern Pacific. Constantly at odds with other military and civilian officials, he demanded that a return to the Philippines remain an immediate strategic objective, often to the detriment of other military concerns. In 1944, MacArthur led allied troops back to the Philippines. He assumed that he should supervise the creation of a new government after the fall of Japanese power. The following passage concerns developments in the winter and spring of 1945.] During the Leyte campaign I was faced with civic problems as well as military ones. Like all American professional soldiers, I believed that the civil power of government should be paramount to any power wielded by the military. I, therefore, restored to the duly elected Philippine government, in the person of President Osmena, the right to govern in that part of Leyte which we had recaptured. I called the president to the wrecked and devastated provincial capitol building three days after the landing and formally proclaimed the resumption of constitutional government before a gathering of Filipino citizens. “On behalf of my government,” I said then, “I restore to you a constitutional administration by countrymen of your confidence and choice. As our forces advance, I shall in like manner restore the other Philippine cities and provinces throughout the entire land.” I don’t think the president and the other government officials expected anything like this. I had not discussed it with any of them beforehand. Indeed, I gathered that President Osmena looked upon his trip to Leyte as a ceremonial visit, and that he fully expected to go back to the United States and continue to administer a government-inexile until the war was over, or at least until military operations in the Philippines were concluded. As fast as we freed an area, it was turned over to administration by civil authority. There never was any military government of the Philippines during and after the American recapture of the archipelago. The American and Filipino Army that ended the campaign was already subject to civil authority and never, in any sense of the word, was an army of occupation. Serious differences along this line developed with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. By virtue of the office he held, and in the absence of a high commissioner through whom he had formerly operated, Secretary Ickes argued that he should take over the running of the Philippines. It was his claim that the archipelago was a “possession” of the United States and he seemed to think of the islands as another one of his national parks. In the period before our landings at Leyte, he informed me that he would take charge as soon as we had completed the invasion. Most certainly he was opposed to giving the reins of government into the hands of President Osmena and the regularly elected authorities. He informed me that he had been advised as to who had been loyal and who had been disloyal to the United States during the period of Japanese occupation, and that he was going to try the disloyal people for treason.

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The Japanese had granted independence to the Philippines and had established a puppet government, and it was quite evident to me that Ickes intended to shoot or hang any Filipino who had anything to do with this puppet government, no matter what reasons they may have had for cooperating. All of these men were well known to me and their devotion to their country was unquestionable. No prima facie case of treason existed against a man simply because he accepted duties under the Japanese established government. Many men were led to do so simply by a desire to ameliorate the hardships and rigor imposed upon the people. I stated that any Filipino who had been named as a collaborator or accused of other disloyalties would be rounded up and held for trial by and under such procedures as were provided for in the Philippine constitution, and that I would guarantee the safety of such individuals until the Philippine authorities could act . . . The collaboration issue was settled in due course by the Philippine Republic, and the Filipinos were never subjected to the domination of our irascible and eccentric Secretary of the Interior. Ickes never forgave me, and became a leader of a vengeful and abusive faction which has repeatedly misrepresented and falsified my position, opinions, and personal character. The Communists had never ceased their violent attacks against me and, with the liberal extremists joining them, the crescendo was rising . . . On February 27, 1945, full constitutional government was restored to the Filipinos with appropriate ceremonies at Malacanan Palace. As I passed through the streets with their burned-out piles of rubble, the air still filled with the stench of decaying unburied dead, the tall and stately trees that had been the mark of a gracious city were nothing but ugly scrubs pointing broken fingers at the sky. Once-famous buildings were now shells. The street signs and familiar landmarks were gone. One moved by sense of direction rather than sight. But Malacanan itself was virtually untouched; its stained windows, elaborate carvings, and even its richly embroidered hangings and large crystal chandeliers were still there . . . [The following passage contains MacArthur’s interpretation of his own role in governing postwar Japan and shaping Japanese political institutions.] The 15th of August was an eventful date in history: Japan’s notification of final surrender was received in the United States; President Truman announced the end of conflict in the Pacific; the Emperor of Japan made a dramatic and unparalleled broadcast to his people announcing the surrender. It was a notable day for me, too—I was made Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers . . . Military occupation was not new to me. I had garrisoned the west bank of the Rhine as commander of the Rainbow Division at the end of World War I. At first hand, I had seen what I thought were basic and fundamental weaknesses in prior forms of military occupations: the substitution of civil by military authority; the loss of self-respect and selfconfidence by the people; the constantly growing ascendency of centralized dictatorial power instead of a localized and representative system; the lowering of the spiritual and moral tone of a population controlled by foreign bayonets; the inevitable deterioration in the occupying forces themselves as the disease of power infiltrated their ranks and bred a sort of race superiority. If any occupation lasts too long, or is not carefully watched from the start, one party becomes slaves and the other masters. History teaches, too, that

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almost every military occupation breeds new wars of the future. I had studied the lives of Alexander and Caesar and Napoleon, and great as these captains were, all had erred when they became the leaders of occupation forces. I tried to remember the lessons my own father had taught me, lessons learned out of his experiences as military governor of the Philippines, but I was assailed by the gravest misgivings. With such hazards as I anticipated, could I succeed? My doubts were to be my best safeguard, my fears my greatest strength. From the moment of my appointment as supreme commander, I had formulated the policies I intended to follow, implementing them through the Emperor and the machinery of the imperial government. I was thoroughly familiar with Japanese administration, its weaknesses and its strengths, and felt the reforms I contemplated were those which would bring Japan abreast of modern progressive thought and action. First destroy the military power. Punish war criminals. Build the structure of representative government. Modernize the constitution. Hold free elections. Enfranchise the women. Release the political prisoners. Liberate the farmers. Establish a free labor movement. Encourage a free economy. Abolish police oppression. Develop a free and responsible press. Liberalize education. Decentralize the political power. Separate church from state . . . The extent of some of our problems went far beyond anything that we could possibly have imagined at the moment of the cease-fire in the summer of 1945. Supposedly, the Japanese were a twentieth-century civilization. In reality, they were more nearly a feudal society, of the type discarded by Western nations some four centuries ago . . . Before we could really do much with the Japanese governmental system, there had to be sweeping changes in the fundamental law of the land—the constitution. The political situation in Japan was desperate. It’s old Meiji constitution had been warped in its interpretation, and so deprecated in public opinion by the results of the war, that a new charter was immediately imperative if the structure of Japanese selfgovernment was to be sustained. The choice was alien military government or autonomous civil government. The pressure for the former by the Allied nations was intense, accompanied by many drastic concepts designed to fracture the Japanese nation. We could not simply encourage the growth of democracy. We had to make sure that it grew. Under the old constitution, government flowed downward from the Emperor, who held the supreme authority, through those to whom he had delegated power. It was a dictatorship to begin with, a hereditary one, and the people existed to serve it. Under these conditions, the population of Japan had no basic rights, written or unwritten. Because they had never been exposed to the idea that they might have such inherent rights, they had existed for centuries without any idea of what the possession of those rights might mean to them. The fact that they were being given something that they had never experienced promised to make the task of writing and getting acceptance for a new constitution somewhat easier than it might otherwise have been . . . I did not, however, try to force an American version of a Japanese constitution, and order them to adopt it. The revision had to be made by the Japanese themselves and it had to be done without coercion . . .

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On March 6th, I stated to the anxious people: “It is with a sense of deep satisfaction that I am today able to announce a decision of the Emperor and the government of Japan to submit to the Japanese people a new and enlightened constitution which has my full approval.” Now began the task of seeing to it that the masses of the Japanese people had a chance to read and evaluate the new document. It was circulated throughout Japan and earnestly debated for a month. Ideas for small changes were forwarded from all sections, but by and large the people liked it and approved of it in wholehearted fashion. The only dissenters, as might have been expected, were the Communists. The government carried out a large-scale educational program in the papers and on the radio, explaining all the features and answering questions. The April election was what I had wanted—a true plebiscite. The people who had publicly committed themselves to the adoption were elected to a strong and clear majority in the new Diet . . . The new Japanese constitution is really an amendment to the older Meiji one. I felt that by using this particular device we could insure a continuity, and continuity is important in Japan. It is undoubtedly the most liberal constitution in history, having borrowed the best from the constitutions of many countries. From an absolute monarch, the Emperor has turned into a constitutional one, “the symbol of the state and unity of the people.” The supreme power in the state is now held by the Diet. The Japanese people, for the first time in their history, enjoy the safeguards and the protection of a bill of rights. As in our own government, it provides for a separation of powers between the three branches of government. By making the courts independent of the ministry of justice, it ends one of the great evils of the former government. There is a supreme court, and all courts are permitted to establish their own procedural rules, within the limits of the law, and they are allowed to set up their own independent budget for approval by the Diet, a fact that removes them from the influence of the legislative branch. The form of government is a combination of the American executive system and the British parliamentary one. The prime minister serves a term of four years, but he is elected from the membership of the lower house of the legislature. If, for any reason, the prime minister is not upheld on issues that come before the Diet, he has two choices: he can resign and let the lower house elect a successor, or he can dissolve the Diet and call for new elections. This provision provides a degree of stability in the government. No group within the Diet is going to question the administration of a prime minister in an idle fashion if they are going to be forced to stand the expense of a new election campaign as a result of their capriciousness. Source: Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964), 19–23, 84, 103, 111–112, 234–236, 251–302.

NOTES 1. John F. Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, 25 May 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Massachusetts, www.jfklibrary.org/ Historical+Resources/Archives/Reference+Desk/Speeches/JFK/003POF03NationalNeeds052 51961.htm.

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2. Frederick H. Gareau, “Morgenthau’s Plan for Industrial Disarmament in Germany,” Western

3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

Political Quarterly 14, no. 2 (1961): 517–534; Henry Morgenthau Jr., “Postwar Treatment of Germany,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 246 (1946): 125–129; Warren F. Kimball, Swords or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau Plan for Defeated Nazi Germany, 1943–1946 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1976). Franklin D. Roosevelt to Cordell Hull, 29 September 1944, Foreign Relations of the United States: Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1955), 155. Melvyn P. Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 25–54. For the creation of NATO, the Marshall Plan, and the broader U.S. policy in the years after World War II, see Elizabeth Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Leffler, A Preponderance of Power. John W. Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W. W. Norton & Co./New Press, 1999); Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Charles S. Maier, Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 151-190; Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Robert J. McMahon, Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945–49 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

CHAPTER

5

Empire Debated, 1965–2000

I

n March 1983, Ronald Reagan stood in front of a friendly audience ready to reassert America’s role in the world. Holding its annual convention in the vacation town of Orlando, Florida, the National Association of Evangelicals invited Reagan to Florida after he easily carried the state in the 1980 presidential election. President Ronald Reagan with his newly appointed Middle East envoy, Donald Heading into his Rumsfeld, standing by, right, defended the use of U.S. troops in Grenada during a third year in office, November 3, 1983, press briefing at the White House. the fortieth presi- Source: AP Images/Barry Thumma dent was developing a particular skill for explaining his agenda in clear, direct terms. Reagan’s supporters believed he was a brilliant communicator who knew how to reach the heart of the matter, while his detractors believed he was a dangerous demagogue incapable of acknowledging, or even understanding, the complexities of the world. Those opposing arguments are crucial to understanding both Reagan’s speech and the reaction that followed. Reagan emphasized the value of faith—especially Christian faith—to democracy. He then shifted his attention to the role of the United States in a larger world. “I urge you to speak out against those who would place the United States in a position of military and moral inferiority.” He was particularly concerned about recent efforts to stop production on the nation’s nuclear arsenal (Document 5.5). “So, in your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge you to beware the temptation of pride—the temptation of blithely declaring yourselves above it all and label both sides equally at fault, to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.”1

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It was the words “evil empire” that quickly entered the nation’s public debate and popular culture. Fans and detractors alike have evoked that phrase either to celebrate or to condemn Reagan. In the 1980s, it was a useful phrase for his opponents, who considered Reagan both foolish and dangerous. Twenty years later, others would claim it as proof of Reagan’s wisdom and foresight. Reagan and his speechwriters had been toying with the imperial label for some time. They were hardly the first to do so. After all, in 1950 NSC-68, the National Security Council’s landmark plan for U.S. policy, had referred to a “Soviet empire” to frame the malevolent threat in the East. But Reagan’s reference to an evil empire immediately lit a fire. Without even referring to the Soviet Union by name, everybody knew what he was talking about. Reagan’s speech came at a particular moment when the nation’s foreign policy and domestic politics sat at an intersection between two very different visions of the nation’s trajectory. From the perspective of the Reagan administration, the speech was only one in a series of steps designed to reconnect with the nation’s founding principles after more than a decade of drift and ambiguity. The notion of an evil empire was supposed to provide a metaphorical gloss to a very real set of policies designed to combat the Soviet Union on a global scale. It was also supposed to counter the statements of Americans whom Reagan and those around him considered either dupes or fellow travelers. But to many Americans, Reagan’s reference to an evil empire showed what had gone horribly wrong in America. Indeed, they considered the problems with Reagan’s outlook to be only the latest in a series of abject lessons that Americans had finally begun to understand. Since the mid-1960s, Americans had begun loudly denouncing the policy of governing foreign territory and foreign people. Equally important, they questioned the assumptions that had inspired those policies. In the process, they engaged in one of the most profound reconsiderations of national policy and national mission in more than a century. From 1965 to 2001, the United States repudiated much of the aggressive involvement in other nations it had demonstrated in the earlier part of the twentieth century. The United States specifically ended some of its most time-honored practices of directly acquiring and governing territory. These changes in policy developed in no small part because they coincided with an equally important change in culture. Since 1776, some Americans had opposed either territorial expansion or overseas governance, but they were rarely able to generate widespread public opposition or change attitudes within the federal leadership. In the final decades of the twentieth century, however, these arguments gained new power. Indeed, it was during these decades that the antiimperialist figures of the past finally got their due, attaining a heroic status in the telling of history that they had not enjoyed in their own time. Yet for all these changes, certain key continuities remained. Most obviously, the United States had maintained the cold war structure of internationalism. The United States preserved control over a series of island dependencies, retained its global military bases, wielded its influence in foreign nations, and, when that influence failed, it continued to use covert means to shape the politics and governments of foreign nations.

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As in the past, these policies continued to have very real consequences for people throughout the world. The United States and the Soviet Union managed to avoid the nuclear apocalypse that both sides feared, but they did so in no small part by allowing others to suffer, and sometimes die, for them. As the United States and the Soviet Union sought to preserve their own client states and curtail their opponent’s power, they created a war machine that exploded throughout the developing world in a series of lengthy conflicts. Just as the United States and the Soviet Union used similar cold war tactics, so did the dueling combatants in American domestic politics. In his call for a renewed policy of containment and confrontation, Reagan used the word “empire” for its rhetorical power. Casting the Soviet Union as an empire was effective because Americans could immediately call on a two-centuries-old vocabulary in which they had criticized empires as agents of tyranny. In responding to Reagan’s call to confront the evil empire, his critics charged the federal leadership in particular and American culture in general with engaging in various forms of imperialism. Both sides used fundamentally similar arguments, in large part because both sides emerged from a political culture with a profound resentment toward empires. In the heated and occasionally chaotic politics of the late twentieth century, policymakers were often at odds about how best to respond to the domestic pressures and shifting international configurations that surrounded them. But one thing was clear. By definition, empires were evil.

AMERICA

AND

VIETNAM

In 1965, as American policymakers contemplated the rapidly escalating violence in Southeast Asia, they believed their nation’s history provided numerous lessons with direct, practical applications. They believed that they could avoid the pitfalls of empire even as they faced the threats they saw emanating from Vietnam. And they were not entirely wrong. In the years that followed, the United States was at the zenith of its power, governing foreign territory and foreign people with unprecedented resources. The Vietnam War suggested that the United States might be able to achieve its goals of containing the Soviet empire without becoming an empire itself. Before the decade was over, however, the Vietnam experience would unleash a wholesale reevaluation of U.S. policy, both at home and abroad. Since 1945, American policymakers had situated Vietnam as a peripheral battleground in the struggle among empires. In an effort to preserve the World War II alliance in the postwar era, the United States had initially supported French aspirations in Vietnam during the 1940s. Then, to prevent the spread of communism into Southeast Asia, the United States itself created and sustained the South Vietnamese government. In 1964, as the North Vietnamese guerrilla campaign against the South Vietnamese government and the United States continued, the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson used a minor confrontation between North Vietnamese gunboats and U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin to justify a major escalation of U.S. involvement. The United States Army arrived in force, while U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy aircraft began wholesale bombing

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operations in both North and South Vietnam. By 1968, when the U.S. troop commitment reached its peak, over a half million American military personnel were fighting in Vietnam.2 Americans now know that Vietnam became a disaster with a horrific human toll on both the Vietnamese and the Americans. In the mid-1960s, however, American civilian and military leaders were initially reassured by their ability to amass forces in Vietnam. The buildup itself demonstrated the capacity of the United States to effectively govern on a global scale. Indeed, the height of the U.S. mobilization in Vietnam symbolized everything the United States had achieved during the preceding century. By air and by sea, U.S. troops and equipment traveled from the West Coast to Hawaii, on to the Philippines, and finally to Vietnam. Air Force jets flew not only from bases in South Vietnam, but also from Thailand, the Philippines, and Guam. The Navy supplied and repaired ships at ports throughout the Pacific. These bases were located primarily in territories acquired during the late-nineteenth-century era of imperialism. The bases themselves and the structures that supported them were the products of cold war strategic planning. The United States likewise attempted to direct the future of South Vietnam with all the tools it had developed during the cold war. Publicly, the United States acknowledged South Vietnamese independence, directly contrasting U.S. efforts to support that independence against the Soviet plan to create a subservient client state in North Vietnam. The precedent on the Korean Peninsula enabled the United States to emphasize the distinction between independence and dominance, American freedom versus Soviet imperial subjugation. The United States initiated a massive economic development plan that was supposed to help the people of South Vietnam and undermine the communist appeal, just as the Marshall Plan had done after World War II. Military involvement was supposed to help this process, since supplying, housing, and entertaining American troops pumped billions of dollars into the South Vietnamese economy.3 Although the United States publicly showcased all of the systems it had created since World War II to promote national development and confront communism, it also quietly deployed the covert mechanisms it had used throughout the world. American policymakers increasingly sought to direct decisions within the South Vietnamese government by attempting to impose policies onto South Vietnamese leaders and supporting various coups when those leaders failed to toe the line. Covert agencies worked alongside the military in a vast propaganda effort throughout Southeast Asia. And as the war in Vietnam spread into neighboring countries, the United States launched secret military ventures in Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos.4 All of these projects initially seemed reasonable and prudent to the civilian and military leadership in Washington. They were the logical extension not only of the cold war but of a broader process of international engagement that was palatable to an American public with very strong opinions about national independence and political selfdetermination. It was only when these techniques began to fail as the Vietnam conflict wore on that the nation’s political leadership started to worry. Despite the rosy predictions of military and civilian planners, North Vietnamese activity in the South was

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growing while popular support for the South Vietnamese government and for the United States was declining. By the early 1970s, the United States withdrew not only its commitment to preserving the South Vietnamese regime, but also the massive military involvement that was supposed to be the means to that end. Most noticeably, American ground troops made a rapid departure. Entitled “Vietnamization,” the program was supposed to place South Vietnam in charge of its own defense. But the United States attempted to preserve its influence on South Vietnamese politics and assumed a leadership role in advising the South Vietnamese army. And while Vietnamization was supposed to remove U.S. troops from the front lines of Vietnam, the Nixon administration actually increased the use of air force and navy aircraft to bomb both North and South Vietnam. The United States also expanded its bombing in the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia, which North Vietnam used for transporting troops and equipment to the South. Vietnamization in the 1970s was no more successful than the U.S.-led campaign of the 1960s. In 1975, the South Vietnamese regime fell, and the leadership in the North finally succeeded in its goal of creating a unified Vietnam. Consolidated under a single communist government allied with the Soviet Union, Vietnam appeared to be a tremendous defeat for the United States. By the time it was over, the Vietnam War had caused approximately two million deaths. In the United States, the loss of nearly 60,000 soldiers, sailors, and airmen left wounds that never really healed. But the vast majority of the casualties were Vietnamese, most of them civilians. The ratio of civilian to military casualties became a major point of contention in postwar debates. Those Vietnamese casualities served as a reminder that, although nations that aligned themselves with either the United States or the Soviet Union during the cold war may have enjoyed the protection of a superpower, they also became the front line in a global conflict.

RETRENCHMENT

AND

RECONSIDERATION

The Vietnam War had a profound impact on the American struggle with empire. In official terms, Americans—both public officials and private citizens—engaged in a passionate debate about the proper role of the United States when it came to the domestic affairs of foreign nations. This debate occurred in Congress, within various presidential administrations, on the editorial pages of American newspapers, and on campaign trails throughout the country. But it also occurred in more subterranean contexts. In spy novels and science fiction movies and in small political organizations and academic graduate programs, Americans reconsidered the meaning of empire throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Yet for all this debate, the conclusions were pretty much the same. Americans reaffirmed their belief in self-government and their suspicion of empires. The question was simply determining which empire they were actually talking about. Even before the war was over, people disagreed about the meaning of the Vietnam War. That argument shaped policymaking in the decades that followed. It was a product of cultural change just as it propelled that cultural change. In the end, Vietnam would have a life in the United States long after the war itself was over.

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In policymaking circles, civilian and military officials argued about who was responsible for defeat in Vietnam. Some claimed the project had been impossible from the start. Some charged the military leadership with misleading the civilian leadership and with incompetent management in the field. Others, especially officers in the armed services, claimed that civilian leaders had assumed an improper role in military planning, imposing priorities and restrictions that prevented the military from doing its job.5 The most dramatic change in these years was the emergence of a vocal and powerful critique that plastered American foreign policy with the label of imperialism. It was hardly new, but it was a movement that enjoyed unprecedented political power in the 1970s and 1980s. Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans had periodically mobilized against what they considered to be imperialism. The Mexican War, the annexation of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, and the various Caribbean interventions of the twentieth century all elicited similar criticisms from a diverse set of Americans. Employing the long-standing belief that empires were antithetical to American principles of liberty, these critics had charged not only that the United States caused suffering but also that the government was betraying the nation’s most sacred ideals. Local residents in territories the United States acquired or controlled (residents of the Southwest in the 1840s, Hawaiians and Filipinos in the 1890s, Puerto Ricans in the twentieth century) had long protested the systems of political and racial exclusion that came with U.S. authority. Nonetheless, these movements had never gained sufficient traction to substantively change American policy. Although Americans throughout the country had joined the chorus of anti-imperialism, it had remained a relatively quiet chorus.6 But in the wake of Vietnam, some of the leaders of these earlier anti-imperialist crusades seemed too important to ignore. For example, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (both had opposed the Mexican War) now occupied a special place in American culture. In their own time, they had been struggling writers who had garnered little public attention beyond the literary and philosophical communities of New England. It was only in the second half of the twentieth century that their anti-imperialist claims gained national attention, as a new generation of American commentators— academics, public intellectuals, editorial journalists—began looking to those earlier Americans for the intellectual foundations of anti-imperialism. Comparisons with the world of Frederick Jackson Turner are particularly useful. When Turner began his career, he believed that the study of American history would reveal the transcendent truths of American democracy and would validate American claims to greatness. Many educators agreed, concluding that one of the functions for history was to instruct Americans in democratic behavior and imbue them with a reverence for their nation’s destiny. By the 1970s, all that was beginning to change, especially on American university campuses. The campus-based social movements of the 1960s had been student led, but faculty members were hardly immune. Historians were questioning some of the most familiar truisms of the nation’s past. Those questions framed how Americans understood the world around them and how they reinterpreted their own national past. Nowhere was this more true than in the effort to refashion the narrative of interracial conflict in the North American West. Long before

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Frederick Jackson Turner, Anglo-Americans had celebrated what they saw as a struggle to bring freedom, opportunity, and civilization to a West dominated by Native American savagery. In 1987, Patricia Limerick spoke on behalf of a new generation of scholars when she chose The Legacy of Conquest as the title for her path-breaking book on the American West. To Limerick, western history was a story of avarice and suffering as the federal government provided opportunity to white settlers at the cost of Native Americans, Hispanics, and African Americans.7 Even as some Americans were writing a new history that challenged the familiar narrative of American glory, others needed only to look at their own personal experiences to conclude that the United States had a long history of tyranny. Native Americans had learned firsthand what it was like to be on the receiving end of the American struggle with empire. Throughout the nineteenth century, the federal government had relocated, isolated, and killed Native Americans. During the twentieth century, the federal government preserved a reservation system that, if it allowed Native Americans to remain in one place, nonetheless treated them as a quasi-foreign population. Throughout these years, federal leaders claimed they were, in fact, acting in the interest of Native Americans. All Native Americans had indeed enjoyed U.S. citizenship since 1924. Nonetheless, they knew from their own experience that they continued to face prejudice and poverty. The reality of life for Native Americans on federal reservations brought into broad relief the complex nature of sovereignty in the United States. Technically, tribal officials controlled the daily process of governance. In point of fact, many Native Americans believed that the extent of their freedom and self-government really hinged on the largesse of the federal government. They argued that, following centuries in which federal policy had been to subjugate or eliminate Native Americans, the existing structure would never be able to work to their benefit. If Patricia Limerick chose a title that articulated the conclusion of scholars, Vine Deloria in 1969 spoke on behalf of Native Americans when he published a book entitled Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Document 5.2).8 At the same time that Native Americans were connecting their own continental history to American overseas policy, African Americans were raising similar questions. Once again, this was hardly new. African American intellectuals had been among the first people to join the anti-imperialist movement at the turn of the twentieth century. During the 1960s and 1970s, however, African Americans developed a sophisticated interpretation that identified the ways in which racial supremacy figured in American foreign policy. Vietnam was crucial to this process. The United States had promoted the self-determination of European countries, but had repeatedly interfered in the internal governance of nonwhite countries. In a war where middle-class whites could more easily secure draft deferments, working-class African Americans wondered why they had to risk their lives overseas when they still faced racial discrimination at home (Document 5.1).9 The broader culture of social movements in the 1960s and 1970s also brought renewed energy to the nationalist campaign in Puerto Rico. Since the 1950s, the federal government and the leadership in Puerto Rico had effectively contained the move for Puerto Rican independence. Puerto Rican nationalists now found ready allies in critics

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who shared their conclusion that the United States had a long history of imperialistic policies. Nonetheless, they were unable to convince either the federal leadership or the majority of Puerto Ricans to support full independence.10 Taken together, these movements marked a profound change in the American struggle with empire. Oddly enough, it rivaled the moment when the United States embraced empire. In the run-up to the Mexican War in the 1830s and 1840s, Americans had abandoned much of their ambivalence toward territorial acquisition. A little over a century later, Americans were publicly reconsidering, with the criticism of empire gaining momentum. These two moments constituted the most dramatic shifts in public opinion regarding the American struggle with empire. The political movements of the 1960s and 1970s coincided with, and in some ways helped propel, substantive changes in federal policymaking. Within the nation’s political leadership, especially among congressional Democrats, the Vietnam War suggested that destruction could result when the executive branch enjoyed unfettered power to interfere in foreign nations. Congress responded by imposing new restrictions on foreign interventionism. In 1973, the War Powers Resolution required the president to seek congressional approval within forty-eight hours of initiating military operations and then seek reapproval every sixty days. Congress also conducted a series of investigations into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), chastising the agency not only for spying on American citizens at home in direct violation of law but also for engaging in covert activities abroad (Document 5.3). Americans outside policymaking circles and political movements encountered these changes through newspaper and television coverage. Equally important, however, they continued to engage in the struggle with empire, as they always had, through American popular culture. Here, too, a new message emerged that used accusations of imperialism—and the suffering that came with it—at the center of a broad-based critique. These concerns about governing others radiated in various ways throughout American culture. Much of this occurred in the context of Vietnam. The war had actually been the subject of only limited cultural representation as it was fought. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, it emerged front and center as a dominant concern of American fiction and nonfiction, and especially of American film. One of the few movies to appear during the war, The Green Berets (1968), interpreted Vietnam in the familiar, celebratory tones of American war movies. The film treated Vietnam as so many American policymakers had described it: an American project to protect a nation from succumbing to communist tyranny. Indeed, that is what made the movie so typical of its time. Filmmakers had rarely considered it their role to challenge U.S. policy or public opinion. The fact that the movie starred John Wayne only reinforced the point. A vocal conservative whose career was dominated by films that celebrated the American mission at war or in the American West, Wayne came to symbolize the cultural celebration of American power. Subsequent Vietnam-themed movies contrasted starkly with The Green Berets. The cultural upheaval of the Vietnam era caused a dramatic shift after which many filmmakers considered it their responsibility to challenge conventional wisdom and political orthodoxy. The new vision of American power overseas often included actors who built

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their careers as antiheroic alternatives to stars like John Wayne. During the 1970s, films such as The Deer Hunter (1978), Coming Home (1978), and Apocalypse Now (1979) treated the war as misguided from the start. Equally important, Hearts and Minds, which won the Academy Award for documentary filmmaking in 1974, claimed that a steady diet of western movies and football had instructed Americans in the celebration of conquest. Films like Platoon (1986) and Hamburger Hill (1987) and TV shows like Tour of Duty (1987–1990) and China Beach (1988–1991), all released in the 1980s and set in Vietnam itself, backed away from some of these claims but nonetheless questioned whether the United States could really govern another country, implying that ego and foolishness had led American leaders to believe they could direct affairs half a world away. Movies like Uncommon Valor (1983), Missing in Action (1984), and Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) took a very different approach to the war, celebrating the mission and criticizing protesters and others who opposed the war. But these movies substituted one set of villains for another, usually singling out politicians as those who were unable to understand how to win a war in another country. This representation of Vietnam coincided with and in many ways reinforced a broader cultural critique on film and, to a lesser degree, on TV that directly challenged the notion that the United States could successfully or ethically govern foreign peoples. Movies like Missing (a 1982 film that was openly critical of the Pinochet regime in Chile and the U.S. government that supported it) and Salvador (a 1986 film about the violence and repression practiced by the U.S.-supported government in El Salvador) painted a bleak picture of American involvement in Latin America. The director of Salvador, Oliver Stone, soon brought the same message to Platoon (1986), which transformed the way Americans saw the Vietnam War on screen. Other movies considered the nation’s continental past in similar terms. After decades in which western movies had trumpeted the triumph of the American mission in the West, a new set of films claimed that the West showed everything that was worst in American culture. Some of these, like Little Big Man (1970) and Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) took a comedic approach that lampooned the old western films while celebrating Native Americans. In the 1990s, Dances with Wolves (1990) and Geronimo: An American Legend (1993) attempted to situate Native Americans at the center of more dramatic narratives emphasizing the tragedy of Western conquest. Yet for all the apparent critique of this new wave in American popular culture, many of the underlying assumptions remained the same. First was the notion that empires were evil. By labeling the United States as an empire, this critical stance in American filmmaking was merely relocating a label that had long been applied to other countries. In 1977, Star Wars helped redefine American filmmaking, but its popularity rested in no small part on its ability to reassert old themes. With its story of an evil empire that sought to strip planets or individuals of their liberties and self-determination, the movie struck a chord with American viewers (Document 5.4). But this movie was as much about World War II as it was about more recent cultural developments. With villainous imperial officials wearing costumes that looked eerily like those of Nazi officials, the only thing missing was the German accents. The villains in the Star Wars films often spoke with British accents, a culture that perhaps most epitomized empire in the mind of many Americans.

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Of course, Star Wars hardly took a strong critical stance. To the contrary, film critics have subsequently concluded that the movie’s popularity rested in its appeal to oldfashioned movie themes of heroism and individualism. But that is exactly the point. From the left or the right, whether consciously critical or intentionally escapist, American filmmaking continued to situate empires and imperialism as the source of evil and suffering. That cultural consensus across political lines actually helps make sense of politics and policymaking. It can be tempting to explain domestic politics and foreign policy entirely through these broad-based changes of the 1960s and 1970s. The familiar story is one of increased radicalism, introspection, and disillusionment. The story remains so popular because all political sides find something to like in it. To the left, it is the story of a nation coming to its senses, with Americans questioning long-held beliefs in the pursuit of a more reasoned and democratic set of politics and policies. To the right, it is the story of how the United States lost its way, descending into political turmoil and economic stagnation, in the process almost abandoning its commitment to global leadership as a beacon of democracy. At the same time that American culture remained remarkably consistent in its attitude toward empire during the 1960s and 1970s, so, too, did American policy. The Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations remained committed to the broad contours of containment. The Nixon administration’s détente with the Soviet Union and the decision to recognize the People’s Republic of China constituted major shifts within that policy, but the United States nonetheless sustained an ever-growing arsenal of nuclear weapons and vast conventional forces, all geared toward the task of deterring the communist threat to the United States and its allies. Western Europe and the Pacific remained the front lines in the cold war, with the United States preserving its military bases and political power in foreign countries throughout these areas. Meanwhile, the United States continued to use covert methods to preserve its power in other countries, particularly Latin America. In 1968, the CIA helped Mexican officials suppress widespread protests against the government. In 1973, the CIA colluded with the Chilean military to topple the government after concluding the administration of Salvador Allende was dangerously leftist. The new government of Augusto Pinochet, one of several right-wing regimes that emerged in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, imposed a brutal dictatorship. The circumstances of the Pinochet takeover was the backdrop for the 1982 film, Missing. The United States continued to provide funding, political support, and military assistance so long as these regimes remained staunchly anticommunist or friendly to American business interests. Not all U.S. client states were dictatorships. Equally important, not all of them compliantly followed orders from Washington. That marked an important continuity of its own. Governments in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia regularly set their own rules and made their own decisions. While they relied on the United States for support, they were often unwilling to cede their own power. The governments were occasionally more brutal than the United States would have preferred, or they were unwilling to clamp down on the forms of dissent that U.S. leaders found most threatening. But the United States government was willing to accept that foreign

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governments would reject some U.S. demands—provided those foreign governments promised to crush communism within their own countries. The clearest example of this dynamic was in the Philippines. Although the Philippines remained a vital U.S. ally in the Pacific during the Vietnam era, it was hardly a neocolonial subordinate. Instead, Filipinos set their own path, all the while hoping to manipulate their special relationship with the United States to promote individual or national benefits. After independence in 1946, the Philippines became home to a vigorous electoral democracy. But it was also a place where political power usually rested in the hands of elite business owners and agricultural magnates. Members of the elite might sometimes disagree with one another, but the collective power of their class was rarely in question. Their commitment to preserving their own status helps explain the shift in Philippine politics after 1965. Ferdinand Marcos consolidated his authority as president in the late 1960s, and in 1972 he declared martial law. He crushed most of his opponents and held power for the next fifteen years. All the while, Marcos enjoyed support from Washington as he sought to destroy the communist movement in the Philippines, promoted trade with the United States, and preserved a strategic alliance with the U.S. military.11 Sometimes relations with dictatorial regimes backed by the United States went beyond this difficult give-and-take and backfired outright. That had certainly been the case in Vietnam, where the corrupt and despotic regime of South Vietnam had failed to build popular support. Meanwhile, equally dangerous regimes emerged in the 1970s. In 1979, Nicaraguan rebels finally deposed the long-standing regime of the Somoza family that the United States had helped to install more than forty years earlier. Members of the new regime were quick to criticize the United States as an imperialist regime intent on global domination. They took their name—Sandinistas—from Augusto Sandino, the rebel who had so vehemently condemned American imperialism in Nicaragua in the 1920s. The United States faced even greater embarrassment in 1979. Since 1953, the shah of Iran had enjoyed solid U.S. support. In the quarter century that followed, he had preserved access to Iranian oil for the global market and had pursued various modernization plans in Iranian society and infrastructure. But his dictatorial regime faced increasing public opposition. When the shah’s government fell to the Iranian Revolution and the new leaders established an Islamic republic, American officials recoiled as Iran built connections with the Soviet Union. Worst of all, revolutionary forces seized the U.S. embassy and imprisoned the embassy staff. After a botched rescue effort by the U.S. military, the situation in Iran became an immense political setback for the administration of President Jimmy Carter, which was already struggling with a major economic recession in the United States. Revolutionaries in Iran invoked what became a common refrain for critics of the United States. Decrying “American imperialism,” they proclaimed their independence from U.S. influence. Movements throughout the developing world often invoked the same language, casting the United States as a malevolent force in the world. In 1980, the presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan highlighted the situation in Iran as proof of declining American power overseas. Reagan unseated Carter, promising to return the United States to its status as the leader in a global crusade for freedom and representative government.

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At first glance, the Carter and Reagan administrations seem worlds apart. That certainly is how Americans explained things at the time and how historians and commentators have come to see the shift from the 1970s to the 1980s. Nor are these claims entirely incorrect. The election of 1980 marked the shift from a liberal Democratic president to a conservative Republican. The Carter administration had sought to revive the goals of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, in which the nation’s wealth was to be used for the benefit of all Americans. The Reagan administration claimed that the government effectively stole money from those who had earned it and, for all its noble ambitions, had succeeded only in retarding economic growth that would eventually have benefited all citizens. In foreign policy, where the Carter administration emphasized negotiated settlements, the Reagan administration advocated a return to the core mission of resisting communism and spreading democracy along an American model. But these differences can hide profound similarities that were at work in the 1970s and 1980s, not only in American policy but also in American culture. First and foremost, the old American possessions remained in place. Puerto Rico continued to occupy its nebulous status as an unincorporated territory where residents nonetheless enjoyed the status of U.S. citizenship. Within the island’s society, Puerto Ricans continued to argue about whether to pursue statehood, seek independence, or preserve the status quo. The Philippines under the Marcos regime remained a steadfast ally of American military and economic planning, with the Philippine elite enjoying all the benefits that came from a privileged relationship with the United States. In West Germany, an extensive American military presence made the United States a powerful force in the nation’s politics and culture. Likewise, on Guam and Okinawa, the United States Navy remained a constant presence. Equally important, the new policies of the Reagan administration and shifts in American public opinion only fueled the resurgent anti-imperialism that had emerged since the 1960s. When Ronald Reagan called on Americans to oppose an evil empire, his critics responded by claiming that the United States was really the empire that others should fear. These arguments became particularly loud in debates about the future of the Western Hemisphere. The Reagan administration announced that Latin America and the Caribbean would be the front line in the global struggle with communism. Convinced that the Soviet Union was orchestrating an effort to create client states in the Western Hemisphere, the Reagan administration expressed the same fear that members of the Truman administration had expressed in NSC-68 when they discussed ways in which the Soviet Union might undermine the United States in the future. In practical terms, that meant escalating the public condemnation and economic isolation of Cuba, preserving weak democratic governments, and undermining communist organizations throughout the Western Hemisphere. In 1983, a coup on the Caribbean island of Grenada installed a leftist government that welcomed Cuban military and economic assistance. Citing the threat to American medical students on the island as a reason for intervention, the United States launched its first major military action since Vietnam, quickly deposed the

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government, and reinstated the pre-coup regime. Caribbean governments as well as Canada, Great Britain, and the United Nations condemned the U.S. action, emphasizing exactly the same right to self-determination the United States itself claimed to champion (Document 5.7). Meanwhile, the United States reverted to language connecting back to the Cuban missile crisis, the Roosevelt Corollary, and the Monroe Doctrine to justify its actions in the Caribbean (Document 5.6). Public discussion soon focused on Central America, specifically the neighboring countries of El Salvador and Nicaragua. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas had consolidated power in part by casting themselves as the people’s defenders against the imperialist ambitions of the United States. In El Salvador, a right-wing regime enjoyed American support by promising to crush communism and by preserving American business interests. Though at opposite ends of the political spectrum, both the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran governments exploited the cold war dynamic to crush domestic dissent. They were also at the center of the global debate over imperialism. Nicaragua was only the latest communist nation to critique the Europe-rooted imperialism that Nicaraguans contended had spread to the United States. Meanwhile, the Reagan administration claimed that supporting El Salvador and restraining Nicaragua would prevent the Soviet Union from extending its own imperial ambitions. The governments of all four countries—the United States, the Soviet Union, El Salvador, and Nicaragua—were soon in the midst of a regional guerrilla war. In El Salvador, leftist guerrillas looked to Cuba and the Soviet Union for support. In Nicaragua, the United States helped arm and train a series of rebel groups that eventually fell under the umbrella title of the Contras. The primary victims of these efforts were civilians in El Salvador and Nicaragua who endured both the indiscriminate violence inherent to guerrilla warfare as well as the increasingly repressive policies of the two governments. The situations in El Salvador and Nicaragua reflected the reality of serving as proxies in the cold war. The United States and the Soviet Union avoided a direct nuclear confrontation, and relatively few troops from either country were killed or wounded in the various conflicts that emerged from the cold war, but people in numerous countries— neither American nor Soviet—suffered. This reality is one of the most important continuities during the length of the cold war. In Korea in the 1950s, in Vietnam in the 1960s, and in Central America in the 1980s, foreign people died in large part so American and Soviet civilians would not. Meanwhile, the eventual creation of proxy armies in Latin America prevented the deaths of American service members that had occurred in Korea and Vietnam. The situation in Central America became a particularly explosive issue in American domestic politics. To critics, this was neocolonialism at its worst. Not only did they charge that the Reagan administration had overstated the communist threat in Latin America, but they added that the United States was promoting warfare primarily to preserve Latin America as a source for cheap labor and raw materials to be exploited by American businesses. The situation also became an extension of the conflict between the White House and Congress over the management of military affairs. In 1982, Congress had passed legislation that expressly prohibited direct support for the Contras. This step constituted a logical extension of efforts under way since Vietnam as Congress sought to

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rein in the executive branch’s capacity to conduct foreign policy without oversight or scrutiny (Documents 5.9 and 5.10). The debate reached a crescendo in 1987 as news emerged that the administration, acting primarily through the National Security Council, had secretly supplied support to the Contras. Profits on sales of military equipment to Iran supplied funds for much of the support for the Contras. The Iran-Contra affair, as the scandal soon became known, spawned a major congressional investigation and a broad-reaching public discussion of the proper role for the U.S. government in the domestic affairs of foreign nations. In the end, however, the affair did little to change the Reagan administration’s policy of aggressive anticommunism.

THE NEW IMPERIAL ORDER In 1988, President George H. W. Bush entered the White House with an outlook that merged the principles of World War II and its aftermath with the tactics of the cold war in the 1960s and 1970s. A navy pilot who fought in the grand campaign against the Imperial Japanese Navy in World War II, Bush returned home as the United States began the occupation of Germany and Japan. After making a small fortune in the oil industry, he struggled to become a leader in the Republican Party. After a brief stint in Congress, he served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and envoy to China. In 1976, he began a one-year tenure as director of the CIA, running an organization that was attempting to shape foreign countries even as it confronted the institutional changes of the 1970s. After his bid for the presidential nomination in 1980 generated limited excitement among Republicans, Bush was lucky to become Reagan’s choice as vice president. Building off Reagan’s considerable popularity, Bush finally won the presidency in 1988. As Bush came to power, the old cold war order was collapsing. In 1991, the Soviet Union disintegrated. During the two years beforehand, the extended power of the evil empire that Reagan had described came apart, as Americans believed all empires would. When the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev permitted limited political reforms throughout the Soviet system, the old Soviet satellite countries immediately chose leaders who challenged Moscow’s authority. In 1989, Germans tore apart the Berlin Wall, the East German government disintegrated, and immediately negotiations began that, in 1990, led to the reunification of Germany. Equally important from an American perspective, the new Germany was an expanded version of the Federal Republic, validating the democratic system the United States had established after World War II. Other countries of Eastern Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria—followed suit, rejecting Soviet rule and reestablishing political autonomy. Finally, the core Soviet republics declared independence, leaving Russia surrounded by places like Ukraine, Belarus, and Uzbekistan, regions that during preceding centuries had known periodic independence alternated with extended periods of imperial rule. Even within Moscow, a political revolution was under way. After seventy years of ironclad rule under the Communist Party, a multiparty political system took shape in a Russia rededicated to a capitalist economy. To aging cold warriors, this new state of affairs validated fifty years of containment. To the most fervent Reagan advocates, it proved the benefits of a confrontational style that

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forced the Soviet Union to overextend itself militarily and financially and collapse as a result. To critics, it suggested that a showdown with the Soviet Union had hardly been inevitable and that the world had avoided nuclear annihilation despite U.S. action, rather than because of it. Beyond the particulars of the cold war, however, many Americans could conclude that the changes in Eastern Europe and West Asia demonstrated the power of the basic principles of self-government. These monumental changes in the former Soviet Union can overshadow the equally important changes at work in other countries where the United States had long claimed a role for itself. In the late 1980s, many of the regimes constructed or supported by the United States and the Soviet Union were falling apart. In 1986, a remarkable, generally nonviolent revolt toppled the regime of Ferdinand Marcos and restored electoral democracy to the Philippines. In 1989, the Bush administration ordered an invasion of Panama to depose Manuel Noriega. Although Noriega seemingly was the prototypical Latin American despot, the United States had ignored his dictatorship for as long as his alliance had preserved a friendly set of rules for the Panama Canal. In 1990, after years of civil war, the Sandinistas finally permitted multiparty elections for the first time since seizing power eleven years before. Nicaraguan voters immediately repudiated the Sandinista regime, electing Violeta Barrios Torres de Chamorro, long an outspoken anticommunist, as president. These changes in U.S. foreign relations coincided with the end of a long war in Afghanistan. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in 1979 in a clear attempt to secure Soviet borders in West Asia. Throughout the 1980s, the United States countered by arming a growing resistance movement in that country. That some of the most effective guerrillas were committed to creating an Islamic state was less important to the Americans than their more immediate goal of grinding away at the Soviet war machine. In 1989, after more than a decade of fighting, the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. Without making even a token claim of victory, the Soviet Union acknowledged the depiction of a humiliating defeat, a verdict on the war that soon spread throughout the world. In time, Americans referred to Afghanistan as “the Soviet Union’s Vietnam,” and rightly so. In both cases, guerrilla forces had effectively defeated the most powerful military forces on Earth. But these two wars were part of a bigger story that had been taking shape in the United States, a story that suggested the ambivalent ways Americans thought about acquiring and governing territory. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the United States had described Native Americans in ways very similar to those used in describing twentieth-century guerrillas: fierce fighters who, despite their limitations in technology, showed an almost mystical capacity to use the land to their benefit. U.S. military veterans of the wars with Native Americans had said the same thing about Filipinos at the turn of the twentieth century. Americans and Filipinos then turned the situation on its head during World War II, as Filipinos fought alongside the Americans in a protracted guerrilla war against the Japanese. All of these precedents informed the American outlook, first as people sought to understand the defeat in Vietnam and later as they witnessed victory for their allies in Afghanistan. For all the compliments, these were fundamentally condescending comparisons. American commentators marveled at the ability of opponents who could withstand the

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technologies of modern warfare, but usually in a way that described those enemies as fundamentally premodern and potentially uncivilized. Equally important, the comparisons all sought to explain just how far one country could go in its capacity to govern both people and territory. Put simply, had the empires of the twentieth century— the United States and the Soviet Union—reached their limits? Within the Bush administration, officials scrambled for a response. Treating this process as the final stage in a period of decolonization that had been under way for a half centur y, administration officials assumed that the United States should play a role in other countries as it had for decades. Nonetheless, they also recognized that it was becoming infinitely more difficult for the United States to shape the domestic affairs of foreign powers. Perhaps most important, they concluded that U.S. policy should promote the goals of democratization and selfgovernment. In other words, they borrowed from language as old as the Northwest Ordinance to develop a strategy for what Bush himself called a “new world order” (Document 5.14). Subtle connections across the long history of the American struggle with empire were entirely overwhelmed by the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they suggested that the empires of the cold war were gone. To some, the 1990s marked the end of a Soviet Empire founded on conquest and repression that shared more in common with Nazi Germany than Soviet Communists could ever admit. To others, events in Latin America and the Philippines repudiated American policies. When these events were considered together with the changes in Nicaragua and Afghanistan, it seemed clear that both the United States and the Soviet Union had been unrealistic in their belief that they could impose their will upon governments regardless of local popular sentiment. The old struggles of the cold war and the new challenges emerging in the world collided in the Gulf War of 1990–1991 (Documents 5.11 and 5.12). In 1990, Iraq invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait. Convinced that Iraq intended to hold the country indefinitely and might use it as the staging ground for an invasion of Saudi Arabia, the United States assumed leadership in organizing a coalition of countries that first defended Saudi Arabia and, in 1991, evicted Iraq from Kuwait. The victory in Operation Desert Storm was stunning in its speed. A quarter century after the United States endured a lengthy and destructive conflict in Vietnam, a military led by veterans of that conflict committed itself to a military operation premised on a massive commitment of forces that would overwhelm the Iraqi occupation. Once again, a distant conflict demonstrated the global reach the United States had developed during the cold war. The United States redeployed troops, tanks, and equipment from Europe, transporting them from American air bases in the newly reunified Germany. Saudi Arabia, eager for allies to defend against Iraq, quickly allowed forces from a multinational coalition to use Saudi Arabian military bases. Coordination for the war came under American leadership, using an organizational structure that was already in place through the U.S. Central Command. General Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the Central Command, quickly became the recognized field commander

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Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, left, and Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke to reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, August 9, 1990, concerning deployment of military forces in the Persian Gulf War. Cheney and Powell later served as vice president and secretary of state, respectively, when Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched in 2003 during the George W. Bush administration. Source: AP Images/Tannen Maury

of Operation Desert Shield (the preliminary effort to contain Iraq) and Operation Desert Storm (the military operation to evict Iraq from Kuwait). The Bush administration was quick to interpret events in Kuwait in clear terms. In a speech in November 1990 Bush claimed that Iraq “literally—literally, not figuratively— literally raped, pillaged, and plundered this once-peaceful land, this nation that is a member of the Arab League and a member of the United Nations.” To this he added that Iraq “tried to silence Kuwaiti dissent and courage with firing squads, much as Hitler did when he invaded Poland.”12 Americans who shared this interpretation likewise cast Saddam Hussein as a modern-day Hitler, an insane despot who took pleasure in the suffering of others. From this perspective, the United States would nip Iraq’s empire in the bud, restoring independence and self-determination to Kuwait. To critics of the war, this was mere window dressing for a more insidious motive. In an age when numerous countries faced external threats and internal suffering, why was the United States working so hard to defend Kuwait? Critics charged that the United States was prepared to preserve two despotic principalities—Kuwait and Saudi Arabia—in order to guarantee access to Middle Eastern oil. For some, U.S. policy in the Middle East fit within a broader critique of a foreign policy that had imposed U.S. power onto other countries in the name of democracy, but in fact at the expense of democracy (Document 5.13). Still others claimed that overextending U.S. power overseas would undermine the nation’s principles at home (Document 5.18). It was a serious argument, and a passionate one. But to make their cases both sides operated from the same foundation and deployed age-old fears about the corruption of

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empires. The very speed of Operation Desert Storm prevented a more thorough debate about its merits. So, too, did the economic recession that soon gripped the United States, shifting American public attention so quickly that the Bush administration never quite caught on to the fact that events in Iraq and Kuwait had faded from the minds of American voters. Meanwhile, the Democrats launched a highly effective presidential campaign. Their nominee, Bill Clinton, not only grasped the concerns of average voters more clearly than George H. W. Bush did, but, like Ronald Reagan, he was tremendously effective at communicating his ideas. Bush’s staid, halting, and occasionally uncomfortable speaking style only made Clinton appear more charismatic. In 1993, the first baby-boomer president, Bill Clinton, symbolized a generational changing of the guard in the nation’s political leadership. Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant that the cold war—the event that had shaped so much of foreign policy, domestic politics, and popular culture since 1945—would no longer define life in the United States or the world. The nation’s political tone, however, remained very much the same in the 1990s, with Republicans and Democrats defining themselves and their opponents in familiar terms. And if Clinton’s election in 1992 and reelection in 1996 suggested a new Democratic ascendancy, the tidal wave of Republican victories in Congress and state offices in 1994 prevented the Democrats from wholly controlling the agenda. When it came to foreign policy the Clinton administration faced a big question: what is the proper role of the United States in the world after the cold war? Answering that question forced Americans to return to the challenge of empire. If the solutions were as novel as the new circumstances of the 1990s, they nonetheless emerged from the most familiar of questions and preserved the most traditional of vocabularies. Equally important, Bill Clinton faced much the same struggle with empire as his immediate predecessors. With unrestrained U.S. involvement overseas eliminated in the aftermath of Vietnam, but with many Americans—and especially policymakers—assuming that the status of superpower required the United States to assume a leadership role, Clinton would have to navigate the difficult diplomatic and political waters of the 1990s without a map.

THE POST–COLD WAR CHALLENGE In June 1991, the Philippine volcano of Mount Pinatubo erupted following centuries of dormancy. A series of earthquakes in the preceding weeks had provided the forewarning that convinced thousands of people to leave the area of the volcano. The United States immediately ordered the evacuation of American personnel, with Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base serving as departure points. But Americans soon had to abandon both military bases, which were quickly covered in mud, ash, and pumice. The United States never really returned. Clark Air Base was closed for good. Subic Bay returned to limited operations, but in 1992 the governments of the United States and the Philippines negotiated a final closure.

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Filipinos expressed considerable ambivalence about the decision. The U.S. military bases had long been a troubling, visible reminder of American paternalism toward the Philippines (Document 5.8). At the same time, American dollars flooded the Philippine economy from those bases, and after the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the country was in particular need of outside investment. There is never a good time for a natural disaster to strike, but in American strategic thinking, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo could have been a lot worse. As the United States realigned its relationship with a government in Moscow that had lost much of its Soviet-era power and even seemed to be leaning toward democratic capitalism, the vast U.S. structure of overseas bases seemed to be more trouble (and more expense) than it was worth. Beginning in 1989, the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process began to slowly reduce the U.S. military presence overseas. The Clinton administration inherited the BRAC process, and during the 1990s the United States dramatically reduced its military presence throughout the world. This was particularly apparent in western Europe. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization still maintained a vast, multinational force to which the United States was the largest contributor, but by the mid-1990s, military units had returned to the United States, in some cases as the first step toward being disbanded. With the end of the cold war, Democrats and Republicans alike were committed to a restructured, smaller military. The only argument was how much to cut. The federal government was rethinking its commitment to overseas bases and territories even as the U.S. government faced new forms of criticism. When two U.S. marines stationed in Okinawa, Japan, raped a young girl in 1995, Okinawans angrily protested the American presence on the island. Governments throughout the Pacific Rim asked how the United States could justify its continued presence after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Such incidents became major international events. They demonstrated how the U.S. presence overseas caused unintended consequences, often to the detriment of the people in host nations. These incidents also threatened to derail delicate diplomatic relationships. Yet even as the United States withdrew from some of its longtime military commitments overseas, the Clinton administration still assumed a familiar role for the United States in asserting sovereignty both at home and abroad. The administration preserved long-standing traditions of governance for reservations for Native Americans and for Puerto Rico, in both cases preserving federal sovereignty over people who enjoyed citizenship but nonetheless suffered high levels of poverty that stemmed from long histories of exploitation (Documents 5.16 and 5.17). In 1994, U.S. troops helped coerce the departure of the ruling military regime in Haiti. Unlike earlier moments when the United States replaced popularly elected governments with U.S.friendly regimes, Operation Uphold Democracy did the reverse. Nonetheless, the United States still acted much as it had before, assuming that it could play the leadership role in shaping the political institutions of neighboring countries (Document 5.15).

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As the Clinton administration pursued divergent responses to the challenge of empire, Americans continued to debate how to interpret the nation’s histor y, debates that began in the 1960s but that hardly ended even as Americans withdrew from radical politics. In 1992, the question of how best to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas revealed the stark battle lines over empire and conquest. For generations, white Americans had celebrated Columbus as the man who “discovered” the new world that eventually led to the political freedoms of the United States. Many assumed that the quincentenary of his arrival would be a moment to reassert long-standing American beliefs. Americans had certainly done so a hundred years earlier. But things had changed during that centur y, and many Americans considered Columbus an embodiment of the death and destruction that came in the wake of imperial projects of all sorts.13 Similar arguments soon emerged over other commemorations. In 1991, an exhibit entitled “The West as America,” on display at the National Museum of American Art, brought together a generation of work in history and cultural analysis to explain how art expressed the culture of expansion and conquest. To many, this was a new, sophisticated approach that constituted a long-overdue change in the ways museums had traditionally told the story of western history. To others, it was nothing less than an attack on the United States itself.14 In 1995, a major exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the American mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, unleashed even greater passions. The exhibit was supposed to mark the event that helped bring about the end of World War II, and the centerpiece was to be the Enola Gay, the B-29 that actually dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. As fragments of the text intended to accompany the museum exhibit became public, a rollicking debate ensued. Exhibit planners explained that they considered the anniversary a wonderful opportunity for Americans to engage in a thoughtful consideration of the past. They also believed they had an ideal opportunity to reconsider some of the time-honored assumptions that they believed Americans too easily took for granted. The preliminary exhibition plan explained the war in the Pacific as the result of a rising conflict between empires, as Japan sought to expand its influence into regions the United States had controlled. The exhibition plan subsequently focused on the suffering unleashed by the bombing of Hiroshima, claiming that the United States could have ended the war through other means. Critics immediately charged that the exhibition was ahistorical, offensive, and unAmerican. They countered that the exhibit denied the sins of Japanese expansionism, failed to adequately indict Japan for its role in starting the conflict, and paid more attention to the suffering of the Japanese than the Americans. Much of the criticism came from veterans’ groups, but conservative organizations

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across the country soon joined the fight. Defenders claimed that critics wanted the representation of the past to be simplistic and comforting although the reality was often more complex and unsettling. They likewise charged that conser vative activists were exploiting the situation to promote their modern-day agendas. Conservatives responded in kind, describing the exhibit as yet another attempt by the left to indoctrinate Americans in a belief system that denied American greatness. 15 Much of the argument turned on claims about empire. Exhibit planners used recent scholarship that had emphasized the imperialistic ambitions of the United States in the Pacific. Critics charged that the exhibit did not pay adequate attention to the imperialistic goals of Japan. To both sides, empire was the villain. The debate over the Enola Gay exhibit was only the latest in a series of disputes that Americans have come to describe as the “culture wars,” fought periodically since the 1970s. Developments in political and intellectual circles intersected with broad cultural developments that captured the schizophrenic American attitude toward governance in general and empires in particular. These were often arguments about history, not only about what happened in the past but also how to interpret the past. The notion that America’s struggle with empire was somehow in the past proved wrong. Instead, American public policy in the twenty-first century unleashed a newfound consideration of empire and its implications for American destiny.

Document 5.1 Selections from the Vietnam Comic Book, 1967 In 1967, Julian Bond was only twenty-seven years old, but he was already a veteran of the civil rights movement. In 1965, on the heels of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Bond won a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives. The state legislature refused to seat him, however, citing his public opposition to the Vietnam War. The refusal constituted an effort by the whites-only legislature to exclude black election winners, but it also reflected the national struggle over the meaning of public opposition to the war. In 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Bond’s favor, and he began a career in the Georgia House that lasted until his 1974 election to the Georgia Senate, where he served for an additional twelve years. Bond now serves as chairman of the board for the NAACP. The following is an excerpt from a 1967 comic book that Bond produced with T. G. Lewis, who provided the illustration for Bond’s text.

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Source: Julian Bond, Vietnam, illus. by T. G. Lewis (1967), ©Julian Bond.

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Document 5.2 Custer Died for Your Sins, 1969 Vine Deloria Jr. was born in South Dakota near the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. His father, Vine Deloria Sr., was an Oglala Lakota Indian who met his wife, a white woman from New Jersey, during his training as an Episcopal priest. The younger Deloria also trained for the ministry, but soon focused his energies on the American Indian political movement. He served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians and later taught at the University of Colorado. The author of numerous books, Deloria wrote Custer Died for Your Sins, which was first published in 1969 and reissued in 1988. It remains Deloria’s most powerful statement about the long history of struggle between Indians and the U.S. government. The following excerpt focuses on the history of treaty negotiations between Indians and the federal government. Although Deloria concerns himself primarily with the territorial conquest of the United States, he makes explicit connections to the social movements surrounding him in the late 1960s. Specifically, he connects the foundations of the U.S. government to racial prejudice at home and to duplicity in Vietnam. He labels all of these activities an “imperialist” venture.

Under the laws and courts of the present there is no way for Indian people to get the federal government to admit they have rights. The executive branch of the government crudely uses Indian lands as pawns in the great race to provide pork-barrel agencies with sufficient dam-building projects to keep them busy. Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations. The Indian wars of the past should rightly be regarded as the first foreign wars of American history. As the United States marched across this continent, it was creating an empire by wars of foreign conquest just as England and France were doing in India and Africa. Certainly the war with Mexico was imperialistic, no more or less than the wars against the Sioux, Apache, Utes, and Yakimas. In every case the goal was identical: land. When the frontier was declared officially closed in 1890 it was only a short time before American imperialistic impulses drove this country into the Spanish-American War and the acquisition of America’s Pacific island empire began. The tendency to continue imperialistic trends remained constant between the two world wars as this nation was involved in numerous banana wars in Central and South America. There has not been a time since the founding of the republic when the motives of this country were innocent. Is it any wonder that other nations are extremely skeptical about its real motives in the world today? Source: Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 52–53.

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Document 5.3 The War Powers Resolution, 1973 The War Powers Resolution is a landmark document in American federalism and American foreign relations. But it also had a profound impact on the American struggle with empire, even as it reflected changes in the ways America responded to that struggle. The Vietnam War had convinced many in Congress that the executive branch was making inappropriate use of military force without seeking any form of congressional approval. Members of Congress were particularly concerned that in Vietnam the United States had engaged in a lengthy, openended military struggle without the president ever asking Congress to authorize a declaration of war. Although Congress could always withhold funding for military operations, these restraints would only come into play after long delay. The War Powers Resolution sought to impose new restrictions on the executive by mandating that the president report military action in a timely manner and seek subsequent approval for ongoing military activities. Throughout the twentieth century, the United States had most often used military force without seeking a declaration of war when it sought to establish American power in foreign countries. This was particularly true with U.S. intervention in Latin American countries. The impact of the War Powers Resolution remains a subject of debate. Although presidents have often resented the requirement of seeking congressional approval and members of Congress have often chastised presidents for the use of force, presidents have rarely found themselves unable to use troops for brief military ventures. Only in cases of large military operations (for example, the Gulf War of 1990–1991 or the U.S. military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan) has Congress actively challenged the president’s capacity to use the military.

Joint Resolution Concerning the War Powers of Congress and the President. Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SHORT TITLE SECTION 1. This joint resolution may be cited as the “War Powers Resolution.”

PURPOSE AND POLICY SEC. 2. (a) It is the purpose of this joint resolution to fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution of the United States and insure that the collective judgement of both the Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and to the continued use of such forces in hostilities or in such situations.

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(b) Under article I, section 8, of the Constitution, it is specifically provided that the Congress shall have the power to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution, not only its own powers but also all other powers vested by the Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof. (c) The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.

CONSULTATION SEC. 3. The President in every possible instance shall consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situation where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, and after every such introduction shall consult regularly with the Congress until United States Armed Forces are no longer engaged in hostilities or have been removed from such situations.

REPORTING SEC. 4. (a) In the absence of a declaration of war, in any case in which United States Armed Forces are introduced— (1) into hostilities or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances; (2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a foreign nation, while equipped for combat, except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair, or training of such forces; or (3) in numbers which substantially enlarge United States Armed Forces equipped for combat already located in a foreign nation; the president shall submit within 48 hours to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President pro tempore of the Senate a report, in writing, setting forth— (A) the circumstances necessitating the introduction of United States Armed Forces; (B) the constitutional and legislative authority under which such introduction took place; and (C) the estimated scope and duration of the hostilities or involvement. (b) The President shall provide such other information as the Congress may request in the fulfillment of its constitutional responsibilities with respect to committing the Nation to war and to the use of United States Armed Forces abroad (c) Whenever United States Armed Forces are introduced into hostilities or into any situation described in subsection (a) of this section, the President shall, so long as such armed forces continue to be engaged in such hostilities or situation, report to the Congress periodically on the status of such hostilities or situation as well as on the scope

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and duration of such hostilities or situation, but in no event shall he report to the Congress less often than once every six months.

CONGRESSIONAL ACTION SEC. 5. (a) Each report submitted pursuant to section 4(a)(1) shall be transmitted to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and to the President pro tempore of the Senate on the same calendar day. Each report so transmitted shall be referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives and to the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate for appropriate action. If, when the report is transmitted, the Congress has adjourned sine die or has adjourned for any period in excess of three calendar days, the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate, if they deem it advisable (or if petitioned by at least 30 percent of the membership of their respective Houses) shall jointly request the President to convene Congress in order that it may consider the report and take appropriate action pursuant to this section. (b) Within sixty calendar days after a report is submitted or is required to be submitted pursuant to section 4(a)(1), whichever is earlier, the President shall terminate any use of United States Armed Forces with respect to which such report was submitted (or required to be submitted), unless the Congress (1) has declared war or has enacted a specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces, (2) has extended by law such sixty-day period, or (3) is physically unable to meet as a result of an armed attack upon the United States. Such sixty-day period shall be extended for not more than an additional thirty days if the President determines and certifies to the Congress in writing that unavoidable military necessity respecting the safety of United States Armed Forces requires the continued use of such armed forces in the course of bringing about a prompt removal of such forces. (c) Notwithstanding subsection (b), at any time that United States Armed Forces are engaged in hostilities outside the territory of the United States, its possessions and territories without a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization, such forces shall be removed by the President if the Congress so directs by concurrent resolution.

CONGRESSIONAL PRIORITY PROCEDURES FOR JOINT RESOLUTION OR BILL SEC. 6. (a) Any joint resolution or bill introduced pursuant to section 5(b) at least thirty calendar days before the expiration of the sixty-day period specified in such section shall be referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives or the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate, as the case may be, and such committee shall report one such joint resolution or bill, together with its recommendations, not later than twenty-four calendar days before the expiration of the sixty-day period specified in such section, unless such House shall otherwise determine by the yeas and nays. (b) Any joint resolution or bill so reported shall become the pending business of the House in question (in the case of the Senate the time for debate shall be equally divided between the proponents and the opponents), and shall be voted on within three calendar days thereafter, unless such House shall otherwise determine by yeas and nays.

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(c) Such a joint resolution or bill passed by one House shall be referred to the committee of the other House named in subsection (a) and shall be reported out not later than fourteen calendar days before the expiration of the sixty-day period specified in section 5(b). The joint resolution or bill so reported shall become the pending business of the House in question and shall be voted on within three calendar days after it has been reported, unless such House shall otherwise determine by yeas and nays. (d) In the case of any disagreement between the two Houses of Congress with respect to a joint resolution or bill passed by both Houses, conferees shall be promptly appointed and the committee of conference shall make and file a report with respect to such resolution or bill not later than four calendar days before the expiration of the sixty-day period specified in section 5(b). In the event the conferees are unable to agree within 48 hours, they shall report back to their respective Houses in disagreement. Notwithstanding any rule in either House concerning the printing of conference reports in the Record or concerning any delay in the consideration of such reports, such report shall be acted on by both Houses not later than the expiration of such sixty-day period.

CONGRESSIONAL PRIORITY PROCEDURES FOR CONCURRENT RESOLUTION SEC. 7. (a) Any concurrent resolution introduced pursuant to section 5(b) at least thirty calendar days before the expiration of the sixty-day period specified in such section shall be referred to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House of Representatives or the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate, as the case may be, and one such concurrent resolution shall be reported out by such committee together with its recommendations within fifteen calendar days, unless such House shall otherwise determine by the yeas and nays. (b) Any concurrent resolution so reported shall become the pending business of the House in question (in the case of the Senate the time for debate shall be equally divided between the proponents and the opponents), and shall be voted on within three calendar days thereafter, unless such House shall otherwise determine by yeas and nays. (c) Such a concurrent resolution passed by one House shall be referred to the committee of the other House named in subsection (a) and shall be reported out by such committee together with its recommendations within fifteen calendar days and shall thereupon become the pending business of such House and shall be voted on within three calendar days after it has been reported, unless such House shall otherwise determine by yeas and nays. (d) In the case of any disagreement between the two Houses of Congress with respect to a concurrent resolution passed by both Houses, conferees shall be promptly appointed and the committee of conference shall make and file a report with respect to such concurrent resolution within six calendar days after the legislation is referred to the committee of conference. Notwithstanding any rule in either House concerning the printing of conference reports in the Record or concerning any delay in the consideration of such reports, such report shall be acted on by both Houses not later than six calendar days after the conference report is filed. In the event the conferees are

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unable to agree within 48 hours, they shall report back to their respective Houses in disagreement.

INTERPRETATION OF JOINT RESOLUTION SEC. 8. (a) Authority to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations wherein involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances shall not be inferred— (1) from any provision of law (whether or not in effect before the date of the enactment of this joint resolution), including any provision contained in any appropriation Act, unless such provision specifically authorizes the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into such situations and stating that it is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of this joint resolution; or (2) from any treaty heretofore or hereafter ratified unless such treaty is implemented by legislation specifically authorizing the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into such situations and stating that it is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of this joint resolution. (b) Nothing in this joint resolution shall be construed to require any further specific statutory authorization to permit members of United States Armed Forces to participate jointly with members of the armed forces of one or more foreign countries in the headquarters operations of high-level military commands which were established prior to the date of enactment of this joint resolution and pursuant to the United Nations Charter or any treaty ratified by the United States prior to such date. (c) For purposes of this joint resolution, the term “introduction of United States Armed Forces” includes the assignment of member of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged, or there exists an imminent threat that such forces will become engaged, in hostilities. (d) Nothing in this joint resolution— (1) is intended to alter the constitutional authority of the Congress or of the President, or the provision of existing treaties; or (2) shall be construed as granting any authority to the President with respect to the introduction of United States Armed Forces into hostilities or into situations wherein involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances which authority he would not have had in the absence of this joint resolution.

SEPARABILITY CLAUSE SEC. 9. If any provision of this joint resolution or the application thereof to any person or circumstance is held invalid, the remainder of the joint resolution and the application of such provision to any other person or circumstance shall not be affected thereby.

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EFFECTIVE DATE SEC. 10. This joint resolution shall take effect on the date of its enactment. CARL ALBERT Speaker of the House of Representatives. JAMES O. EASTLAND President of the Senate pro tempore.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, U.S., November 7, 1973. The House of Representatives having proceeded to reconsider the resolution (H. J. Res 542) entitled “Joint resolution concerning the war powers of Congress and the President,” returned by the President of the United States with his objections, to the House of Representatives, in which it originated, it was Resolved, That the said resolution pass, two-thirds of the House of Representatives agreeing to pass the same. Attest: W. PAT JENNINGS Clerk.

I certify that this Joint Resolution originated in the House of Representatives. W. PAT JENNINGS Clerk.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, November 7, 1973 The Senate having proceeded to reconsider the joint resolution (H. J. Res. 542) entitled “Joint resolution concerning the war powers of Congress and the President,” returned by the President of the United States with his objections to the House of Representatives, in which it originate, it was Resolved, That the said joint resolution pass, two-thirds of the Senators present having voted in the affirmative. Attest: FRANCIS R. VALEO Secretary. Source: War Powers Act of 1973, Public Law 93-148, U.S. Statutes at Large 87 (1973): 555–560.

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Document 5.4 The Rise of Empires a Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. . . , 1977 In 1977, Star Wars was a cultural phenomenon. Setting new records for attendance and profits, the movie had a particularly frenzied devotion among young Americans, who attended the movie repeatedly to marvel at the combination of old-fashioned storytelling and pathbreaking special effects. In the process, Americans also heard a story of the evils of empire. In 1976, while George Lucas was still finishing work on the movie that became Star Wars, he wrote a novelization entitled Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. The following excerpt is from the first page of the book and describes how the Old Republic became an empire. It concerns the rise and rule of Palpatine, the emperor who is often discussed but never referred to by name in the first trilogy of films released from 1977 to 1983. It was in the three “prequels” released from 1999 to 2005 that Lucas fleshed out the story suggested in this brief prologue.

The Old Republic was the Republic of legend, greater than distance or time. No need to note where it was or whence it came, only to know that . . . it was the Republic. Once, under the wise rule of the Senate and the protection of the Jedi Knights, the Republic throve and grew. But as often happens when wealth and power pass beyond the admirable and attain the awesome, then appear those evil ones who have greed to match. So it was with the Republic at its height. Like the greatest of trees, able to withstand any external attack, the Republic rotted from within though the danger was not visible from outside. Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears. Having exterminated through treachery and deception the Jedi Knights, guardians of justice in the galaxy, the Imperial governors and bureaucrats prepared to institute a reign of terror among the disheartened worlds of the galaxy. Many used the Imperial forces and the name of the increasingly isolated Emperor to further their own personal ambitions. But a small number of systems rebelled at these new outrages. Declaring themselves opposed to the New Order they began the great battle to restore the Old Republic. From the beginning they were vastly outnumbered by the systems held in thrall by the Emperor. In those first dark days it seemed certain the bright flame of resistance would be extinguished before it could cast the light of new truth across a galaxy of oppressed and beaten peoples. . . . Source: George Lucas, Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker (New York: Ballantine Books, 1976), 1–2.

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Document 5.5 “Evil Empire” Speech, March 8, 1983 Ronald Reagan’s famous reference to an “evil empire” came in the midst of a talk to the National Association of Evangelicals. The speech focused on two of the most divisive issues in American politics: abortion and the nuclear arms race. Reagan focused much of his speech on the right of evangelicals to draw on their religious beliefs to frame their political outlook. He spoke extensively about his opposition to abortion rights, and only in the end of the speech addressed matters of foreign policy. Nonetheless, it was Reagan’s comments about an “evil empire” that soon captured public attention.

I can’t tell you how you have warmed my heart with your welcome. I’m delighted to be here today. Those of you in the National Association of Evangelicals are known for your spiritual and humanitarian work. And I would be especially remiss if I didn’t discharge right now one personal debt of gratitude. Thank you for your prayers. Nancy and I have felt their presence many times in many ways. And believe me, for us they’ve made all the difference. . . . So, I tell you there are a great many God-fearing, dedicated, noble men and women in public life, present company included. And, yes, we need your help to keep us ever mindful of the ideas and the principles that brought us into the public arena in the first place. The basis of those ideals and principles is a commitment to freedom and personal liberty that, itself, is grounded in the much deeper realization that freedom prospers only where the blessings of God are avidly sought and humbly accepted. The American experiment in democracy rests on this insight. Its discovery was the great triumph of our Founding Fathers, voiced by William Penn when he said: “If we will not be governed by God, we must be governed by tyrants.” Explaining the inalienable rights of men, Jefferson said, “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time.” And it was George Washington who said that “of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports.” And finally, that shrewdest of all observers of American democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville, put it eloquently after he had gone on a search for the secret of America’s greatness and genius—and he said: “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America . . . America is good. And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” Well, I’m pleased to be here today with you who are keeping America great by keeping her good. Only through your work and prayers and those of millions of others can we hope to survive this perilous century and keep alive this experiment in liberty, this last, best hope of man. I want you to know that this administration is motivated by a political philosophy that sees the greatness of America in you, her people, and in your families, churches, neighborhoods, communities—the institutions that foster and nourish values like concern for others and respect for the rule of law under God.

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Now, I don’t have to tell you that this puts us in opposition to, or at least out of step with, a prevailing attitude of many who have turned to a modern-day secularism, discarding the tried and time-tested values upon which our very civilization is based. No matter how well intentioned, their value system is radically different from that of most Americans. And while they proclaim that they’re freeing us from superstitions of the past, they’ve taken upon themselves the job of superintending us by government rule and regulation. Sometimes their voices are louder than ours, but they are not yet a majority . . . But whatever sad episodes exist in our past, any objective observer must hold a positive view of American history, a history that has been the story of hopes fulfilled and dreams made into reality. Especially in this century, America has kept alight the torch of freedom, but not just for ourselves but for millions of others around the world. And this brings me to my final point today. During my first press conference as President, in answer to a direct question, I pointed out that, as good Marxist-Leninists, the Soviet leaders have openly and publicly declared that the only morality they recognize is that which will further their cause, which is world revolution. I think I should point out I was only quoting Lenin, their guiding spirit, who said in 1920 that they repudiate all morality that proceeds from supernatural ideas—that’s their name for religion—or ideas that are outside class conceptions. Morality is entirely subordinate to the interests of class war. And everything is moral that is necessary for the annihilation of the old, exploiting social order and for uniting the proletariat. Well, I think the refusal of many influential people to accept this elementary fact of Soviet doctrine illustrates an historical reluctance to see totalitarian powers for what they are. We saw this phenomenon in the 1930’s. We see it too often today. This doesn’t mean we should isolate ourselves and refuse to seek an understanding with them. I intend to do everything I can to persuade them of our peaceful intent, to remind them that it was the West that refused to use its nuclear monopoly in the forties and fifties for territorial gain and which now proposes a 50-percent cut in strategic ballistic missiles and the elimination of an entire class of land-based, intermediate-range nuclear missiles. At the same time, however, they must be made to understand we will never compromise our principles and standards. We will never give away our freedom. We will never abandon our belief in God. And we will never stop searching for a genuine peace. But we can assure none of these things America stands for through the so-called nuclear freeze solutions proposed by some. The truth is that a freeze now would be a very dangerous fraud, for that is merely the illusion of peace. The reality is that we must find peace through strength. I would agree to a freeze if only we could freeze the Soviets’ global desires. A freeze at current levels of weapons would remove any incentive for the Soviets to negotiate seriously in Geneva and virtually end our chances to achieve the major arms reductions which we have proposed. Instead, they would achieve their objectives through the freeze. A freeze would reward the Soviet Union for its enormous and unparalleled military buildup. It would prevent the essential and long overdue modernization of United States and allied defenses and would leave our aging forces increasingly vulnerable. And an honest freeze would require extensive prior negotiations on the systems and numbers to

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be limited and on the measures to ensure effective verification and compliance. And the kind of a freeze that has been suggested would be virtually impossible to verify. Such a major effort would divert us completely from our current negotiations on achieving substantial reductions . . . I believe we shall rise to the challenge. I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages even now are being written. I believe this because the source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual. And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man. For in the words of Isaiah: “He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might He increased strength . . . But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary . . . ” Yes, change your world. One of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, said, “We have it within our power to begin the world over again.” We can do it, doing together what no one church could do by itself. God bless you, and thank you very much. Source: Ronald W. Reagan (remarks at annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983), Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library, Simi Valley, California, www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/ speeches/1983/30883b.htm.

Document 5.6 Explaining Operation Urgent Fury, October 1983 On October 25, 1983, U.S. troops landed on the Caribbean island of Grenada. Within hours, the Reagan administration was explaining the operation. What follows is a partial transcript from the joint press conference held by Ronald Reagan and Eugenia Charles, the prime minister of Dominica. Not to be confused with the Dominican Republic (which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti), Dominica was a British colony that received its independence in 1978. Five years later, Charles was chairing the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. The press conference by Reagan and Charles established a model that the United States used frequently in the years that followed. Unlike many previous similar instances during the twentieth century when American leaders simply proclaimed the need to use military force in foreign countries, Operation Urgent Fury in Grenada began the custom of American presidents being careful to include representatives of those countries or their allies. Those representatives were often deposed leaders who claimed to speak on behalf of their people in decrying a dictatorial government. In this case, Charles claimed to speak on behalf of people throughout the Caribbean. Her particular concern was that the recent coup in Grenada could become a model for political violence in the Caribbean. The Reagan administration was more concerned by the threat of Cuban (and, by default, Soviet) influence extending throughout the region.

THE PRESIDENT. Ladies and gentlemen, on Sunday, October 23d, the United States received an urgent, formal request from the five member nations of the Organization of

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Eastern Caribbean States to assist in a joint effort to restore order and democracy on the island of Grenada. We acceded to the request to become part of a multinational effort with contingents from Antigua, Barbados, Dominica, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, and the United States. I might add that two of those, Barbados and Jamaica, are not members of the Organization, but were first approached, as we later were, by the OECS and asked to join in that undertaking. And then all of them joined unanimously in asking us to participate. Early this morning, forces from six Caribbean democracies and the United States began a landing or landings on the island of Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean. We have taken this decisive action for three reasons. First, and of overriding importance, to protect innocent lives, including up to a thousand Americans, whose personal safety is, of course, my paramount concern. Second, to forestall further chaos. And third, to assist in the restoration of conditions of law and order and of governmental institutions to the island of Grenada, where a brutal group of leftist thugs violently seized power, killing the Prime Minister, three Cabinet members, two labor leaders, and other civilians, including children. Let there be no misunderstanding, this collective action has been forced on us by events that have no precedent in the eastern Caribbean and no place in any civilized society. American lives are at stake. We’ve been following the situation as closely as possible. Between 800 and a thousand Americans, including many medical students and senior citizens, make up the largest single group of foreign residents in Grenada. From the start we have consciously sought to calm fears. We were determined not to make an already bad situation worse and increase the risks our citizens faced. But when I received reports that a large number of our citizens were seeking to escape the island, thereby exposing themselves to great danger, and after receiving a formal request for help, a unanimous request from our neighboring states, I concluded the United States had no choice but to act strongly and decisively. Let me repeat, the United States objectives are clear: to protect our own citizens, to facilitate the evacuation of those who want to leave, and to help in the restoration of democratic institutions in Grenada. I understand that several Caribbean States are asking that the Organization of American States consider the situation in Grenada. Our diplomatic efforts will be in close cooperation with the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and the other countries participating in this multinational effort. And now I’m very proud to present to you the Chairman of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and the Prime Minister of Dominica, Prime Minister Charles. THE PRIME MINISTER. I think we were all very horrified at the events which took place recently in Grenada. We, as part of the Organization of East Caribbean States, realizing that we are, of course, one region—we belong to each other, are kith and kin; we all have members of our state living in Grenada—we’re very concerned that this event should take place again. It is true that we have managed to live with the regime since March ’79. And we felt quite clearly and we had good reason to believe that the Bishop regime was

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seeing it our way and was on the way to have elections. And we think this is the reason why himself and his Cabinet were destroyed, because he realized that the pressure we put on him to have elections was worthwhile, was right, and he’d begun to see that the democratic institutions must be put in place in any of these small countries. It is even more important in a small island state, poor island state, to have the democratic institutions. And this we have had for a long time, and we’ve continued it and we wish to continue it. Grenada was an aberration in this respect. But that these men, who had for all these years accepted the Bishop regime should then, for their own reasons—and I think the power-hungry reasons—decide to destroy the persons whom they had accepted as their leaders for so long, made us realize that this sort of assassination must not be allowed to continue in our country. It means that our people there are not safe. It means that Grenadians had never been given the chance to choose for themselves the country that they want. And, therefore, it is necessary for us to see to it that they have the opportunity to do so. To do this, we have to isolate the persons who have committed the acts that they did last week, in killing off most of the Cabinet. And we have to ensure that, in fact, an interim government of persons of, not political greed, but persons who are good administrators and who are Grenadians who can run the country for a few months for the pure purpose of putting the country back on the democratic status, so that elections can take place as soon as possible. This is what you want to do so that Grenadians can choose for themselves the government they want and not have, every few years have governments imposed on them by persons who will otherwise—— Q. Are all the Americans safe? Q. Mr. President, did you have information that the Soviets and the Cubans were behind this takeover of Grenada? Did the Joint Chiefs tell you that yesterday afternoon? THE PRIME MINISTER. Want me to answer this? Yes, we do have this information. I can’t give you all the details because of the safety of people concerned. But we noted with great—in the 2 weeks before the assassination took place, the movements between the Soviet Embassies and known activists and the activists returning to Grenada, obviously a conduit between some of these Russians and some of these—— Q. Mr. President, can you tell us, are all the Americans safe, sir? Can you tell us that? And how long will the American forces be on the ground there? What is their role? THE PRESIDENT. I could—well, we don’t know how long that will be. We want to be out as quickly as possible, because our purpose in being there is only for them to enable—to take over their own affairs. As far as we know, the citizens are safe. We have been monitoring that very closely. And one of our prime objectives in the actual invasion that was almost instantly done was the securing of that St. Georges Medical College, where several hundred of the students were. Q. What is the military situation, sir? Q. Mr. President, as late as yesterday, your own spokesman said that Americans on Grenada were in no danger. Did you have information that things had changed?

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THE PRESIDENT. They were in no danger in the sense of that, right now, anything was being done to them. But we know that there was concern on the part of those, because already we’d been informed of several hundred who wanted to leave. But the airports were closed. There was no way of leaving. This was a case of not waiting until something actually happened to them. But we did manage to get some intelligence out of the island, intelligence information on this. And the tenuous situation was, as I said, the only authority that you could say of a governmental nature on that island was a 24-hour curfew with orders to shoot on sight anyone found moving in those 24 hours. Q. What is the military situation now, sir, in Grenada? Can you tell us? THE PRESIDENT. I can only tell you that we’ve secured both the airports, and the landings have been completed. But we are yielding to the influence of General Vessey in that we don’t think in these early hours of that landing that we should be on the horn asking the commanders to stop and give us detailed reports. Q. Mr. President, do you think that the United States has the right to invade another country to change its government? THE PRIME MINISTER. But I don’t think it’s an invasion—if I may answer that question. Q. What is it? THE PRIME MINISTER. This is a question of our asking for support. We are one region. Grenada is part and parcel of us, an organization—— Q. But you’re sovereign nations, are you not? THE PRIME MINISTER.—and we don’t have the capacity, ourselves, to see to it that Grenadians get the freedom that they’re required to have to choose their own government. Q. With what’s happening in Lebanon, are we spread too thin, Mr. President? THE PRESIDENT. Wait one second here. No; we’re not spread too thin. And let me augment what the Prime Minister just said. Once these nations, which were once British colonies, were freed, they, themselves, had a treaty. And their treaty was one of mutual support. And Grenada is one of the countries, signatories to that treaty—and observe that treaty at one time when they had a democratic government and a constitution—a constitutional government, the constitution that was left to them by the British. So, this action that is being taken is being taken under the umbrella of an existing treaty. . . . Q. What reports have you received of the success of the operation? THE PRESIDENT. Of the initial operation, of landings, securing the immediate targets, taking control of the airports: completely successful. Now, the Prime Minister and I are going to depart, but I know there are going to be a lot more technical questions of that kind and Ambassador Motley is here, and I’m going to put him before you to ask all of the technical questions you may have.

Source: Ronald W. Reagan, president of the United States, and Eugenia Charles, prime minister of Dominica (remarks announcing the deployment of U.S. forces in Grenada, October 25, 1983), Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library, Simi Valley, California.

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Document 5.7 Condemning Operation Urgent Fury, October 1983 U.S. military action in Grenada generated widespread condemnation. That criticism came from long-standing allies like Canada and Great Britain. It also came from numerous nations within the United Nations General Assembly, a state of affairs that reflected the complex relations between the United States and the United Nations. At the end of World War II, Americans had been among the leading advocates of a United Nations, providing funding for the organization and, through a donation from the Rockefeller family, prime real estate in New York City for UN headquarters. In the decades that followed, the UN often provided the appearance of international support for American foreign policy. As a result, many critics saw the UN as little more than an apologist for the neocolonial aspirations of the great powers in the world. As UN membership expanded to include the growing number of newly independent countries in the second half of the twentieth century, the organization increasingly became a forum where smaller or weaker countries could finally articulate their own criticism of big-power imperialism. The documents that follow exemplify not only the rule of the UN, but also the language of antiimperialism that was increasingly directed against the United States. The first document is a formal resolution of the UN General Assembly, demanding an immediate end to the violence in Grenada and implicitly calling on the United States to withdraw troops without directly condemning the United States. Those condemnations came from individual member nations. The second document is from the Non-Aligned Countries, an organization consisting primarily of nations in the developing world. Rejecting formal alliances with the major superpowers and their security organizations, many of these countries had recently been European colonies, and they were deeply suspicious that the U.S. claim to “liberate” Grenada was merely an attempt to extend U.S. power. Finally, the communiqué from North Korea captures the way anti-imperialism was a particularly potent term in the communist lexicon. Itself a pariah nation ruled by a despotic government that had closed almost all contacts with the outside world, North Korea often justified domestic repression as a necessary response to Western imperialism.

Resolution of the U.N. General Assembly The situation in Grenada The General Assembly, Considering the statements made before the Security Council in connection with the situation in Grenada. Recalling the Declaration on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. Recalling also the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States. Reaffirming the sovereign and inalienable right of Grenada freely to determine its own political, economic and social system, and to develop its international relations without outside intervention, interference, subversion, coercion or threat in any form whatsoever.

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Deeply deploring the events in Grenada which led to the killing of the Prime Minister, Mr. Maurice Bishop, and other prominent Grenadians. Bearing in mind that, in accordance with Article 2, paragraph 4, of the Charter of the United Nations, all Member States are obliged to refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State or in any other manner inconsistent with the principles of the Charter. Gravely concerned at the military intervention taking place and determined to ensure a speedy return to normalcy in Grenada. Conscious of the need for States to show consistent respect for the principles of the Charter, 1. Deeply deplores the armed intervention in Grenada, which constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of that State; 2. Deplores the death of innocent civilians resulting from the armed intervention; 3. Calls upon all States to show the strictest respect for the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of Grenada; 4. Calls for an immediate cessation of the armed intervention and the immediate withdrawal of the foreign troops from Grenada; 5. Requests that free elections be organized as rapidly as possible to enable the people of Grenada to choose its government democratically; 6. Requests the Secretary-General as a matter of urgency to assess the situation and to report back to the General Assembly within seventy-two hours. 43rd plenary meeting 2 November 1983. Source: UN General Assembly, Resolution 38/7, “The Situation in Grenada,” November 2, 1983, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/RESOLUTION/GEN/NR0/443/99/IMG/NR044399.pdf?Op enElement.

Communiqué from the Co-ordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Countries 1. At an urgent session held at United Nations Headquarters in New York on 26 and 28 October 1983, the Co-ordinating Bureau of the Non-Aligned Countries expressed its grave concern at the latest developments in Grenada, a member of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries. It noted that these developments constituted a threat to international peace and security. 2. In this context, the Bureau recalled that the Heads of State or Government of nonaligned countries, meeting at their seventh summit at New Delhi in March 1983, had expressed their concern at the continuing colonialist policies and the increasing economic pressure, threats and aggression in the Caribbean region. They had urged all States to scrupulously refrain from all acts of aggression, recourse to the use or threat of force and intervention and interference in the internal affairs of States. They had further reaffirmed the right of all peoples of the region to national self-determination, independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, and their right to choose their own political,

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economic and social systems and pursue their own economic development free from any type of external interference or pressure. 3. The Bureau also recalled that the efforts of the States members of the nonaligned movement had culminated in the adoption by the General Assembly of the Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention and Interference in the Internal Affairs of States (resolution 36/103). It reiterated the call, made at the Seventh Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries, upon all States to adhere to the Declaration and observe its principles in their dealings with other States. 4. The Bureau further recalled that the Heads of State or Government meeting at New Delhi had condemned the covert and overt actions and the political and economic pressures being exerted by imperialist forces against Grenada (see A/38/132-S/15675, annex, sect. I (Political declaration), para. 153). It also recalled that the Ministerial Meeting of Non-Aligned Countries, held in New York from 4 to 7 October 1983, had reaffirmed solidarity with the Government of Grenada in its efforts to preserve its sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of political and economic pressures and efforts at destabilization directed against it. 5. The Bureau deeply deplored the brutal assassination of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and other high Grenadian officials. 6. The Bureau condemned the armed intervention in Grenada, which constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of that State. It called for an immediate cessation of intervention and the immediate withdrawal of all foreign forces from Grenada. It reaffirmed its firm solidarity with Grenada and called on all States to respect its sovereign and inalienable right freely to determine its own political, economic and social system and to develop its international relations without outside intervention, interference, subversion, coercion or threat in any form whatsoever. Source: UN General Assembly, Document no. A/38/540, “Letter dated 23 October 1983 from the Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General,” October 31, 1983, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N83/280/68/PDF/N832 8068.pdf?OpenElement.

Protest from North Korea Statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on 27 October 1983. A grave situation is being created in Grenada and the Caribbean region due to the United States imperialists’ open brigandish armed invasion and intervention against Grenada. On 25 October the United States imperialists launched an all-out armed invasion of Grenada, a small island country in the Caribbean region, with the mobilization of thousands of paratroopers and marines.

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The United States sent warships, including an aircraft carrier, to the sea off Grenada for this armed invasion. The sovereignty of the Grenadian people is gravely violated by the United States imperialists’ outrageous aggression. To justify their heinous aggression on Grenada, the United States imperialists claim, using the unstable situation temporarily created in Grenada these days as a pretext, that it is aimed at “protecting” the American citizens residing in the country and “helping restore democracy” there. With nothing, however, can they conceal their despicable nature as the criminals who started a barbaric armed invasion of Grenada. In history it has always been a habitual tactic employed by the imperialists and colonialists in invading other countries to talk about “protection of citizens” and “recovery of democracy.” The United States imperialists, who have regarded as a thorn in their flesh Grenada which is pursuing an independent and progressive policy in the Caribbean region, have long resorted to all dastardly tricks such as economic blockade, subversive acts and sabotages in an attempt to establish a pro-United States puppet regime in this country. Their armed invasion of Grenada this time is a brigandish criminal act designed to realize their wild ambition by force of arms. The situation in Grenada today clearly shows once again that United States imperialism is the most wicked and shameful aggressor in history, an international gendarme and disturber of world peace. The Government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Korean people sternly denounce the United States imperialists’ brigandish aggression on Grenada as an intolerable outrageous infringement upon the Grenadian people’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and as a heinous challenge to peace in the Caribbean region and the world and express full support and firm solidarity for the just struggle of the Grenadian people against the United States imperialist aggressors. The United States imperialists’ aggression on Grenada is evoking unanimous indignation among all the peace-loving countries and peoples of the world. The United States imperialists are now expanding armed intervention with each passing day against the peoples of Grenada and other countries in the Caribbean region, including Nicaragua, and rendering the situation in this region extremely acute. With no amount of desperate efforts, however, can they block the road ahead of the peoples in this region who are struggling against all manner of domination and subjugation and for national independence and Chajusong. The day has gone when the imperialists could arbitrarily invade and conquer small countries with the mobilization of huge armed forces and act as they wish. If the United States imperialists persist in their reckless aggressive and belligerent manoeuvres against the new emerging countries despite the unanimous denunciation of the Governments and peoples of the peace-loving countries of the world, they will be unable to escape a heavier blow. They must immediately stop their armed intervention and aggression against Grenada and withdraw from the country without delay.

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Source: UN Security Council, Document no. S/16087, “Letter dated 27 October 1983 from the Permanent Observer of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to the United Nations addressed to the President of the Security Council,” October 27, 1983, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/ UNDOC/GEN/N83/275/79/PDF/N8327579.pdf?OpenElement.

Document 5.8 Protesting U.S. Bases in the Philippines, 1983 At the very moment that the United States was extending its power into the Caribbean through the invasion of Grenada, people in the Philippines were opposing the preservation of U.S. power in the Pacific. The following is a declaration condemning the preservation of military bases in the Pacific. The result of the International Conference on Peace and the Removal of Foreign Bases, the declaration addressed itself to the entire Pacific region, but the movement had particular importance to the Filipinos who helped organize and host the event. The declaration combined a perspective on the cold war, nuclear arms, and national independence that was common throughout the developing world but was particularly important in the Philippines. In the same way that the Non-Aligned Countries had protested the U.S. invasion of Grenada, recently independent countries in the Pacific had been questioning whether the cold war alliances were merely a way to preserve neocolonial power. Likewise, they claimed that their own countries should not face the threat of nuclear annihilation in a conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

WE, the participants in the 1983 International Conference on General Disarmament, World Peace and Removal of all Foreign Military Bases held in Quezon City, Philippines, on October 24 to 26, 1983, coming from North America, Europe, Asia and the Pacific, REFLECTING UPON the consequences of the arms race, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the presence of foreign bases on the peoples of the world, particularly those in Third World countries in Asia and the Pacific, HEREBY DECLARE THAT: 1. The arms race is a scourge to humanity. This is particularly true with respect to developing and deploying newer and deadlier nuclear weapons such as the Tomahawk and the SS-20. These weapons have increased not security but insecurity. The desire of the super-powers to keep pace with one another has led to a tragic waste of human life and material resources, and can end only in a war that could extinguish human, animal and plant life as we know it today on this planet. 2. The renewed tensions between the super-powers has led to the abandonment of the strategy of mutual deterrence, and the adoption of the strategies of first strike capability. This has caused them to deploy nuclear and other weapons, ready for immediate use in their own and other countries, and to establish military bases in foreign countries, test each other’s will particularly in Third World countries of the Middle East and Asia. The tragic probability is that war, not of its own choosing or making, may break out in a Third World country, which will destroy it and ultimately the rest of the world. 3. We reject the concept of armed peace or nuclear deterrence and its corollaries like “nuclear war can be limited, controlled and won,” “rapid deployment forces” and “first

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strike capability,” and plans to use outer space for launching nuclear attacks. Even on the assumption that no nation would deliberately start a nuclear war, armed peace creates grave risks of such a war by accident, mistake, a misreading of the intentions or misinterpretation of the acts of a presumed enemy. 4. Armed peace is in fact war by governments on their own people. It requires governments to consume tremendous resources, manpower, time, capital and creativity in making or acquiring weapons of destruction, that soon become outmoded or obsolete and require continuous replacement. These expenditures have deprived the peoples of the world of a higher standard of living, and produced world tensions that have lowered the quality of life. They lead to the spread of militarism and the oppression of minorities, as the examples of the American Indian people and Third World communities in the United States and of the indigenous, ethnic minorities in other countries show. In the Third World particularly, as illustrated by the Philippines, more has been spent in the last decade on the military than on education and health. Had expenditures been devoted to human needs, there would be less hunger, disease, poverty and exploitation than exist today. 5. Foreign military bases are means of offense, not defense. In the Third World, they are instruments of imperialism and domination, not equality and justice among nations. The cases of Guam, Micronesia and the Philippines clearly illustrate this. Because of U.S. military bases, the people of Guam have been kept ignorant of their right to selfdetermination and prevented from exercising it; and the efforts of the people of Palau and Micronesia to exercise that right have been manipulated and frustrated. In the Philippines, military bases were imposed upon the people as a condition of the recognition of their independence, though there was no external threat to the nation’s security. They continue though no such threat exists today. In the 60s, the vague threat cited was the People’s Republic of China; today it is the USSR. But the one admitted purpose that has not changed is that the bases serve to project U.S. military power into the Indian Ocean and the Middle East to protect and to “control the sea lanes . . . to the rich resources of the East Indies.” That was said in 1969. Today, they serve, as the Commander of Clark Air Base said in January 1983, to “provide the punch to protect our (U.S.) trade initiatives and economic interests.” 6. Foreign military bases do not deter aggression, they provoke it. The presence of military bases of one super-power in a country leads to the establishment of similar bases by the other super-power in a neighboring country. Thus, U.S. naval and air bases in Subic and Clark Air Base in the Philippines have led to the use by the USSR of naval and air bases in Cam Ranh Bay and Danang in Vietnam. 7. Foreign military bases lead to the militarization of the societies of both the host country and the country operating the bases. The pretext for such bases is mutual defense. This requires that arms be supplied to the host country and this, in turn, requires increased development and production of arms by the dominant country. As a result, the temptation is great in other countries to solve political, economic and social problems by military repression rather than by democratic dialogue and consensus. In Japan, for example, military spending has increased greatly and the military mentality is becoming dominant because of the pressure of the U.S. government on the Japanese government

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to share the burdens of the domination of Asia. In the Philippines, in the early 70s, there was a clamor for reform, nationalist in character, that demanded among other things the dismantling of the U.S. bases. To quell these demands, martial law was imposed. After martial law, U.S. military and economic aid more than doubled. Martial law resulted in the total dismantling of the institutions of democracy in the Philippines—an independent judiciary, a freely elected Legislature, a free press, and freedom of assembly and expression. They have resulted in unjustified arrests, torture, unexplained disappearances and extra-legal executions, the most prominent and one of the more recent being the assassination of the opposition leader, Senator Benigno S. Aquino, Jr., while under custody of the military. 8. Foreign military bases prevent independent economic development of Third World countries which host such bases. Such development requires changes—often fundamental—in political, economic and social structures. These changes are opposed by those in power in the host country, and they are supported by the foreign power having bases there. As a result, foreign military bases inevitably support the status quo. Guam and the Philippines are cases in point. In the Philippines, the status quo has been characterized by an outmoded and archaic free wheeling capitalist system, functioning within the context of an equally outmoded and archaic free trade and free enterprise ideology. This system has perpetuated a social order marked by extreme concentration of wealth and a political economy that is grossly underdeveloped and dependent on the United States. Prior to martial law, Congress and an ongoing Constitutional Convention were in distinct and irreversible process of overhauling the socio-economic system. Such a process required a package of fundamental changes being demanded by a rising nationalist and anti-imperialist movement. The changes clearly called for the dismantlement not only of U.S. economic and financial monopoly in the Philippines, but also of the military bases. As mentioned, this challenge could be met, and aborted, only by dismantling the institutions of political democracy through which the reformist and nationalist movements were voicing and accomplishing their demands. 9. Foreign military bases distort the social and cultural values of the host country. This distortion is particularly virulent in the Third World. Foreign bases foster smuggling, drug abuse, and the exploitation of women and children. They create a psychology of import-oriented consumerism that is not only wasteful and inappropriate for the Third World but which also deepens their economic dependence. 10. The arms race, nuclear weapons and foreign military bases violate the moral sense of humanity. They are condemned by the religious of the world and by all peace-loving peoples. IN THE LIGHT of these conclusions, We resolve: 1. To maximize our individual and collective efforts for general disarmament, and particularly for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. 2. As steps towards such goals, to call for: (a) the immediate ban of all nuclear testing, particularly in Micronesia and the South Pacific; [a ban on] the production of nuclear weapons; and the denuclearization of Asia and the Pacific; (b) the immediate dismantling of all foreign military bases in Asia and the Pacific and the recall of all foreign troops to

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their homeland, in order to achieve a nuclear free, self-determined and non-aligned Asia and Pacific. 3. To call on the super powers categorically and unequivocally to abandon the preventive strategy of first strike. 4. To engage in educational campaigns, beginning in the home and the school, concerning the immorality, the risks and consequences of nuclear weapons, the arms race, foreign military bases, militarism and imperialism. 5. To encourage the creation and growth of peace movements in Asia and the Pacific, and establish closer and better coordination of efforts among peace movements all over the world. 6. To associate ourselves with the cause of the people of Guam, Palau, Micronesia, New Caledonia, Tahiti, other South Pacific countries, the Philippines and all other oppressed peoples of the world. UNANIMOUSLY APPROVED AND ADOPTED this 26th day of October 1983, at Quezon City, Philippines. Jose W. Diokno, Conference Chairperson Source: Declaration, 1983 Conference on Peace and Removal of Foreign Bases, in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 301–305.

Document 5.9 Barry Goldwater Criticizes William Casey, 1984 Among the chief goals of the Reagan administration was to bring down the government in Nicaragua. The administration began by offering material and organizational support to the local opposition, helping to create an armed guerrilla movement known as the Contras. In April 1984, Americans learned that the administration had also ordered a secret program of mining Nicaraguan harbors. Members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate were already critical of the administration’s Nicaraguan policy, but this news unleashed a new level of anger. Among the most surprising criticisms came from Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican. A staunch conservative and vocal anticommunist, his rhetoric had been so extreme that in the 1964 presidential election his campaign as the Republican nominee facing Lyndon Johnson ended in one of the most lopsided defeats in presidential election history. Goldwater addressed this letter to William Casey, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and chief architect of the Reagan administration’s covert operations in Latin America. Goldwater’s comments suggested the extent—and the limitations—of American opposition. Goldwater did not join other Americans who claimed the United States had no right to change the government of a foreign country. Instead, Goldwater’s anger emerged primarily from the fact that the administration was pursuing a foreign policy in violation of the law and, perhaps most important, without notifying Congress of its intentions.

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April 9, 1984. Hon. William J. Casey, Director of Central Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, DC. Dear Bill: All this past weekend, I’ve been trying to figure out how I can most easily tell you my feelings about the discovery of the President having approved mining some of the harbors of Central America. It gets down to one, little, simple phrase: I am pissed off! I understand you had briefed the House on this matter. I’ve heard that. Now, during the important debate we had all last week and the week before, on whether we would increase funds for the Nicaragua program, we were doing all right, until a Member of the Committee charged that the President had approved the mining. I strongly denied that because I had never heard of it. I found out the next day that the CIA had, with the written approval of the President, engaged in such mining, and the approval came in February! Bill, this is no way to run a railroad and I find myself in a hell of a quandary. I am forced to apologize to the Members of the Intelligence Committee because I did not know the facts on this. At the same time, my counterpart in the House did know. The President has asked us to back his foreign policy. Bill, how can we back his foreign policy when we don’t know what the hell he is doing? Lebanon, yes, we all knew that he sent troops over there. But mine the harbors in Nicaragua? This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war. For the life of me, I don’t see how we are going to explain it. My simple guess is that the House is going to defeat this supplemental and we will not be in any position to put up much of an argument after we were not given the information we were entitled to receive; particularly, if my memory serves me correctly, when you briefed us on Central America just a couple of weeks ago. And the order was signed before that. I don’t like this. I don’t like it one bit from the President or from you. I don’t think we need a lot of lengthy explanations. The deed has been done and, in the future, if anything like this happens, I’m going to raise one hell of a lot of fuss about it in public. Sincerely, Barry Goldwater, Chairman Source: Congressional Record 137 (1991), part 20, http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/ Z?r102:S05NO1-125:174164:30478:.

Document 5.10 Congress Debates Covert Operations in Nicaragua, 1984 What follows are excerpts from the Senate debate of April 10, 1984, and the House of Representatives debate of April 11. The Senate debate featured three leading figures in national politics. Edward M. Kennedy from Massachusetts, younger brother of President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert Kennedy, had been in the Senate for more

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than twenty years and had sought the Democratic presidential nomination himself in 1980. In contrast, Arlen Specter had joined the Senate only three years earlier, but he was already establishing himself as a major figure on judicial affairs and soon became one of the leading Senate Republicans. John Glenn, a Democrat from Ohio, had been a national hero since 1961 when he became the first American to orbit the Earth. A sample of speeches from the House suggests the arguments for and against a more aggressive policy toward the government of Nicaragua. John Seiberling had served as a Democratic representative from Ohio since 1971, and in November 1984 he won his last election before he retired from the House in 1987. In contrast, Dan Burton of Indiana was in his first term, but his comments on Nicaragua suggest the role he would later play as a leading House Republican on matters of foreign policy and national security. Republican Donald Ritter of Pennsylvania likewise argued that the United States enjoyed the right to change the government in Nicaragua in the broader interest of containing communism. Like Dan Burton, Sala Burton (no relation) was also serving her first term in the House. She came to Congress after a special election to fill the seat left by her husband, Phillip Burton, who died in 1983. She went on to win reelection twice before she died in 1987. April 10, 1984 Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, 2 weeks ago, I expressed the opinion that the debate we were about to have would be the most important debate we would have this session. Today, we are about to take a vote that could be the most significant vote of this decade. This vote is significant because it involves the lives of innocent people. Today, we will vote to save innocent lives, or we will vote to take innocent lives. With this vote, we will also determine whether the United States of America, under the direction of President Reagan, will continue its march toward war in Central America. With this vote, we will decide whether U.S. funds should continue to be used for—and whether U.S. personnel should continue to be involved in—the indiscriminate mining of territorial waters in Nicaragua. On March 29, just as our debate about Central America was beginning, we learned that U.S. personnel were being used on reconnaissance missions over El Salvador to assist the Salvadoran Army in combat with the guerrillas. And last Friday, after our debate had ended, we learned that U.S. personnel were being used to mine the harbors and territorial waters of Nicaragua. That same day, the Secretary of State quietly withdrew this Nation from the jurisdiction of the World Court with respect to disputes with Central American nations. But we did not know about that then, and we did not learn about that until yesterday. President Reagan is moving us toward war. He has moved U.S. citizens up to the edge of combat, and he has involved U.S. citizens in the hostilities. Last week, we debated whether the United States should continue to provide military assistance to the Contras in Nicaragua. Last week, on the floor of the Senate, we debated whether such assistance was in violation of international law. We were repeatedly assured that the Contras were not engaged in efforts to overthrow the Government of Nicaragua.

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We were repeatedly told that the Contras were not conducting a war to destroy the economic infrastructure of Nicaragua. If that were true, many Senators said, we would not be voting to support the Contras. And even the President of the United States got into the debate. He sent a letter in which he assured us that the United States did “not seek to destabilize or overthrow the government of Nicaragua; nor to impose or compel any particular form of government there.” But 2 days later, the United States of America withdrew from jurisdiction of the World Court. The question before the Senate is a fundamental one: Will we take any responsibility at all—or will we abdicate completely to the executive branch? Will we condone terrorism and sabotage? Will we let the Reagan administration pursue a policy of sneaking war into Central America? We have turned our backs on diplomacy. We have turned our backs on international law. Will the Senate watch passively as this administration sovietizes American foreign policy—as it adopts the standard that the end justifies the means—as it avoids our constitutional process and misleads the Congress? . . . The administration said we had no combat role in El Salvador. On March 29, we learned this was untrue—and that our forces were engaged in combat reconnaissance in that country. The administration said that we were not seeking to destabilize the Government of Nicaragua; we only sought to interdict arms and supplies for the rebels in El Salvador. Now we have learned that this is untrue—that we have mined a port far from any point of arms shipments to El Salvador—and that our mines may blow up the ships of our NATO allies. We know the evasions, the rationalizations, the fabrications, for we have heard them from this administration until they have become as tattered as they are untrue. We have no excuse for continued inaction. Let us end escalation by surprise in Latin America. Mr. SPECTER. Mr. President, I am voting in support of this amendment because I am concerned that the reported CIA involvement in the mining of Nicaraguan ports is part of a broader U.S. covert effort that effectively supports the overthrow of the Government of Nicaragua in violation of the Congress legislative statement of 1982. Last week I supported an amendment to delete $21 million for the covert war against Nicaragua While the official purpose of U.S. covert aid to Nicaraguan Contras is the interdiction of the flow of arms from Nicaragua to El Salvador, the express goal of the Contras is the overthrow of the Sandinista government. While it may be argued that the mining of Nicaraguan ports will help to interdict the flow of arms between Nicaragua and El Salvador, the effect of the mining goes beyond this limited goal. Mines are blind to the cargo and flag of the vessels that trigger them, damaging commercial vessels as easily as those transporting Soviet and Cuban armaments. I am concerned that our actions in and around Nicaragua have dangerous repercussions beyond our stated goals, and that our present involvement is contrary to the stated intent of Congress. The Congress has not declared war against Nicaragua, yet the mining of another nation’s harbors, like support

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for a group whose expressed objective is the overthrow of a government with which we have full diplomatic relations, may be interpreted as an act of war. If it is the will of American people to wage, either directly or indirectly, a war against the Government of Nicaragua, let Congress debate and so declare its intent. If it is not the intent of the United States to overthrow the Government of Nicaragua, let us not engage in support of activities that may be interpreted as acts of war. Mr. GLENN. Mr. President, I rise to state my strong support for Senator KENNEDY’s amendment—and to voice my strong opposition to administration policy. American participation in the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors is more than a mere contravention of international law. It constitutes a policy that is strategically wrong, politically stupid, and morally outrageous. It is a policy that comes dangerously close to being an act of war—and I say it is time for Congress to bring it to a halt. Let there be no mistake about what is at issue today. We are not talking about whether the United States should be involved in Central America—or about whether we should provide financial assistance to democratic elements in that region. I have long voiced my support for economic and military help to the governments of El Salvador and other central American countries—and so have a majority of my Senate colleagues. I have long voiced my concern over Nicaragua’s seeming desire to export revolution in that region—and so have a majority of my Senate colleagues. Like you, I believe the United States has an obligation to encourage the voices of moderation and democracy in Central America—and to discourage the forces of tyranny and dictatorship. But those goals are not at issue today. What is at issue is the Reagan administration’s cavalier attitude toward basic principles of international law. What is at issue is the administration’s continuing love affair with gunboat diplomacy and the politics of force. And what is at issue is the administration’s blatant disregard for Congress’ role in the making of U.S. foreign policy. Apparently, Mr. Reagan thinks that when it comes to the use of military force, the job of Congress is to keep its eyes closed, its checkbook open, and its mouth shut. He seems to think that it is all right to violate international law and to spit in the eyes of our allies and he apparently expects Congress to dutifully go along and do only what we are told. Well, I say enough is enough. I say the time has come for us to stand up and serve notice on this administration; to serve notice that we are not content to be silent partners in a misguided policy that ignores our national interests and betrays our national principles. Let us serve notice that when American lives are at stake, Congress can no longer be expected to first look the other way—and then to rally round this administration’s failures. By directing the CIA to participate in the mining of Nicaragua’s harbors, the Reagan administration has embarrassed the Congress and the country. It has put us in the ridiculous position of laying mines that our Western European allies may help to remove. It has put us in the preposterous position of attempting to topple at worst or bully at best a government we recognize and with whom we have diplomatic relations. And it puts us in the hypocritical position of opposing state-sponsored terrorism when it is directed

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against our friends—and of condoning and even conducting it when it is directed against our real or imagined enemies . . . April 11, 1984 Mr. SEIBERLING. Mr. Speaker, a lot has been said already on the illegal and ill-fated mining of the harbors in Nicaragua, done in secret without even informing the Speaker of the House or chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, BARRY GOLDWATER. The President in the meantime has been castigating the Congress for not supporting his foreign policy. BARRY GOLDWATER summed it up very well in his letter to the Chief of the CIA, he said: The President has asked us to support and defend his foreign policy, but how can we support his foreign policy when we do not even know what it is? . . . Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mr. Speaker, much criticism has been aimed at the administration because the CIA was involved in helping mine the harbors in Nicaragua. Was this necessary? Should we interdict war supplies going into and coming out of Nicaragua? Let us look at the facts. Fact No. 1: 15,000 tons of Soviet bloc war materials were sent to Nicaragua last year alone, a 60-percent increase. Fact No. 2: There are 102,000 soldiers and militiamen in the Sandinista army, more than twice the size of all the Central American armies combined, and they plan to more than double that. Fact No. 3: Umberto Ortega, the Defense Minister of Nicaragua, said they were working toward revolution from Costa Rica to Guatemala, all of Central America. Fact No. 4: There are four airfields being enlarged to handle Soviet Mig-23 jet fighter planes in Nicaragua. This President is trying to help Central American countries remain free. The Communists would take away those freedoms. If we do not support our President on this issue, the Communists will have their way in all of Central America and ultimately we will be directly involved because of congressional weakness . . . Mr. RITTER. Mr. Speaker, the Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan axis must be jumping for joy as they witness our lack of unity and our recriminations over the subject of foreign policy in the Central American region. The Soviet-Cuban-Nicaraguan axis, who themselves command and control the blowing up of powerplants, bridges, telephone lines, roads, and factories in El Salvador, must be Jumping for Joy as they witness our lack of unity over foreign policy in Central America. I ask the American people: Do they want a militaristic Soviet-armed Nicaragua threatening all the countries of Central America and, indeed, the United States itself? Critics in this House talk about potential for U.S. troop commitment. Well, I will tell you when we will have that troop commitment. It is when those who themselves would fight for freedom, those nationals of the Central American countries, have been deserted by their allies in this country;

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when nearly the entire Central America region is threatened by Soviet/Cuban domination, and that, my colleagues, would be a tragic result of the disunity that we show over foreign policy in Central America today. Are we sleepwalking? Can we not see what our adversaries are trying to do to all the Americas? Mrs. BURTON of California. Mr. Speaker, the U.S.-sponsored mining of Nicaragua’s ports is a violation of international law. The Reagan administration has admitted as much by refusing to accept the Jurisdiction of the World Court on Issues relating to our actions in Central America. I am shocked that the President of the United States would show so little respect for the law. The conflict in Central America is a result of years of poverty, violence, and repression. The mining of the ports of Nicaragua may harass the Government, but it is hurting those who we supposedly want to help; the poor, the hungry, and the children of that country. The United States has much to offer its neighbors, but military aggression will only make the people of Central America suspicious of any constructive assistance and will undermine efforts to elect more democratic, humanitarian governments in those countries. I commend the other body for overwhelmingly passing Senator KENNEDY’s resolution condemning U.S. participation in the mining of Nicaragua’s ports. It is time for the Congress to stop condoning the President’s actions by immediately ending all funding for his illegal adventures in Central America. Source: Congressional Record 130 (1984), part 6, 8536–8538; part 7, 8795–8797.

Document 5.11 National Security Directive 45, 1990 On August 2, 1990, Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait. Forty-eight hours later, the Kuwaitis capitulated. The military and government personnel who could escape fled to neighboring countries, especially Saudi Arabia. Kuwaiti citizens awaited the changes that might come about as a province of Iraq. In Washington, the Bush administration struggled for a response. That process began by weighing the benefits and disadvantages of opposing Iraq. The document that follows, a national security directive, is like many official documents that bear the president’s signature but is actually the work of numerous, anonymous staff members. In its review of the Iraqi invasion, the directive details the reasons why the United States should assert a role in the new crisis. Critical to this process was denying the notion that Iraq truly “owned” Kuwait. Unlike federal practice during the nineteenth century, when the United States openly acquired territory that it acknowledged as the property of other nations, in this case the United States claimed it was only liberating one country from the dictatorship of another. The directive also began the process of establishing the limits of U.S. involvement, a direct result of years in which other nations had criticized the United States for assuming imperial powers in other nations.

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THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON August 20, 1990 NATIONAL SECURITY DIRECTIVE 45 MEMORANDUM FOR

THE VICE PRESIDENT THE SECRETARY OF STATE THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE THE ATTORNEY GENERAL THE SECRETARY OF ENERGY THE DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET THE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS THE DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE THE CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF THE DIRECTOR, UNITED STATES ARMS CONTROL AND DISARMAMENT AGENCY THE DIRECTOR, UNITED STATES INFORMATION AGENCY

SUBJECT: U.S. Policy in Response to the Iraqi Invasion of Kuwait

U.S. Interests U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf are vital to the national security. These interests include access to oil and the security and stability of key friendly states in the region. The United States will defend its vital interests in the area, through the use of U.S. military force if necessary and appropriate, against any power with interests inimical to our own. The United States also will support the individual and collective self-defense of friendly countries in the area to enable them to play a more active role in their own defense. The United States will encourage the effective expressions of support and the participation of our allies and other friendly states to promote our mutual interests in the Persian Gulf region. On Thursday, August 2, 1990 the government of Iraq, without provocation or warning, invaded and occupied the State of Kuwait, thereby placing these vital U.S. interests at risk. Four principles will guide U.S. policy during this crisis: — the immediate, complete, and unconditional withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait;

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— the restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate government to replace the puppet regime installed by Iraq; — a commitment to the security and stability of the Persian Gulf; and, — the protection of the lives of American citizens abroad. To meet these principles and to bring the crisis to an immediate, peaceful, and just end, I hereby direct that the following diplomatic, economic, energy and military measures be undertaken.

Diplomatic The United States will continue to support the precepts of UNSC resolution 660 and 662 condemning Iraq’s invasion and subsequent annexation of Kuwait and calling for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Secretary of State should continue to work bilaterally with our allies and friends, and in concert with the international community through the United Nations and other fora, to find a peaceful solution to end the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait and to restore Kuwait’s legitimate government.

Economic Consistent with my authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the National Emergencies Act, the United Nations Participation Act, and section 301 of title 3 of the United States Code, the Executive Orders signed on August 2 and August 9, 1990 freezing Kuwaiti and Iraqi assets in this country and prohibiting transactions with Iraq and Kuwait remain in force. The Secretary of the Treasury, in consultation with the Secretary of State, should continue to take such actions, including the promulgation of rules and regulations, as may be necessary to carry out the purposes of these Orders. Furthermore, the United States will continue to support UNSC Resolution 661 imposing mandatory economic sanctions against Iraq and Kuwait under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. We will emphasize individual and collective compliance with these sanctions, but are prepared, if necessary, to enforce them in the exercise of our inherent right of individual and collective self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.

Energy The United States now imports nearly half the oil it consumes and, as a result of the current crisis, could face a major threat to its economy. Much of the world is even more dependent on imported oil and more vulnerable to Iraqi threats. To minimize any impact that oil flow reductions from Iraq and Kuwait will have on the world’s economies, it will be our policy to ask oil-producing nations to do what they can to increase production to offset these losses. I also direct the Secretaries of State and Energy to explore with the member countries of the International Energy Agency (IEA) a coordinated drawdown of strategic petroleum reserves, and implementation of complementary measures. I will continue to ask the American public to exercise restraint in their own consumption of oil

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products. The Secretary of Energy should work with various sectors of the U.S. economy to encourage energy conservation and fuel switching to non-oil sources, where appropriate and economic. Finally, I will continue to appeal to oil companies to show restraint in their pricing of crude oil and products. The Secretary of Energy, as appropriate, should work with oil companies in this regard.

Military To protect U.S. interests in the Gulf and in response to requests from the King of Saudi Arabia and the Amir of Kuwait, I have ordered U.S. military forces deployed to the region for two purposes: to deter and, if necessary, defend Saudi Arabia and other friendly states in the Gulf region from further Iraqi aggression; and to enforce the mandatory Chapter 7 sanctions under Article 51 of the UN Charter and UNSC Resolutions 660 and 661. U.S. forces will work together with those of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries to preserve their national integrity and to deter further Iraqi aggression. Through their presence, as well as through training and exercises, these multinational forces will enhance the overall capability of Saudi Arabia and other regional states to defend themselves. I also approve U.S. participation, in conjunction with the forces of other friendly governments, in two separate multinational forces that would provide for the defense of Saudi Arabia and enforce the UN mandated sanctions. These two groups will be called the Multinational Force for Saudi Arabia (MNFSA) and the Multinational Force to enforce sanctions (MNFES) against Iraq and Kuwait. The United States should coordinate closely with the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and others on the composition and organization of these forces. The MNFSA: The MNFSA is to deter aggression by Iraq against Saudi Arabia and other friendly Arab states in the Gulf, to ensure the territorial integrity and political independence of Saudi Arabia and other members of the GCC, and to conduct exercises and training to enhance the proficiency of Saudi forces in the defense of the Kingdom. Adequate legal basis exists under the UN Charter and UNSC resolutions for the implementation of multinational efforts. I do not believe it is necessary now for the United States to seek additional UN endorsement for the MNFSA. If I subsequently determined that further UN endorsement is required, we should ensure that any UN-led effort is acceptable to U.S. military commanders and an adequate command structure is established and operating beforehand. In concert with the other UNSC Permanent members, I authorize U.S. participation in discussions of the UN Military Staff Committee on the MNF operation for Saudi Arabia. If such talks are initiated, they should be of lower priority than talks concerning the MNFES. Soviet participation in the MNFSA is warranted only if the Saudis request it. If so, we should work with the Saudis to insure that the Soviet mission is acceptable to us and that Soviet forces are deployed at a distance from U.S. operations in these countries. Soviet assistance in providing lift support to others providing forces inside Saudi Arabia should be encouraged.

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The MNFES: The MNF to enforce economic sanctions against Iraq and Kuwait is designed to bring about the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, and to restore Kuwait’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity. Participating countries would seek to prevent the export of all commodities and products originating in Iraq or Kuwait, regardless of port of embarkation or transshipment point, and prevent the shipment to Iraq or Kuwait, regardless of declared port of destination or transshipment point, of any commodities or supplies whose provision to Iraq or Kuwait is contrary to UNSC Resolutions 660 and 661. These efforts should complement individual and collective compliance measures already in force. In accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter and UNSC resolutions 660 and 661, I hereby direct that all imports and exports, except medicines and food for humanitarian purposes (i.e., natural disasters) bound to and from Iraq and Kuwait be intercepted immediately. I direct the secretary of Defense to immediately organize and coordinate a multinational force as requested by the Government of Kuwait. U.S. forces, in coordination with other cooperating national forces, should take necessary action to intercept vessels on a case-by-case basis until sufficient U.S. and other forces are available for more comprehensive enforcement. I also approve the submission to Congress of a separate letter informing it of the character and basis for our intercept operations in keeping with my commitment to congressional consultations on matters of national importance. The GCC states and potential contributors to the MNFES should be notified of the implementation of the intercept operation. I also agree to Soviet participation in the MNFES. Since the UN Charter provides the legal basis for the conduct of this operation, I do not believe it is necessary now to obtain additional UN endorsement for the MNFES. Subject to the consent of the UNSC Permanent members, I agree to allow U.S. participation in discussions of the MNFES operation for enforcing sanctions against Iraq and Kuwait by the UN Military Staff Committee. [Signed] Gg Bush Source: National Security Directive 45, August 20, 1990, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, College Station, Texas, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/pdfs/nsd/nsd54.pdf.

Document 5.12 Congress and the U.S. Presence in the Middle East, 1990–1991 When Iraq invaded Kuwait, the United States committed itself first to containing Iraqi territorial ambitions and later to ejecting the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Before the United States could pursue the diplomatic and military means to that end, Congress and the executive engaged in extensive negotiations to determine the exact mandate of the United States. This was partly a matter of strategy, as the two branches of government sought common ground on American goals in the Middle East. But it was also a crucial constitutional question. It marked the first time the president of the United States initiated a major military operation since the passage of the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

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The congressional resolutions that follow therefore discuss more than just Iraq and Kuwait. They established the extent of U.S. commitment and the policymaking latitude of the Bush administration. They also attempted to reassert the American commitment to selfdetermination. After decades in which the peoples of old colonies had become suspicious of U.S. intentions, Congress had to develop wording that could combine the technical language of constitutional law with the vaunted promises of liberty.

JOINT RESOLUTION To support actions the President has taken with respect to Iraqi aggression against Kuwait and to demonstrate United States resolve. Whereas the Government of Iraq without provocation invaded and occupied the territory of Kuwait on August 2, 1990, has brutalized the population of Kuwait, has taken large numbers of innocent hostages, and has disregarded the rights of diplomats, all in clear violation of international law and the norms of international conduct; Whereas Iraq’s actions have caused great suffering among the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who have been displaced by this crisis; Whereas the President condemned Iraq’s unprovoked and naked aggression and undertook a series of actions, including imposing comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq and freezing Iraqi and Kuwaiti assets in the United States; Whereas the United Nations Security Council in a series of resolutions condemned these actions as blatantly unlawful, imposed mandatory economic sanctions (including maritime and air embargoes) designed to compel Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, called on all states to take appropriate measures to ensure that these sanctions are enforced, called for the immediate release of all hostages, strongly condemned aggressive acts perpetrated by Iraq against diplomatic premises and personnel in Kuwait, and reaffirmed the right of individual and collective self-defense in this situation; Whereas the President, in response to requests from governments in the region and in exercise of the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense as specified in the Charter of the United Nations, has deployed United States Armed Forces into and around the Arabian Peninsula as part of a multinational force that includes Arab, Islamic, nonaligned, North Atlantic Treaty Organization members, and other states to deal with this armed aggression, to protect American lives, and to assist in enforcement of sanctions and the defense of friendly states in the region; Whereas friends and allies have provided critical leadership in, and support for, the international efforts to impose sanctions on Iraq and otherwise oppose Iraqi aggression; and Whereas these actions have thus far deterred Iraq from initiating hostilities against other friendly states in the region or against United States forces: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This resolution may be cited as the ‘United States Policy on Iraqi Aggression Resolution.’

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SEC. 2. DECLARATION OF UNITED STATES OBJECTIVES AND POLICIES. (a) UNITED STATES OBJECTIVES- United States policy in the Persian Gulf, as stated by the President and hereby affirmed by the Congress, is directed toward— (1) the immediate, unconditional, and complete withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait; (2) the restoration of Kuwait’s legitimate government; (3) the security and stability of the Persian Gulf region; (4) the protection of American citizens abroad, and the release of all those held hostage by Iraq; and (5) the fostering of a new world order, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. (b) IMPORTANCE OF SECURITY AND STABILITY OF THE REGION- The United States and the international community recognize the importance of the security and stability of the Persian Gulf region and adequate access to its energy resources. The United States and the international community must continue to oppose Iraq’s armed aggression against Kuwait, a flagrant violation of international law which threatens global economic security and constitutes a serious challenge to international efforts to build a stable and peaceful environment in the post-Cold War era. (c) CONDEMNATION OF IRAQ—The United States and the international community— (1) should continue to condemn Iraq for its flagrant aggression, its abysmal human rights record, its support for international terrorism, its efforts to destabilize the region, its taking of civilian hostages, its terrorism of diplomats and violations of diplomatic premises, and its continuing efforts to develop and its demonstrated willingness to use weapons of mass destruction; and (2) should hold Iraq and its leaders accountable for such actions. (d) SUPPORT FOR DEPLOYMENT OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCESThe Congress— (1) supports the deployment by the President of United States Armed Forces to the Persian Gulf region in response to Iraq’s military aggression; (2) expresses its appreciation to and support for the members of the Armed Forces who have been deployed to that region and to the members of the Ready Reserve and the National Guard who have been ordered to active duty; and (3) declares its support for them as they perform their vital role in the achievement of United States objectives. (e) UNITED STATES EFFORTS TO PROMOTE INTERNATIONAL COOPERATIONThe Congress commends the President for his successful efforts to promote international consensus and cooperation in response to this crisis. The United States should continue its efforts to— (1) strengthen the international consensus against Iraq’s aggression, through broadening cooperation with the Soviet Union, other members of the international community, and the United Nations;

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(2) obtain additional and substantial commitments of air, sea, and ground forces from other nations in support of the multinational forces deployed in the Persian Gulf region in response to Iraq’s aggression; (3) obtain increased financial assistance and other support from other nations for those multinational forces; (4) obtain substantial tangible international assistance for those nations that have suffered financial losses as a result of their support for the United Nations trade embargo against Iraq; and (5) obtain adequate international humanitarian assistance for those foreign nationals who have fled Iraq and Kuwait. (f) OTHER UNITED STATES ACTIONS- The United States should also— (1) continue to seek international consensus— (A) to contain Iraq’s conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, and (B) to stop the export to Iraq of dual use technology and military components, including technology and components of direct or indirect United States origin; (2) continue to seek international consensus to address regional problems of arms proliferation, including conventional weapons, ballistic missiles, and weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons), and to seek to ensure that conventional weapons transfers to the region reflect legitimate security needs of the recipient nation; (3) continue its stated policy to maintain Israel’s economic well-being and qualitative military advantage in the Middle East (including through means such as technology transfers and defense cooperation), and continue its efforts to achieve an Arab-Israeli peace settlement; and (4) continue promoting respect for internationally recognized human rights and the rule of law, and support the development of democratic institutions, throughout the region. (g) SUPPORT FOR ACTIONS OF THE UNITED NATIONS—(1) COMMENDATION OF THE UNITED NATIONS- The United Nations should be commended for its timely, unified, and strong response to Iraq’s armed aggression against Kuwait. (2) COMMENDATION OF SECURITY COUNCIL MEMBERS- The member states of the United Nations Security Council who formulated a coordinated and unprecedented international policy response to Iraq’s aggression through the adoption of Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, and 668 should also be commended. (3) AFFIRMATION OF RESOLUTIONS- The Congress affirms its support for those Security Council resolutions. (4) INTERNATIONAL IMPLEMENTATION OF RESOLUTIONS- The Congress calls on all nations to fully support and comply with the resolutions adopted by the Security Council and to strengthen the enforcement of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations against Iraq.

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(5) CONTINUATION OF DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS- The United States and other members of the international community should continue efforts to achieve a diplomatic solution to the crisis in the Persian Gulf region through implementation of those resolutions.

SEC. 3. EFFORTS TO ACHIEVE UNITED STATES OBJECTIVES AND POLICIES. The Congress supports the President’s emphasis on diplomatic efforts, international sanctions, and negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations to achieve the United States objectives and policies set forth in section 2. The United States shall continue to emphasize the use of diplomatic and other nonmilitary means in order to achieve those objectives and policies, while maintaining credible United States and multinational deterrent military force.

SEC. 4. WAR POWERS FINDINGS. The Congress finds that— (1) on August 9, 1990, the President reported to the Congress that he had ordered the deployment of substantial elements of the United States Armed Forces into the Persian Gulf region in response to the threat posed by the actions of Iraq; (2) in this report, the President stated that the report was being provided ‘consistent with the War Powers Resolution’: (3) the War Powers Resolution requires, in sections 4(a)(2) and 4(a)(3), that the President report to the Congress whenever, in the absence of a declaration of war, United States Armed Forces are introduced into the territory, airspace, or waters of a foreign nation while equipped for combat (except for deployments which relate solely to supply, replacement, repair, or training of such forces) or are introduced in numbers which substantially enlarge United States Armed Forces equipped for combat already located in a foreign nation; (4) the War Powers Resolution also requires, in section 4(a)(1), that the President report to the Congress whenever, in the absence of a declaration of war, United States Armed Forces are introduced into hostilities or situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances; (5) consistent with that requirement, the President declared in his August 9th report, ‘I do not believe involvement in hostilities is imminent’; and (6) the President has consulted with the Congress and has kept the Congress informed with regard to the deployment of United States Armed Forces into the Persian Gulf region. Passed the House of Representatives October 1, 1990. Source: United States Policy on Iraqi Aggression Resolution, H. J. Res. 658, 101st Cong., 2d sess. (October 1, 1990), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c101:H.J.RES.658.EH:.

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JOINT RESOLUTION Calling for the removal of United States Armed Forces from the Middle East. Whereas the United States Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power to declare war; Whereas United States Armed Forces were introduced in August 1990 by the President into a situation in a foreign land and waters where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated, without consultation with Congress or a declaration of war by Congress; Whereas this deployment is a commitment of United States Armed Forces into a foreign nation for an unknown period of time; Whereas weapons have been fired in connection with ‘Operation Desert Shield’ in the Persian Gulf; Whereas at least fifteen Americans have lost their lives in connection with ‘Operation Desert Shield’; Whereas there has been no solidly defined and constant mission for United States troops in connection with ‘Operation Desert Shield’ in that— (1) the original deployment was purportedly to ensure the safety of Saudi Arabia and to prevent an Iraqi invasion of that country; (2) the basis for the original deployment has been altered to one of protection of American interests in the Gulf States’ oil supply and to Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait; (3) the effect of the deployment and the sanctions on the Nation’s economy as well as on the international community was neither analyzed nor planned; and (4) the wisdom of protecting foreign oil supplies as opposed to developing a national energy policy that would end dependence on foreign oil and the whims of foreign government officials has not been analyzed; Whereas the military force introduced by the President without consideration of the collective judgment of the Congress has escalated the tension and the potential for world war; Whereas the initial unilateral action by the President was taken without regard for the effects that diplomacy might have had to avert this crisis; and Whereas this deployment to the Middle East is subject to the limitations of the War Powers Resolution: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That— (1) the deployment of United States Armed Forces into certain hostilities in the Middle East is subject to the War Powers Resolution; (2) there has been no declaration of war, specific statutory authorization, or national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions or its armed forces justifying the President’s action in ordering the deployment of United States troops; and (3) therefore this deployment shall terminate at the earliest practicable date, but in no event later than October 1, 1990, and all United States Armed Forces deployed to the Middle East in connection with ‘Operation Desert Shield’ shall be withdrawn.

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Source: Calling for the Removal of United States Armed Forces from the Middle East, H. J. Res 645, 101st Cong., 2d sess. (September 5, 1990), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c101:H.J. RES.645.IH:.

JOINT RESOLUTION To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678. Whereas the Government of Iraq without provocation invaded and occupied the territory of Kuwait on August 2, 1990; and Whereas both the House of Representatives (in H.J. Res. 658 of the 101st Congress) and the Senate (in S. Con. Res. 147 of the 101st Congress) have condemned Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and declared their support for international action to reverse Iraq’s aggression; and Whereas Iraq’s conventional, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and its demonstrated willingness to use weapons of mass destruction pose a grave threat to world peace; and Whereas the international community has demanded that Iraq withdraw unconditionally and immediately from Kuwait and that Kuwait’s independence and legitimate government be restored; and Whereas the United Nations Security Council repeatedly affirmed the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense in response to the armed attack by Iraq against Kuwait in accordance with Article 51 of the United Nations Charter; and Whereas, in the absence of full compliance by Iraq with its resolutions, the United Nations Security Council in Resolution 678 has authorized member states of the United Nations to use all necessary means, after January 15, 1991, to uphold and implement all relevant Security Council resolutions and to restore international peace and security in the area; and Whereas Iraq has persisted in its illegal occupation of, and brutal aggression against Kuwait: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution.’

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES. (a) AUTHORIZATION- The President is authorized, subject to subsection (b), to use United States Armed Forces pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678 (1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, and 677.

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(b) REQUIREMENT FOR DETERMINATION THAT USE OF MILITARY FORCE IS NECESSARY- Before exercising the authority granted in subsection (a), the President shall make available to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President pro tempore of the Senate his determination— (1) that the United States has used all appropriate diplomatic and other peaceful means to obtain compliance by Iraq with the United Nations Security Council resolutions cited in subsection (a); and (2) that those efforts have not been and would not be successful in obtaining such compliance. (c) WAR POWERS RESOLUTION REQUIREMENTS—(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution. (2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution.

SEC. 3. REPORTS TO CONGRESS. At least once every 60 days, the President shall submit to the Congress a summary on the status of efforts to obtain compliance by Iraq with the resolutions adopted by the United Nations Security Council in response to Iraq’s aggression. Source: Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution, H. J. Res. 62, 102d Cong., 1st sess. (January 10, 1991), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c102:H.J.RES.62.IH:.

Document 5.13 Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, 1991 A linguist by training, Noam Chomsky had situated his understanding of languages at the center of his discussion of politics and society. A long-serving faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky has written numerous books that take an avowedly critical stance toward American public institutions. What follows is an excerpt from his 1991 book, Deterring Democracy. The passage captures what had become a common critique within academic and liberal political circles.

While domestic hawks and doves differ on tactical choices, they are in accord in preferring democratic forms, where this is feasible . . . Given the conventions of ideological warfare, it is quite possible to describe even the most brutal regimes as “democracies,” as long as they serve the goals of the policymakers. The example of the “fledgling democracies” of Central America is notorious . . .

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In the case of the Philippines, few seem to find it jarring to read an upbeat report on “the return of full democracy” to the country under the headline “Aquino’s decree bans Communist Party,” with a lead paragraph explaining that a presidential decree stipulated penalties of imprisonment for membership in the party, which had been legalized under the Marcos dictatorship . . . After many earlier interventions, Woodrow Wilson launched murderous counterinsurgency wars in Haiti and the Dominican Republic (Hispaniola), leaving the countries shattered and demoralized, the constitutional structure reduced to a mere farce, and American corporations able to “work their will” without legal impediments. In subsequent years, the US supported savage tyrants, turning against them only when they began to infringe upon US interests or lose their effectiveness, with direct intervention when necessary to ensure that events proceeded on their proper course . . . Similarly in Nicaragua, as the Marines pursued the “elusive bandit chief” Sandino, it was plain that we [were] continuing to act, as we always had, with “the best motives in the world,” the [New York] Times assured the reader . . . No less admirable is our record in Cuba, where we were able to “save the Cubans from themselves and instruct them in self-government,” granting them “independence qualified only by the protective Platt amendment,”—which “protected” US corporations and their local allies who turned the country into a US plantation, averting the threat of democracy and independent development. Source: Noam Chomsky, Deterring Democracy (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 279–281.

Document 5.14 Searching for a New Policy in Africa, 1992 By the summer of 1992, the Bush administration was scrambling to develop a new foreign policy. Despite American pleasure at the collapse of the Soviet Union and the military victory in the Gulf War, the end of the cold war meant that the old goals and familiar alliances would no longer apply. The following document establishes a series of questions for foreign policy makers as they contemplated how best to engage the nations of Africa. It also reveals the ways that accusations of imperialism could overlap and conflict. For decades, American policymakers feared that the newly independent republics of Africa would be easy targets for the Soviet Union. Poverty throughout the continent and suspicions of the old imperial powers did indeed make communism and Soviet support appear attractive to the new leadership class in Africa. American policymakers assumed Africans were simply being led down the path to a new kind of colonialism under the Soviets. But American policymakers were forced to acknowledge that many African leaders nonetheless saw the efforts by the United States as merely the latest effort to extend imperial power onto the continent.

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THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON June 15, 1992 NATIONAL SECURITY REVIEW 30 MEMORANDUM FOR

THE VICE PRESIDENT THE SECRETARY OF STATE THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE THE SECRETARY OF COMMERCE DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL SECURITY AFFAIRS DIRECTOR OF CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE CHAIRMAN, JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF ADMINISTRATOR, AGENCY FOR INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT DIRECTOR, UNITED STATES INFORMATION AGENCY

SUBJECT: American Policy Toward Africa in the 1990s In the three decades since the wave of decolonialization produced forty-five sub-Saharan countries, U.S. policy has been influenced by a combination of factors both external and internal to Africa. These factors are, however, changing dramatically. For example: Soviet striving for influence among African governments has declined substantially and changed in character. The estimate of the military significance of the sub-Sahara has diminished, especially in the aftermath of Desert Storm. U.S. domestic debate over the appropriate policy with respect to apartheid in South Africa has greatly abated. Rejection by African leaders of multi-party democracy as an acceptable political model has diminished with the emergence of freely elected governments in ten formerly oneparty states. The influence of socialist ideologies which favor state ownership and centralized economies to the detriment of economic development has waned dramatically. There is greater realization, both among donors and recipients, of the limited role outside assistance can play, and a more realistic assessment of the difficulty in modernizing African societies.

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Environmental awareness is growing in Africa, at the same time the continent’s ecological problems intensify. This changed situation requires a new look at U.S. policy in subSaharan Africa from the broad perspective of a new world order and from the bilateral perspective of our interests. The Policy Coordinating Committee on Africa is therefore directed to undertake a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward Africa. Detailed reviews of policy in African sub-regions such as the Horn or Southern Africa should be left for subsequent PCC action, but references should be made to these areas and issues to give balance and specificity to continent-wide perspectives. The review should be completed, and a NSD presented for Presidential signature no later than August 1, 1992.

PART I: ASSESSMENT —

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Assess our current policy course in light of changing circumstances and interests, e.g. promoting political and economic reform, countering violent instability, reducing narcotics and terrorist activities, and facing environmental problems. Define U.S. interests and objectives in Africa, including its strategic significance and relate them to global political, economic and military objectives. Analyze both current and future needs for access to important raw and strategic materials. Evaluate the significance of obtaining support from African governments for our international positions. Determine prospects for how we can best meet new demands for humanitarian assistance. Examine the prospects for cooperation and coordination with other developed nations to achieve our objectives, and the extent to which our interests diverge and competition is appropriate.

PART II: OPTIONS FOR POLICY Political — How can our policies contribute to widespread and sustainable democratization? — Does the goal of democratization conflict with other national security priorities, e.g. collective security, combating terrorism and narcotics, and nonproliferation? If so, how should these conflicts be resolved? — How can we best promote democracy and free markets? Should assistance be made conditional on progress in human rights, democracy, better governance and military downsizing? — Does Islamic extremism present a threat to U.S. interests and policy objectives in Africa and, if so, what is an appropriate response?

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Economic — Based on recent experience and our current emphasis on structural adjustment and economic policy reform, how can we maximize prospects for desired results? If they are not achieved, should changes be made in our approach? — Would greater economic integration serve our economic development objectives? — Since democratization can affect economic reforms and performance, how should U. S. programs and policies take this into account? How might the AIDS crisis affect economies and societies, and how can we take this into account? — What should be the role and priority of agriculture in African economies and how can we promote the proper balance between urban and rural policies? — How can we best help to reduce corruption and increase economic efficiency?

Commercial — What is the role of our private sector—industry and commerce—in Africa? What is the market potential and who are our competitors? Can the private sector and the USG assume a greater role in making Africa commercially viable? — Is our trade policy toward Africa adequate? — Should more be done within existing economic groupings such as the World Bank and the OECD to coordinate and encourage developed country investor interest? — Should we encourage intra-African trade and economic cooperation and, if so, how? — How can we encourage greater domestic capital investment? Security/conf1ict — What should be the role of the United States in conflict prevention and resolution? — What can we do to facilitate an African capability for conflict resolution? Should we encourage greater reliance on regional collective action, such as ECOWAS/ECOMOG? — What is the proper balance between our bilateral efforts, and those of international and regional organizations? In particular, what is the appropriate relationship between the U.S. and the UN, with its continent-wide and multifaceted efforts in Africa? — Should we be selective in the conflicts we attempt to resolve, and if so, what criteria should be applied? — What can be done, if anything, to reduce African refugee flows? Is our current relief for African refugees and those who are internally displaced adequate? Military — What is the proper role of the military in African societies and what can we do to encourage militaries to assume that role? What security assistance programs should we pursue in Africa? — Should we tie economic assistance levels to limits on military spending, as Japan and Germany wish to do?

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What strategic interests do we retain in the region and what resources and access do we require to protect those interests?

Borders — Should we continue to regard the sanctity of existing borders—those established in the colonial period—to be our fixed policy? — How should we balance territorial integrity and self-determination where these conflict? — What factors must we consider in evaluating proposals for the establishment of new, independent states?

Resources — Given current resource constraints, what should our priorities be? — Do we need to change either the kind or levels of assistance or the method of assistance delivery in Africa in light of the recommendations of this review? — Is the current number of AID missions, and the level of their staffing, appropriate? — What changes, if any, are warranted in our current policy of universal diplomatic representation in Africa, including the presence of agencies such as USIA, DOD and CIA? [Signed] Gg Bush Source: National Security Review 30, 15 June 1992, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, College Station, Texas, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/pdfs/nsr/nsr30.pdf.

Document 5.15 Reasserting and Redefining the American Relationship with Haiti, 1994 The following document is a resolution by the United Nations calling for an immediate end to the coup that had seized power in Haiti in 1991. U.N. Resolution 940 forms an important counterpoint to the U.N. declarations condemning the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. In theory, the circumstances were similar. In 1979, a coup installed a new government in Grenada that soon imposed an increasingly dictatorial regime. In 1991, a coup in Haiti installed a military dictatorship. In both cases, the United States used its power to restore the old governments, using force in Grenada in 1983 and the threat of force in Haiti in 1994. Nonetheless, there were important differences. In 1983, the United States acted unilaterally, and most outside observers saw this as an attempt to remove a Marxist regime that threatened U.S. power in the region. In 1994, the United States acted in concert with other nations, and, although restoring the government of Jean-Bertand Aristide preserved alliances between Haiti and the United States, there were fewer direct benefits to the United States.

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UN Security Council Resolution 940 Adopted by the Security Council at its 3413th meeting, on 31 July 1994 The Security Council . . . Condemning the continuing disregard of those agreements by the illegal de facto regime, and the regime’s refusal to cooperate with efforts by the United Nations and the Organization of American States (OAS) to bring about their implementation, Gravely concerned by the significant further deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Haiti, in particular the continuing escalation by the illegal de facto regime of systematic violations of civil liberties, the desperate plight of Haitian refugees and the recent expulsion of the staff of the International Civilian Mission (MICIVIH), which was condemned in its Presidential statement of 12 July 1994 (S/PRST/1994/32). . . Reiterating its commitment for the international community to assist and support the economic, social and institutional development of Haiti . . . Reaffirming that the goal of the international community remains the restoration of democracy in Haiti and the prompt return of the legitimately elected President, JeanBertrand Aristide, within the framework of the Governors Island Agreement, Recalling that in resolution 873 (1993) the Council confirmed its readiness to consider the imposition of additional measures if the military authorities in Haiti continued to impede the activities of the United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH) or failed to comply in full with its relevant resolutions and the provisions of the Governors Island Agreement, Determining that the situation in Haiti continues to constitute a threat to peace and security in the region, 1. Welcomes the report of the Secretary-General of 15 July 1994 (S/1994/828) and takes note of his support for action under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations in order to assist the legitimate Government of Haiti in the maintenance of public order; 2. Recognizes the unique character of the present situation in Haiti and its deteriorating, complex and extraordinary nature, requiring an exceptional response; 3. Determines that the illegal de facto regime in Haiti has failed to comply with the Governors Island Agreement and is in breach of its obligations under the relevant resolutions of the Security Council; 4. Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, authorizes Member States to form a multinational force under unified command and control and, in this framework, to use all necessary means to facilitate the departure from Haiti of the military leadership, consistent with the Governors Island Agreement, the prompt return of the legitimately elected President and the restoration of the legitimate authorities of the Government of Haiti, and to establish and maintain a secure and stable environment that will permit implementation of the Governors Island Agreement, on the understanding that the cost of implementing this temporary operation will be borne by the participating Member States;

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5. Approves the establishment, upon adoption of this resolution, of an advance team of UNMIH of not more than sixty personnel, including a group of observers, to establish the appropriate means of coordination with the multinational force, to carry out the monitoring of the operations of the multinational force and other functions described in paragraph 23 of the report of the Secretary-General of 15 July 1994 (S/1994/828), and to assess requirements and to prepare for the deployment of UNMIH upon completion of the mission of the multinational force; 6. Requests the Secretary-General to report on the activities of the team within thirty days of the date of deployment of the multinational force; 7. Decides that the tasks of the advance team as defined in paragraph 5 above will expire on the date of termination of the mission of the multinational force; 8. Decides that the multinational force will terminate its mission and UNMIH will assume the full range of its functions described in paragraph 9 below when a secure and stable environment has been established and UNMIH has adequate force capability and structure to assume the full range of its functions; the determination will be made by the Security Council, taking into account recommendations from the Member States of the multinational force, which are based on the assessment of the commander of the multinational force, and from the Secretary-General; 9. Decides to revise and extend the mandate of the United Nations Mission in Haiti (UNMIH) for a period of six months to assist the democratic Government of Haiti in fulfilling its responsibilities in connection with: (a) sustaining the secure and stable environment established during the multinational phase and protecting international personnel and key installations; and (b) the professionalization of the Haitian armed forces and the creation of a separate police force; 10. Requests also that UNMIH assist the legitimate constitutional authorities of Haiti in establishing an environment conducive to the organization of free and fair legislative elections to be called by those authorities and, when requested by them, monitored by the United Nations, in cooperation with the Organization of American States (OAS); 11. Decides to increase the troop level of UNMIH to 6,000 and establishes the objective of completing UNMIH’s mission, in cooperation with the constitutional Government of Haiti, not later than February 1996; 12. Invites all States, in particular those in the region, to provide appropriate support for the actions undertaken by the United Nations and by Member States pursuant to this and other relevant Security Council resolutions; 13. Requests the Member States acting in accordance with paragraph 4 above to report to the Council at regular intervals, the first such report to be made not later than seven days following the deployment of the multinational force; 14. Requests the Secretary-General to report on the implementation of this resolution at sixty-day intervals starting from the date of deployment of the multinational force; 15. Demands strict respect for the persons and premises of the United Nations, the Organization of American States, other international and humanitarian organizations and diplomatic missions in Haiti, and that no acts of intimidation or violence be directed against personnel engaged in humanitarian or peace-keeping work;

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16. Emphasizes the necessity that, inter alia: (a) All appropriate steps be taken to ensure the security and safety of the operations and personnel engaged in such operations; and . . . (b) The security and safety arrangements undertaken extend to all persons engaged in the operations; 17. Affirms that the Council will review the measures imposed pursuant to resolutions 841 (1993), 873 (1993) and 917 (1994), with a view to lifting them in their entirety, immediately following the return to Haiti of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide; 18. Decides to remain actively seized of the matter. Source: UN Security Council, Document no. S/RES/940 (1994), “Authorization to form a multinational force under unified command and control to restore the legitimately elected President and authorities of the Government of Haiti and extension of the mandate of the UN Mission in Haiti,” July 31, 1994, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N94/312/22/PDF/N 9431222.pdf?OpenElement.

Bill Clinton’s Address to the Nation on Haiti September 15, 1994 My fellow Americans, tonight I want to speak with you about why the United States is leading the international effort to restore democratic government in Haiti. Haiti’s dictators, led by General Raoul Cedras, control the most violent regime in our hemisphere. For 3 years, they have rejected every peaceful solution that the international community has proposed. They have broken an agreement that they made to give up power. They have brutalized their people and destroyed their economy. And for 3 years, we and other nations have worked exhaustively to find a diplomatic solution, only to have the dictators reject each one. Now the United States must protect our interests, to stop the brutal atrocities that threaten tens of thousands of Haitians, to secure our borders, and to preserve stability and promote democracy in our hemisphere and to uphold the reliability of the commitments we make and the commitments others make to us. Earlier today, I ordered Secretary of Defense Perry to call up the military reserve personnel necessary to support United States troops in any action we might undertake in Haiti. I have also ordered two aircraft carriers, the U.S.S. Eisenhower and the U.S.S. America into the region. I issued these orders after giving full consideration to what is at stake. The message of the United States to the Haitian dictators is clear: Your time is up. Leave now, or we will force you from power. I want the American people to understand the background of the situation in Haiti, how what has happened there affects our national security interests and why I believe we must act now. Nearly 200 years ago, the Haitian people rose up out of slavery and declared their independence. Unfortunately, the promise of liberty was quickly snuffed out, and ever since, Haiti has known more suffering and repression than freedom. In our time, as democracy has spread throughout our hemisphere, Haiti has been left behind.

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Then, just 4 years ago, the Haitian people held the first free and fair elections since their independence. They elected a parliament and a new President, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest who received almost 70 percent of the vote. But 8 months later, Haitian dreams of democracy became a nightmare of bloodshed. General Raoul Cedras led a military coup that overthrew President Aristide, the man who had appointed Cedras to lead the army. Resistors were beaten and murdered. The dictators launched a horrible intimidation campaign of rape, torture, and mutilation. People starved; children died; thousands of Haitians fled their country, heading to the United States across dangerous seas. At that time, President Bush declared the situation posed, and I quote, “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” Cedras and his armed thugs have conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests. As the dictators have grown more desperate, the atrocities have grown ever more brutal. Recent news reports have documented the slaying of Haitian orphans by the nation’s deadly police thugs. The dictators are said to suspect the children of harboring sympathy toward President Aristide for no other reason than he ran an orphanage in his days as a parish priest. The children fled the orphanages for the streets. Now they can’t even sleep there because they’re so afraid. As one young boy told a visitor, “I do not care if the police kill me because it only brings an end to my suffering.” . . . In July the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution that authorizes the use of all necessary means, including force, to remove the Haitian dictators from power and restore democratic government. Still, we continued to seek a peaceful solution, but the dictators would not even meet with the United Nations Special Envoy. In the face of this continued defiance and with atrocities rising, the United States has agreed to lead a multinational force to carry out the will of the United Nations. More than 20 countries from around the globe, including almost all the Caribbean community and nations from as far away as Poland, which has so recently won its own freedom, Israel and Jordan, which have been struggling for decades to preserve their own security, and Bangladesh, a country working on its own economic problems, have joined nations like Belgium and Great Britain. They have all agreed to join us because they think this problem in our neighborhood is important to their future interests and their security. I know that the United States cannot, indeed we should not, be the world’s policemen. And I know that this is a time with the cold war over that so many Americans are reluctant to commit military resources and our personnel beyond our borders. But when brutality occurs close to our shores, it affects our national interests. And we have a responsibility to act. . . . Today, 33 of the 35 countries in the Americas have democratically elected leaders. And Haiti is the only nation in our hemisphere where the people actually elected their own government and chose democracy, only to have tyrants steal it away. There’s no question that the Haitian people want to embrace democracy; we know it because they went to the ballot box and told the world. History has taught us that preserving democracy in our own hemisphere strengthens America’s security and prosperity. Democracies here are more likely to keep the peace and to stabilize our region. They’re more likely to create free markets and economic opportunity, and to

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become strong, reliable trading partners. And they’re more likely to provide their own people with the opportunities that will encourage them to stay in their nation and to build their own futures. Restoring Haiti’s democratic government will help lead to more stability and prosperity in our region, just as our actions in Panama and Grenada did. Beyond the human rights violations, the immigration problems, the importance of democracy, the United States also has strong interests in not letting dictators, especially in our own region, break their word to the United States and the United Nations. In the post-cold-war world, we will assure the security and prosperity of the United States with our military strength, our economic power, our constant efforts to promote peace and growth. But when our national security interests are threatened, we will use diplomacy when possible and force when necessary. In Haiti, we have a case in which the right is clear, in which the country in question is nearby, in which our own interests are plain, in which the mission is achievable and limited, and in which the nations of the world stand with us. We must act. Our mission in Haiti, as it was in Panama and Grenada, will be limited and specific. Our plan to remove the dictators will follow two phases. First, it will remove dictators from power and restore Haiti’s legitimate, democratically elected government. We will train a civilian-controlled Haitian security force that will protect the people rather than repress them. During this period, police monitors from all around the world will work with the authorities to maximize basic security and civil order and minimize retribution. The Haitian people should know that we come in peace. And you, the American people, should know that our soldiers will not be involved in rebuilding Haiti or its economy. The international community, working together, must provide that economic, humanitarian, and technical assistance necessary to help the Haitians rebuild. When this first phase is completed, the vast majority of our troops will come home, in months, not years. I want our troops and their families to know that we’ll bring them home just as soon as we possibly can. Then, in the second phase, a much smaller U.S. force will join forces from other members of the United Nations. And their mission will leave Haiti after elections are held next year and a new Haitian government takes office in early 1996 . . . In closing, let me say that I know the American people are rightfully concerned whenever our soldiers are put at risk. Our volunteer military is the world’s finest, and its leaders have worked hard to minimize risks to all our forces. But the risks are there, and we must be prepared for that . . . Let me say again, the nations of the world have tried every possible way to restore Haiti’s democratic government peacefully. The dictators have rejected every possible solution. The terror, the desperation, and the instability will not end until they leave. Once again, I urge them to do so. They can still move now and reduce the chaos and disorder, increase the security, the stability, and the safety in which this transfer back to democracy can occur. But if they do not leave now, the international community will act to honor our commitments; to give democracy a chance, not to guarantee it; to remove stubborn and cruel dictators, not to impose a future. I know many people believe that we shouldn’t help the Haitian people recover their democracy and find their hard-won freedoms, that the Haitians should accept the

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violence and repression as their fate. But remember, the same was said of a people who more than 200 years ago took up arms against a tyrant whose forces occupied their land. But they were a stubborn bunch, a people who fought for their freedoms and appealed to all those who believed in democracy to help their cause. And their cries were answered, and a new nation was born, a nation that ever since has believed that the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should be denied to none. May God bless the people of the United States and the cause of freedom. Good night. Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton, 1994, Book II (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1995), 1558–1561.

Document 5.16 The Government’s View on Indian Sovereignty, 1995 The following document captures the ambiguous legal status of Indian tribes and attempts to find a new language for explaining that status. In 1995, following a series of meetings between tribal leaders and members of the Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno issued the following statement. By acknowledging both the validity of Indian sovereignty and the long history of abuse at the hands of the federal government, the statement demonstrated how a generation of political mobilization and shifting cultural attitudes within the United States had changed the way government officials discussed Native Americans. At the same time, the document steadfastly preserved the status quo, asserting that the federal government still enjoyed various forms of political power over tribal lands. The document also acknowledged the mixed legal status of Indians, who were at one moment U.S. citizens accountable to state and federal authority but who were also members of tribes that, if they lived on land governed by tribal governments, operated in very different political circumstances.

Office of the Attorney General Washington, D.C. 20530 DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE POLICY ON INDIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND GOVERNMENT-TO-GOVERNMENT RELATIONS WITH INDIAN TRIBES PURPOSE: To reaffirm the Department’s recognition of the sovereign status of federally recognized Indian tribes as domestic dependent nations and to reaffirm adherence to the principles of government-to-government relations; to inform Department personnel, other federal agencies, federally recognized Indian tribes, and the public of the Department’s working relationships with federally recognized Indian tribes; and to guide the Department in its work in the field of Indian affairs.

I. INTRODUCTION From its earliest days, the United States has recognized the sovereign status of Indian tribes as domestic dependent nations. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1, 17 (1831).

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Our Constitution recognizes Indian sovereignty by classing Indian treaties among the “supreme law of the land,” and establishes Indian affairs as a unique area of federal concern. In early Indian treaties, the United States pledged to “protect” Indian tribes, thereby establishing one of the bases for the federal trust responsibility in our government-togovernment relations with Indian tribes. These principles continue to guide our national policy towards Indian tribes. A. THE EXECUTIVE MEMORANDUM ON GOVERNMENT-TOGOVERNMENT RELATIONS BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND INDIAN TRIBES On April 29, 1994, at a historic meeting with the heads of tribal governments, President Clinton reaffirmed the United States’ “unique legal relationship with Native American tribal governments” and issued a directive to all executive departments and agencies of the Federal Government that: As executive departments and agencies undertake activities affecting Native American tribal rights or trust resources, such activities should be implemented in a knowledgeable, sensitive manner respectful of tribal sovereignty.

President Clinton’s directive requires that in all activities relating to or affecting the government or treaty rights of Indian tribes, the executive branch shall: 1) operate within a government-to-government relationship with federally recognized Indian tribes; 2) consult, to the greatest extent practicable and permitted by law, with Indian tribal governments before taking actions that affect federally recognized Indian tribes; 3) assess the impact of agency activities on tribal trust resources and assure that tribal interests are considered before the activities are undertaken; 4) remove procedural impediments to working directly with tribal governments on activities that affect trust property or governmental rights of the tribes; and 5) work cooperatively with other agencies to accomplish these goals established by the President. The Department of Justice is reviewing programs and procedures to ensure that we adhere to principles of respect for Indian tribal governments and honor our Nation’s trust responsibility to Indian tribes. Within the Department, the Office of Tribal Justice has been formed to coordinate policy towards Indian tribes both within the Department and with other agencies of the Federal Government, and to assist Indian tribes as domestic dependent nations within the federal system.

B. FEDERAL INDIAN SELF-DETERMINATION POLICY President Clinton’s executive memorandum builds on the firmly established federal policy of self-determination for Indian tribes. Working together with Congress, previous Presidents affirmed the fundamental policy of federal respect for tribal selfgovernment. President Johnson recognized “the right of the first Americans . . . to

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freedom of choice and self-determination.” President Nixon strongly encouraged “self-determination among the Indian people.” President Reagan pledged “to pursue the policy of self-government” for Indian tribes and reaffirmed “the government-to-government basis” for dealing with Indian tribes. President Bush recognized that the Federal Government’s “efforts to increase tribal selfgovernance have brought a renewed sense of pride and empowerment to this country’s native peoples.”

II. PRINCIPLES OF INDIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND THE TRUST RESPONSIBILITY Though generalizations are difficult, a few basic principles provide important guidance in the field of Indian affairs: 1) the Constitution vests Congress with plenary power over Indian affairs; 2) Indian tribes retain important sovereign powers over their members and their territory, subject to the plenary power of Congress; and 3) the United States has a trust responsibility to Indian tribes, which guides and limits the Federal Government in dealings with Indian tribes. Thus, federal and tribal law generally have primacy over Indian affairs in Indian country, except where Congress has provided otherwise.

III. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE RECOGNITION OF INDIAN SOVEREIGNTY AND THE FEDERAL TRUST RESPONSIBILITY The Department resolves that the following principles will guide its interactions with the Indian tribes. A. THE SOVEREIGNTY OF INDIAN TRIBES The Department recognizes that Indian tribes as domestic dependent nations retain sovereign powers, except as divested by the United States, and further recognizes that the United States has the authority to restore federal recognition of Indian sovereignty in order to strengthen tribal self-governance. The Department shall be guided by principles of respect for Indian tribes and their sovereign authority and the United States’ trust responsibility in the many ways in which the Department takes action on matters affecting Indian tribes. For example, the Department reviews proposed legislation, administers funds that are available to tribes to build their capacity to address crime and crime-related problems in Indian country, and in conjunction with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and tribal police, provides essential law enforcement in Indian country. The Department represents the United States, in coordination with other federal agencies, in litigation brought for the benefit of Indian tribes and individuals, as well as in litigation by Indian tribes or individuals against the United States or its agencies. In litigation as in other matters, the Department may take actions and positions affecting Indian tribes with which one or more tribes may disagree. In all situations, the Department will carry out its responsibilities consistent with the law and this policy statement.

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B. GOVERNMENT-TO-GOVERNMENT RELATIONSHIPS WITH INDIAN TRIBES In accord with the status of Indian tribes as domestic dependent nations, the Department is committed to operating on the basis of government-to-government relations with Indian tribes. Consistent with federal law and other Departmental duties, the Department will consult with tribal leaders in its decisions that relate to or affect the sovereignty, rights, resources or lands of Indian tribes. Each component will conduct such consultation in light of its mission. In addition, the Department has initiated national and regional listening conferences and has created the Office of Tribal Justice to improve communications with Indian tribes. In the Offices of the United States Attorneys with substantial areas of Indian country within their purview, the Department encourages designation of Assistant U.S. Attorneys to serve as tribal liaisons. In order to fulfill its mission, the Department of Justice endeavors to forge strong partnerships between the Indian tribal governments and the Department. These partnerships will enable the Department to better serve the needs of Indian tribes, Indian people, and the public at large.

C. SELF-DETERMINATION AND SELF-GOVERNANCE The Department is committed to strengthening and assisting Indian tribal governments in their development and to promoting Indian self-governance. Consistent with federal law and Departmental responsibilities, the Department will consult with tribal governments concerning law enforcement priorities in Indian country, support duly recognized tribal governments, defend the lawful exercise of tribal governmental powers in coordination with the Department of the Interior and other federal agencies, investigate government corruption when necessary, and support and assist Indian tribes in the development of their law enforcement systems, tribal courts, and traditional justice systems.

D. TRUST RESPONSIBILITY The Department acknowledges the federal trust responsibility arising from Indian treaties, statutes, executive orders, and the historical relations between the United States and Indian tribes. In a broad sense, the trust responsibility relates to the United States’ unique legal and political relationship with Indian tribes. Congress, with plenary power over Indian affairs, plays a primary role in defining the trust responsibility, and Congress recently declared that the trust responsibility “includes the protection of the sovereignty of each tribal government.” 25 U.S.C. § 3601. The term “trust responsibility” is also used in a narrower sense to define the precise legal duties of the United States in managing prosperity and resources of Indian tribes and, at times, of individual Indians. The trust responsibility, in both senses, will guide the Department in litigation, enforcement, policymaking and proposals for legislation affecting Indian country, when appropriate to the circumstances. As used in its narrower sense, the federal trust

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responsibility may be justiciable in some circumstances, while in its broader sense the definition and implementation of the trust responsibility is committed to Congress and the Executive Branch. E. PROTECTION OF CIVIL RIGHTS Federal law prohibits discrimination based on race or national origin by the federal, state and local governments, or individuals against American Indians in such areas as voting, education, housing, credit, public accommodations and facilities, employment, and in certain federally funded programs and facilities. Various federal criminal civil rights statutes also preserve personal liberties and safety. The existence of the federal trust responsibility towards Indian tribes does not diminish the obligation of state and local governments to respect the civil rights of Indian people. Through the Indian Civil Rights Act, Congress selectively has derived essential civil rights protections from the Bill of Rights and applied them to Indian tribes. 25 U.S.C. § 1301. The Indian Civil Rights Act is to be interpreted with respect for Indian sovereignty. The primar y responsibility for enforcement of the Act is invested in the tribal courts and other tribal fora. In the criminal law context, federal courts have authority to decide habeas corpus petitions after tribal remedies are exhausted. The Department of Justice is fully committed to safeguarding the constitutional and statutory rights of American Indians, as well as all other Americans. F. PROTECTION OF TRIBAL RELIGION AND CULTURE The mandate to protect religious liberty is deeply rooted in this Nation’s constitutional heritage. The Department seeks to ensure that American Indians are protected in the observance of their faiths. Decisions regarding the activities of the Department that have the potential to substantially interfere with the exercise of Indian religions will be guided by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, as well as by statutes which protect the exercise of religion such as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. The Department also recognizes the significant federal interest in aiding tribes in the preservation of their tribal customs and traditions. In performing its duties in Indian country, the Department will respect and seek to preserve tribal cultures.

IV. DIRECTIVE TO ALL COMPONENTS OF THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE The principles set out here must be interpreted by each component of the Department of Justice in light of its respective mission. Therefore, each component head shall make all reasonable efforts to ensure that the component’s activities are consistent with the above sovereignty and trust principles. The component heads shall circulate this policy to all attorneys in the Department to inform them of their responsibilities. Where the activities and internal procedures of the components can be reformed to ensure greater consistency

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with this Policy, the component head shall undertake to do so. If tensions arise between these principles and other principles which guide the component in carrying out its mission, components will develop, as necessary, a mechanism for resolving such tension to ensure that tribal interests are given due consideration. Finally, component heads will appoint a contact person to work with the Office of Tribal Justice in addressing Indian issues within the component.

V. DISCLAIMER This policy is intended only to improve the internal management of the Department and is not intended to create any right enforceable in any cause of action by any party against the United States, its agencies, officers, or any person. Janet Reno Attorney General Date: June 1, 1995 Source: Department of Justice Policy on Indian Sovereignty and Government-to-Government Relations with Indian Tribes, Office of the Attorney General, U.S. Department of Justice, June 1, 1995, http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/readingroom/sovereignty.htm.

Document 5.17 Revisiting the Debate on Puerto Rico’s Political Status, 1997 In 1998, Puerto Rico held the latest in a series of plebiscites intended to determine the island’s political status. Previous plebiscites had given Puerto Ricans a choice of ongoing commonwealth status, statehood, or independence. Voter turnout for these plebiscites was consistently low, with the majority always voting in favor of the commonwealth. People interpreted those returns numerous ways. Some claimed the low turnout reflected public opposition to the wording of the referendum, which was always rigged to preserve the commonwealth by guaranteeing the loss of important federal benefits if Puerto Rico became a state or an independent nation. Others argued that Puerto Ricans were pressured not to vote, but the election results indicated that they preferred the commonwealth regardless of efforts by political activists. In 1997, Congress held an extensive field hearing into the political status of Puerto Rico before the 1998 plebiscite. The excerpts that follow suggest not only the terms of debate in Puerto Rico, but also the diversity of opinion. Although some speakers followed the traditional independence-or-commonwealth lines, these three speakers had different concerns. Miriam Ramirez de Ferrer criticized the structure of political parties in Puerto Rico, claiming that the debate over political status was a farce designed to preserve entrenched interests. Two attorneys— Ramon Velasco and Hector Quijano Borges—disagreed on the issue of political status, but both shared a similar concern about the development of legal institutions within Puerto Rico. When Puerto Ricans went to the polls in 1998, fewer than one-tenth of 1 percent of voters endorsed the commonwealth. Independence was similarly unpopular, receiving less than 3 percent. Almost one-half, 46 percent, chose statehood. But the majority—just over

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50 percent—chose “none of the above.” In the end, the 1998 referendum left Puerto Rico in a political limbo that, in the absence of a clear mandate, preserved the commonwealth system that so few voters had chosen.

STATEMENT OF DR. MIRIAM J. RAMIREZ DE FERRER, MD, PRESIDENT, PUERTO RICANS IN CIVIC ACTION, MAYAGUEZ, PUERTO RICO During all these years, we have visited Washington many times to tell you about the tangled web of local party status politics and to explain how failure to solve the status issue has crippled the social and economic development of Puerto Rico. It has been frustrating, because those who want to preserve their political power and profit by preser ving the status quo have had tremendous ability to influence Congress. Today I am filled with that sense of peace that comes in the struggle for liberty, when the truth is finally revealed. I know the behavior of some of the audience at the hearing in San Juan was not as dignified as it should have been, but the Committee did the right thing by allowing the pro-commonwealth faction to show their true colors. That political faction in Puerto Rico went beyond cheering for their champions and showed disrespect for witnesses in the process. However, it was not spontaneous, it was a well-orchestrated event meant to disrupt the hearings and reduce the time allotted for questions and other witnesses. As a matter of fact, the San Juan Star said in yesterday’s edition, “When the panel of pro-commonwealth witnesses completed its turn before the panel, dozens of the PDP faithful left. And that brought almost to an end the noise and disruption.” That is why self-determination should not be a transaction exclusively between Congress and the Puerto Rico political parties. People have consistently voted for a status change in all referendums and against the status quo. The status quo does not have the support of the majority of the people of Puerto Rico. That is why it is imperative that a process for self-determination be established. At the end, it will be an individual choice between the United States citizens in Puerto Rico who will exercise the right to selfdetermination in the privacy of a voting booth. At the San Juan hearing you heard the bizarre theories of sovereignty and tortured logic of the autonomous doctrine. It is a passive aggressive dogma that in a military tone demands recognition of a separate national sovereignty, but claims victimization at the mere suggestion that separate nationality might mean separate citizenship. It is a schizophrenic political identity which enables the aristocracy of the colonial era to perpetuate its political power by pretending that such aristocracy is the champion of Puerto Rico dignity. The discussion of status under the Young bill has unfolded the truth about the proposals of commonwealth exponents. Don’t take it from me. You heard it yourself. Their theory is that since all people have inherent sovereignty, and this is recognized by the United Nations’ resolutions and the United States Constitution, then Puerto Rico

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has a form of separate sovereignty. They take that half truth and pretend that the local sovereignty and internal autonomy that Puerto Rico has under the territorial clause of the Constitution approved in 1952 is the same as national sovereignty for Puerto Rico. This makes a mockery of the United States national sovereignty under the Treaty of Paris and the territorial clause. Again, they have revealed their false theory to Congress, asserting that local autonomy granted by Congress is a form of national sovereignty that puts Puerto Rico on the plane of bilateral, sovereign-to-sovereign, nation-to-nation level of mutuality with the United States. But when they say “mutual consent,” they mean that the political relationship of Puerto Rico and the United States is permanent because Congress agreed to a local constitution in 1952. According to them, through this, Congress gave up its sovereign power and consented to make nonincorporation a permanent union and binding status for Puerto Rico with permanent United States citizenship. Their theory ignores constitutional supremacy. No matter what Public Law 600 is purported to do, the constitutional supremacy clause prevails. They also told you that Congress has the power to improve, enhance, and develop Puerto Rico, but no authority to require Puerto Rico to contribute to the Union. That arrogant demand is what some now are calling “reverse colonialism.” According to these political leaders, the United States has national sovereignty only to the extent delegated by the Nation of Puerto Rico. But listen to this, even though the 10th Amendment does not apply to Puerto Rico, if Congress exercises its constitutional authority under the territorial clause, you heard them Saturday, they make the childish threat to take you to court. You also heard the politics of shouting down all who question their opportunistic ideology imposed on us by the strident, shrill and uncivil pro-commonwealth representatives. I will leave you with just one thought. My message is simple. Although the United States Federal Government contributed to the problem by going along with the myth and allowing the colonial situation to be perpetuated, the United States did not do this to Puerto Rico. The leadership of the pro-commonwealth party was the driving force in creating this problem because they do not have the courage to face a real choice between citizenship under United States national sovereignty and separate national sovereignty with separate citizenship. The real challenge for the people in self-determination is to take the responsibility for solving our own problems. Commonwealthers have tried for 40 years to propose a status which does not exist. Now we need to face the real choices. What we need is for Congress to set aside the myth and point out the realities. Please define the options available and we can do the rest ourselves. The people of Puerto Rico have great faith that this particular effort will put an end to our divisive status discussion and uncertainty about our future. Thank you very much . . .

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STATEMENT OF RAMON L. VELASCO, ASSOCIATION OF PRO-COMMONWEALTH ATTORNEYS, BAYAMON, PUERTO RICO Mr. VELASCO. Good afternoon, members of the Committee. I represent the Association of Pro-Commonwealth Attorneys. The Association of Pro-Commonwealth Attorneys appears before the Committee today in order to participate in this congressional hearing on H.R. 856. We believe it is important to point out to this Committee that there are several basic findings included in the bill that, in our opinion, are incorrect or inconsistent with the law as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court and other Federal court decisions. In 1950, the U.S. Congress enacted Public Law 600, which enabled the people of Puerto Rico to make a constitution to cover its internal af fairs consistent with the American democratic tradition of government by the consent of the governed. The act itself was submitted to and approved by the people of Puerto Rico. Public Law 600 declared that when the Constitution was approved, the organic provisions of the Jones Act would be automatically repealed. The Constitution was approved by Public Law 447 as a pact between Congress and the people of Puerto Rico. Through this process, the people of Puerto Rico achieved full self-government. The Federal Government’s relations with Puerto Rico changed from being bounded by merely the territorial clause and the rights of a people of Puerto Rico as United States citizens, to being bounded by the United States and Puerto Rico Constitutions, Public Law 600, the Federal Relations Act, and the rights of the people of Puerto Rico as United States citizens. Federal statutes, U.S. Government official positions, and judicial interpretations provide a clear picture of Commonwealth. It is a political status that created a body politic, with autonomy and sovereignty over local matters of a nature equal to a state. This authority has recognized a compact that cannot be changed unilaterally, because the term “compact” implies or presupposes a bilateral agreement. In view of this history of judicial interpretations and U.S. Government official positions, we think it should be clear that Puerto Rico has achieved self-government and that its autonomy and sovereignty are equal to those normally attributed to a State. It is therefore a mistake to base this bill on the assumption that the only alternative to full selfgovernment is the one included in the bill. The Commonwealth created in 1952 is an alternative. It is not perfect, and can be expanded and modernized. The definition exalted by the Popular Democratic Party appealed to the goal of and opens the process of negotiation to clarify, and or expand, the present relationship. The concept of self-determination applies to the process of presenting the alternatives itself. The way this bill is enacted does not comply with that rule. The bill disqualifies the present state of the law without any participation of Puerto Rico.

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The final arbiter of these matters is the Supreme Court, as was announced to the United Nations. When Public Law 600 was approved by the Congress, the requirement of its acceptance was dictated to the people by Congress. That same procedure must be used now. There is another aspect that should worry us all. The United States has been consistent, year after year in the United Nations, in its positions that Puerto Rico’s case is closed. The future development and greater autonomy of Puerto Rico is both necessary and desirable in a modern and changing world. However, it is a private matter between two sovereigns that are associated by a compact. The United Nations Resolutions Number 1514 and 1541 and other resolutions require, among other things, the demilitarization of the territory. This applies to territories that have not achieved full self-government and are still under the jurisdiction of the United States. Puerto Rico is not such a territory and arguing that it is does not serve the best interests of either the United States or Puerto Rico. It is unnecessary and can be ill advised and risky. The enemies of the United States and Puerto Rico may try to influence this Congress to fall into that mistake. The presentation of alternatives present under this bill does not satisfy a majority of the potential voters in a plebiscite. The existing relationship may devote the need for the court’s intervention to adjudicate the authorities by the premises included in it. Statehood is not good for the United States and Puerto Rico. And neither is it good for our desire to be a distinct people and your need to be a cohesive natural body. These things have been pronounced by the Supreme Court on several occasions. Puerto Rico is associated with the United States, permanently bounded by our many common interests. Any bill should take this into consideration. The Congress should follow suit since, after all, this is a matter of political will. It is not foreclosed by legality. We are confident we will win a fair and just plebiscite. Let us create a fair and modernization of the compact that would make the next generation of Americans and Puerto Ricans proud of this generation. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

STATEMENT OF HECTOR QUIJANO BORGES, ASSOCIATION OF STATEHOOD ATTORNEYS, SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO Mr. BORGES. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, distinguished Members of Congress. Welcome to Puerto Rico. My name is Hector Quijano Borges, and I come before you on behalf of the Attorneys for Statehood, an organization that represents thousands of attorneys who believe in the democratic system of the United States as well as in the permanent union with the same Nation. It is a fact that in Puerto Rico, the vast majority of attorneys, especially the younger generations, treasure our U.S. citizenship. We also represent the new generations of job

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professionals who decide a new future of security, progress, equality, for our families, our children. I would like to begin by commending the Committee on Resources for its contribution in providing a process that would put an end to the colonial dilemma of Puerto Rico. This bill reflects the effort of the U.S. Congress to respond to the aspiration of our 3.7 million U.S. citizens eager to become Americans. The Association of Attorneys for Statehood endorses the seven-point definitions of the statehood contained in this bill. And in this hearing you have heard the statement of those who oppose that Puerto Rico should become a federated State of the Union. They argue that statehood represents three basic problems for the United States. First, they allege that if Puerto Rico became the 51st State, it would be a dependent State; second, that both our language and culture are now not compatible with becoming a State; third, that statehood for Puerto Rico would be extremely costly for the U.S. Obviously, those are arguments that only pretend to manipulate your conscience as well as that of the Puerto Rican people. Let’s take those arguments and discuss them one by one. I must be clear that, in the ELA, dependency of Puerto Ricans to work for our problems increase every day. We are much more dependent proportionally than all 50 States. The so-called new definition of ELA proposes equal treatment in Federal programs with our contribution, a penny, for the Federal Treasury. Could there be a better example of the dependency than asking for benefits without assuming any duties? It is a fact that this definition does not fit in the fair and constitutional system of the United States. In legal, constitutional, and practical terms, this definition is not acceptable. Furthermore, the perpetuation of a colonial status for Puerto Rico is in clear violation of the basic principles of international law. History reveals that no one State has become poorer after joining the Union. On the contrary, experience tells us that economy of all territories after becoming a State has strongly developed. Far from becoming a dependent state, Puerto Rico with the advantage of becoming a bilingual State, and with the assets of its hard-working people, will become the commercial bridge between the Spanish-speaking world and the United States. Our economic development as a State will be notorious. To say that Puerto Rico as a State will be a problem for the United States for speaking both Spanish and English contravenes the constitutional principles that all men are created equal. Far from being a problem, our bilingualism enriches our U.S. Nation. So that everyone clearly understands this point, allow me to continue my statement in Spanish. Esto lo hago, para que quede también meridianamente claro que no hay incompatibilidad en creer en la estadidad, ser estadista y ser Puertorriqueño, atesorar el idioma Español, nuestra cultura, tradiciones y religión. Estados Unidos es un vitral de etnias y culturas, unida por unas mismas creencias, por unos mismos principios de convivencia humana y democracia, sin importar el lugar de origen, la raza y el color. Y nosotros añ adimos, sin importar si se hablan o no, uno o más idiomas.

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El hecho de que en Puerto Rico tengamos el Español y el Inglés como idiomas oficiales, en nada afecta a la nación. Por el contrario, la enriquece y le da la versatilidad deseada en un mundo donde las comunicaciones y la computación han eliminado las barreras de las distancias entre las naciones. Estamos en la era de la globalización. Los pueblos no pueden ni deben colocar barreras entre unos y otros. Lo que deben colocar son puentes de entendimiento y de amistad. Ese es el nuevo mundo, al cual aspiramos los jóvenes profesionales de esta bendita tierra, las mismas personas que le dicen ustedes que su fórmula incluye paridad de fondos Federales sin la obligación de contribuciones Federales, son aquellas que insinu´ an que Puerto Rico no puede ser estado porque la cantidad de fondos que recibiría sería muy grande y constituiría una carga para el presupuesto de los Estados Unidos, como si el problema del status se tratara de un asunto de dólares y centavos. El problema colonial de Puerto Rico es un asunto de dignidad humana. No es, y repito, no es un asunto de dinero o de negocios. La nación que ustedes representan, los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica, siempre se ha distinguido por ser la nación más generosa del mundo. Nos preguntamos ahora, ¿es que ese sentimiento de generosidad, ese sentimiento magnánimo se puede perder? El permitirle a los Puertorriqueños decidir su destino político, final, con fórmulas realmente descolonizadoras y constitucionalmente aceptables, incluyendo la estadidad, tampoco puede ser un asunto de dólares y centavos para los Estados Unidos de Norteamérica. Finalmente, queremos llamar la atención a este Comité sobre las expresiones vertidas aquí por lo que presentan la nueva definición del ELA. Segu´n ellos, el proceso tiene que ser uno de consenso, donde la fórmula que concursen segu´n aprobadas por el Congreso, sean aceptables para los proponentes de las fórmulas. Sin embargo, nos preguntamos, ¿cómo se puede complacer a los proponentes del ELA si la definición que proponen es totalmente irreal e inconstitucional? Mr. YOUNG. Puerto Rico is like Alaska. Just a little more. Mr. BORGES. Definitely. We believe that statehood is the first commission to the colonial problem. We want to preserve, protect and make our U.S. citizenship be permanent, equal to that of Puerto Rico’s brothers and sisters in the United States. We find that can only be achieved within the framework of sovereignty shared with the other 50 States of the American Nation. Thank you very much. Source: United States-Puerto Rico Political Status Act, Field Hearing Before the Committee on Resources, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fifth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 856—United States-Puerto Rico’s Political Status Act, Serial no. 105–27 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997), 14–16, 221–225.

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Document 5.18 Pat Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny, 1999 For the past forty years, Pat Buchanan has been one of the loudest, most combative conservative commentators in the United States. After he built his career on writing op-ed articles and occasional books, Buchanan’s pugilistic style of debate proved tailor-made for political debate programs that emerged on television—especially on cable news networks— during the 1980s and 1990s. With no experience in government other than writing speeches for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Buchanan ran for president in 1992 and 1996, proclaiming himself the voice of “reform.” What follows is an excerpt from a book on foreign policy that Buchanan wrote in 1999. Of particular concern to Buchanan was his own conviction that the United States could not preserve its republican government at home and its imperial responsibilities around the world. Although Buchanan would never consider himself in league with the likes of Noam Chomsky (Document 5.13), their approaches to American history are actually rather similar. Buchanan emphasizes the importance of territorial acquisition in the nineteenth century; however, Buchanan celebrates these accomplishments as the proper tasks of foreign policy while Chomsky condemns those same actions.

At the opening of the twentieth century there were five great Western empires—the British, French, Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian—and two emerging great powers: Japan and the United States. By century’s end, all the empires had disappeared. How did they perish? By war—all of them . . . America survives as the sole superpower because it stayed out of the slaughter pens until the other great powers had fought themselves near to death and avoided a cataclysmic clash with a nuclear-armed Soviet Russia . . . Yet, today, America’s leaders are reenacting every folly that brought these great powers to ruin—from arrogance and hubris, to assertions of global hegemony, to imperial overstretch, to trumpeting new “crusades,” to handing out war guarantees to regions and countries where Americans have never fought before. We are piling up the kind of commitments that produced the greatest disasters of the twentieth century. The purpose of this book, then, is to revisit the history of American foreign policy, its successes, triumphs, and failures. From that history, we can expose the myths and identify the true traditions upon which we can build, and the lessons from which we can draw, to offer a foreign policy for the new century that might unite most of us and ensure that America endures as the greatest republic in history. As Patrick Henry said, only the “lamp of experience” can guide our way. And the need for a course correction is urgent. For, with little discussion or dissent, America has undertaken the most open-ended and extravagant commitments in history. Our country is today traveling the same path that was trod by the British Empire—to the same fate. Do we want America to end that way? . . . Source: Patrick J. Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999), 3–6.

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NOTES 1. Ronald W. Reagan (remarks at annual convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983), Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/30883b.htm. 2. George C. Herring, America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 191–205. 3. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1988), 620–626. 4. Harold P. Ford, CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962–1968 (Langley, Va.: History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1998); Zalin Grant, Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991). 5. Mark Bradley and Marilyn Blatt Young, eds., Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives, Reinterpreting History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); David W. Levy, The Debate over Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 6. Bill Brown, “Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism,” Cultural Critique, no. 17 (1990): 51–78; Norman Etherington, “Reconsidering Theories of Imperialism,” History and Theory 21, no. 1 (1982): 1–36; Robert Francis Lee, Conrad’s Colonialism (The Hague; Paris: Mouton, 1969); John Carlos Rowe, Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Gene Wise, “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement,” American Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1979): 311–315. 7. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987). 8. Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). 9. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997). 10. Amilcar Antonio Barreto, “Statehood, the English Language, and the Politics of Education in Puerto Rico,” Polity 34, no. 1 (2001); Pedro A. Malavet, America’s Colony: The Political and Cultural Conflict between the United States and Puerto Rico (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 44–48; Robert Pastor, “The International Debate on Puerto Rico: The Costs of Being an Agenda-Taker,” International Organization 38, no. 3 (1984): 575–595; Anna M. Santiago and George Galster, “Puerto Rican Segregation in the United States: Cause or Consequence of Economic Status?” Social Problems 42, no. 3 (1995): 361–389. 11. Nick Cullather, Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States-Philippines Relations, 1942–1960 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 180–185; John Bresnan, ed., Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and Beyond (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 12. George H. W. Bush (remarks at Republican campaign rally, Mashpee, Massachusetts, November 1, 1990), Public Papers, George Bush Presidential Library and Museum, http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/research/public_papers.php?id=2380&year=1990&month=11. 13. Stephen J. Summerhill and John Alexander Williams, Sinking Columbus: Contested History, Cultural Politics, and Mythmaking during the Quincentenary (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000). 14. “Showdown at ‘The West as America’ Exhibition,” American Art 5, no. 3 (1991): 2–11; Roger B. Stein, “Visualizing Conflict in ‘The West as America,’” Public Historian 14, no. 3 (1992): 85–91; William H. Truettner and Nancy K. Anderson, The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920 (Washington, D.C.: Published for the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 15. Richard H. Kohn, “History and the Culture Wars: The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition,” Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1036–1063.

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The Contemporary Challenge of Empire, 2001–2008

I

n 2007, President George W. Bush asked both Congress and the American people to support a massive infusion of American personnel and equipment in Iraq. Designated the New Way Forward by the administration, it soon became known as the “surge.” To some, it constituted an overdue but fundamentally positive change in U.S. strategy. Others were more dubious. Four years after Bush had claimed that sending troops to Iraq would be a quick and necessary operation, the mission seemed to have no end in sight, and many Americans had come to doubt the administration’s reasons for going in the first place. The lines of debate over the surge could not have been more clear. For some, the surge was a vital first step to save the U.S. President George W. Bush, right, met with the former U.S. mission in Iraq. They believed administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, wearing his trademark that failing to implement the desert boots, in the Oval Office of the White House on Wednesday, June 30, 2004. plan would be catastrophic. To Source: AP Images/Charles Dharapak others, the surge was a last, desperate effort to redeem a failed policy by sending thousands of American servicemen and servicewomen into harm’s way. In political terms, approval of the surge would be a crucial victory for the administration, while failure would constitute a major embarrassment. One thing was clear: a lot was riding on the president’s ability to convince the American people. So it was a moment of high drama when Bush gave a televised address to the nation on January 10 (Document 6.15). He began by emphasizing that Iraq was already making progress: “Nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement.” To this he added that “we thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together and, that as 419

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we trained Iraqi security forces, we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops.” Bush then conceded that “In 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq, particularly in Baghdad, overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made.” He stated that “Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause. And they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis.” Bush concluded that this state of affairs mandated that the United States dispatch a new contingent of troops to apply unprecedented pressure on the insurgents and to bolster the fledgling democracy in Iraq.1 Yet Bush himself was forced to admit that he and his administration had been caught off guard by the insurgency. Within Congress, a series of investigations had asked how the administration could have misinterpreted the situation in Iraq. Within the administration, policymakers asked how the situation in Iraq had become so dangerous. But in more general terms, the real question was why the administration would be surprised at all. What assumptions had the administration—and the American people—taken with them to the task of governing Iraq after 2003? Equally important, how did those assumptions line up with the attitudes of people in other countries? Americans have asked these questions repeatedly in recent years. In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States aggressively deployed its power overseas, most directly in the military operations and subsequent civil administration of Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only did the Bush administration declare that both countries were fronts in a larger war against terrorism, but in both cases the United States found itself governing foreign people and foreign territory and facing forms of resistance that the Bush administration never predicted. Understanding the U.S. roles in Iraq and Afghanistan requires seeking answers not only in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but in the two centuries that came before. Answers lie partly in the detailed intelligence assessments of 2001 and 2002 (Document 6.1) and also in the history of western expansion during the nineteenth century and the post–World War II occupations of the twentieth century. Indeed, in Iraq and Afghanistan the United States pursued an approach to governance with roots extending all the way back to the Northwest Ordinance. Meanwhile, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, people have responded to the U.S. presence within the context of their own histories, both national and imperial. These histories established a background for the new realities of life in Iraq and Afghanistan where numerous, tangible disputes erupted into violence, chaos, and uncertainty. Meanwhile, in the United States the debate over American policy in both countries led to bitter disputes that, like the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan itself, outlasted the Bush administration. Iraq and Afghanistan are the obvious destinations for any study of how the United States has governed foreign territory and foreign people. The situation in those two countries also presents the ideal perspective from which to reconsider the American struggle with empire in broad terms. As a result, this introductory essay is structured differently from the other chapters in this volume. After a brief discussion of circumstances

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in Afghanistan and Iraq, this introductory essay then shifts gears to focus on a series of thematic concerns that connect this chapter to the one that preceded it. Chronicling how the United States engaged in the project of governing Iraq and Afghanistan means reconsidering previous American approaches to empire. In short, the past helps to explain the present and vice versa. That discussion again raises the questions that have always guided the American struggle with empire: • What are the specific ways in which the United States has governed foreign territory and foreign people? • How has the task of governing foreign people and foreign territory changed the ways Americans approach governance? • How has the task of governing foreign people and foreign territory shaped the way Americans think of themselves as a nation? This final chapter examines those questions through a particular focus on Iraq and Afghanistan. U.S. policymaking in both countries reveals profound similarities with prior American efforts at empire building. Pursuing a combination of political democratization and institutional development, the Bush administration sought to build larger communities of interest that would serve the United States and the local population. To this end, administration officials used a combination of civil and military government that shared more with the territorial administration of North America than it did with any of the colonial regimes that had previously sought to control either Iraq or Afghanistan. Critics of this policy within the United States likewise displayed considerable similarities with the critics of empire who preceded them. They charged that the Bush administration was abandoning the nation’s founding principles. Likewise, they charged that policymakers had adopted the rhetorical flourishes of a commitment to global democratization when they were, in fact, operating in the pursuit of ulterior motives. The tone of opposition to U.S. policy outside the United States was equally familiar. Critics in other countries charged the United States with a self-righteous belief in its capacity to rule others, denying that other people could govern themselves. In Europe, observers looked to their own imperial histories as a basis for criticizing the United States. For all these similarities, though, the circumstances the United States has faced in Iraq and Afghanistan are in many ways distinct from the nation’s prior forays into governance of foreigners. The United States successfully conquered the North American continent during the nineteenth century, extended its reach around the globe during the twentieth century, and helped transform the former Axis dictatorships into vibrant democracies after World War II. Iraq and Afghanistan, in sharp contrast, have proved far more difficult. But the reasons why bear direct relationship back to those earlier successes. Some of the very strategies that proved so effective in the past now create enormous problems. This state of affairs is more than mere irony. It reveals instead the changes that have always existed alongside the continuities in the American struggle with empire.

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In 2001, few Americans expected a national debate over the challenge of empire. To the contrary, the United States appeared to be focused on domestic concerns. The scandals of the Clinton administration included the first impeachment of a sitting U.S. president. The 2000 election was so close and generated so much dispute that the United States was in political limbo for more than a month. George W. Bush came into office with his legitimacy still in question and few global issues dominating the national agenda. Equally important, the question of empire seemed to be settled. The United States consisted of fifty states and a series of island dependencies, none of which seemed likely to change its political circumstances any time soon. Meanwhile, most of the empires of the world were gone. The Soviet Union, long a model of imperial despotism, had disintegrated a decade before. While a few European nations continued to hold a limited number of colonies, many of those countries had in fact repudiated much of their imperial past. The event that transformed this outlook was, of course, the attacks of September 11, 2001. In swift and coordinated activity that morning, terrorists seized four commercial passenger aircraft soon after takeoff. The hijackers crashed two planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. Both buildings soon collapsed, leaving thousands dead. A third airplane crashed into the Pentagon just outside Washington, D.C. Passengers aboard the fourth plane stormed the cockpit and apparently overwhelmed the hijackers before the plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania, killing all aboard. The intended destination of that plane remains a mystery, although government officials quickly concluded that either the White House or the Capitol was the target. The 9/11 attacks became a defining moment for Americans and redefined the priorities of the federal government as the Bush administration announced that antiterrorism would become the central policymaking goal of the United States. It is therefore important to bear in mind that what follows is not a discussion of the 9/11 attacks, but instead the particular challenge of empire that emerged in their aftermath. After 9/11, Americans learned that the attacks were the work of al-Qaida. As American officials explained it, al-Qaida was a shadowy organization committed to a war against modernity itself and the creation of an Islamist state to rule the Muslim world. Its leader was Osama bin Laden, the scion of a wealthy Saudi Arabian family who had fought in Afghanistan and Somalia all the while building al-Qaida to fight what he condemned as Western imperialism in the Islamic world. Al-Qaida was a global organization, but its base of operations was in Afghanistan, where it found support from like-minded Islamists, the Taliban, who had imposed a system of strict religious rule onto the country soon after the collapse of the Soviet occupation. In October 2001, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, a military operation aimed at Afghanistan. On October 8, Bush explained the operation in what would become the core refrain of the U.S. policy in Afghanistan: “On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and

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to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.” Bush was quick to claim this was a multinational effort, explaining that “we are joined in this operation by our staunch friend, Great Britain. Other close friends, including Canada, Australia, Germany and France, have pledged forces as the operation unfolds.” Bush later added: “At the same time, the oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America and our allies. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering men and women and children of Afghanistan.”2 The shock, fear, anger, and sense of national purpose created by the 9/11 attacks initially produced overwhelming public support for the Bush administration. Congress not only signed on to a military campaign in Afghanistan but also shied away from the role it had asserted for itself in military affairs since the Vietnam War (Document 6.2). Meanwhile, the United States enjoyed broad-based international support. With Afghanistan already a pariah in diplomatic circles, countries throughout the Middle East and West Asia provided logistical support for the United States. This included recently independent Soviet satellite countries, which provided airfields that served as the vital outposts from which to launch air strikes or transport soldiers and equipment into Afghanistan. Securing this diplomatic coalition marked a high point for Secretary of State Colin Powell, the former general who, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had orchestrated the military strategy for the Gulf War of 1990–1991. The United States assumed leadership over a multinational coalition that sent an armada of aircraft and thousands of troops into Afghanistan. The result was a remarkable achievement in political, diplomatic, and military terms. Coalition and Afghan rebel forces quickly routed the Taliban. In the winter of 2001–2002, a series of meetings in the United States, Europe, and Afghanistan produced a preliminary Afghan government under the leadership of Hamid Karzai, a former government official whose opposition to the Taliban in the 1990s had forced him into exile but made him an attractive candidate for high office. The Bush administration claimed that the situation in Afghanistan was under control and the United States needed to redirect its resources toward a broader effort to defeat terrorism around the globe. The administration focused its attention on terrorist organizations and on the governments that supported them. Of course, what constituted a terrorist organization and what constituted support was never simple. Americans argued throughout 2002 about what policy the United States should pursue. Americans could not even agree on what labels they should use to describe the conflict. Some described a “war on terror,” while others condemned this term as inaccurate and melodramatic. In the years since, the federal government has used numerous terms to describe its efforts since 9/11. By 2003, all of these arguments and policies would find their greatest focus in Iraq. In November 2002, the Bush administration requested and Congress approved a joint resolution permitting the use of force in Iraq. The United States began a massive transfer of forces to the Middle East. Unlike the Gulf War of 1990–1991 or the more recent operations in Afghanistan, the United States found few allies. Many countries balked at the administration’s claims that Iraq was actively supporting terrorism and that the regime of Saddam Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction. Particularly

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striking was the absence of support in the Middle East itself. Although several countries allowed the United States to use their military bases, few provided troops and most kept their support quiet. This was in sharp contrast with the situation in 1990–1991, when Middle East countries were quick to celebrate their role in containing Iraq and liberating Kuwait. Critics around the world echoed Americans who called this a war of choice rather than of necessity. The Bush administration responded that Iraq constituted an immediate threat to the United States through its support for terrorism. Besides, Iraq had failed to meet its obligations after the Gulf War of 1990–1991. Ignoring international protests, armed forces descended on Iraq in March 2003. The vast majority of these forces were American. At the beginning of military operations on March 19, George W. Bush proclaimed, “We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people” (Document 6.4). Initial military operations were overwhelmingly successful. In fewer than three weeks, Saddam Hussein’s military and government collapsed, and he joined a cohort of senior Iraqi officials in hiding. With victory apparently in sight, Bush issued a statement to the Iraqi people proclaiming: “We will end a brutal regime, whose aggression and weapons of mass destruction make it a unique threat to the world. . . . We will respect your great religious traditions, whose principles of equality and compassion are essential to Iraq’s future. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave. Iraq will go forward as a unified, independent and sovereign nation that has regained a respected place in the world” (Document 6.5). In December 2003, American troops captured Saddam Hussein, marking the beginning of an extended period of imprisonment and trial that ended with his execution in December 2006. But in the three years between capture and execution, the situation in Iraq was transformed. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Iraq came under the leadership first of American military personnel and later of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) (Documents 6.6 and 6.11). The long-serving director of that organization was L. Paul Bremer, a career foreign service officer who had written extensively on counterterrorism. In political terms, Iraq underwent a speedy transformation from authoritarian dictatorship to representative democracy. In 2004, Iraq resumed self-government, and in 2005 a new constitution provided the structure for national elections (Documents 6.10, 6.12, and 6.13). Since 2006, Iraq has been governed as a parliamentary democracy. Yet these developments coincided with ongoing military resistance and doubts about the structure of the new government. An armed insurgency formed immediately after the 2003 invasion. As in Afghanistan, this insurgency proved far more difficult to defeat than the formal military or government structures in place before 2001. As a result, foreign troops remain in both countries, and both Iraq and Afghanistan suffer from tremendous violence. The Bush administration predicted the rapid downfall of the governments in Afghanistan and Iraq, the restoration of peace, and an orderly process of reconstruction (Document 6.3). As Vice President Dick Cheney famously said three days before military operations began (Document 6.8), “I think things have gotten so bad inside

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Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”3 Even the most enthusiastic advocates of the administration policy have agreed that the outcome was not what the administration envisioned. Instead, both countries have undergone incremental adjustments in violence and peace, U.S. power, and internal self-government. Both Afghanistan and Iraq are officially self-governing. They hold regular elections, and the United States has surrendered control over most public institutions. At the same time, the U.S. military remains the primary instrument for combating the ongoing insurgencies in both countries. Local officials are forced to rely on the United States, but national leaders and average citizens have complained that the United States wields undue power in domestic affairs. The result is ongoing tension between the United States and the governments of both Afghanistan and Iraq. Developments in both countries since 2001 have been the subject of an extraordinarily broad, provocative, and often combative discussion. Public officials and private citizens around the world have not been shy in stating what they celebrate and what they condemn. Meanwhile, the response to 9/11 and the military operations in West Asia have created an enormous written record. Books continue to roll off the presses seeking to explain Iraq and Afghanistan or to explain how and why the United States pursued its policies in both countries. People have sought to recount the chain of events. But they have also sought to evaluate the wisdom of U.S. policy. And indeed, the United States often takes center stage in these conversations, often to the exclusion of the countries that bear the impact of U.S. policies. Although the recent analytical literature on U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is quite rich, much of that discussion has lacked substantive historical context (Document 6.14). In 2003, people often compared the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan with those in Germany and Japan after World War II. Meanwhile, much of the discussion of Iraq and Afghanistan has invoked the word “empire” and has sought to understand current policy within a broader history of American imperialism, but usually in a rather limited way. The term has become a generalized code word for governments that deploy power overseas. It is more challenging to situate contemporary events in Iraq and Afghanistan within the long-running historical themes of the American struggle with empire. Focusing on six thematic concerns that have shaped the American struggle with empire for more than two centuries provides an understanding of both similarities and differences with past American efforts to govern foreign territory and foreign peoples. It also helps to explain how and why the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan conform, or sometimes conflict, with previous events. These themes are democratization, institutional development, dependence and independence, internal opposition, state building and nation building, and the contentious debate over American means and ends.

DEMOCRATIZATION At the core of the American struggle with empire has been the belief that the United States could avoid the pitfalls of empire by pursuing a policymaking agenda that

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promotes representative government. During the early republic, an era in which many believed “democracy” was merely the chaos of mob rule, Americans tended to claim that they were creating a republican government. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, Americans became more comfortable with democracy, and the phrase became crucial to how Americans understood their own response to the challenge of empire. Democracy and democratization have remained at the center of the American projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, much of the debate over whether the United States has succeeded, or will ever succeed, hinges on the perceived growth of democracy in both countries. The most consistent element of that democracy has been representative government based on widespread suffrage and political participation based on a broadly defined right of expression. This was the case in the Northwest Territory, where Americans claimed that the extension of political rights on par with the original states would enable the United States to expand its territorial possessions without becoming an empire. From 1787 through the creation of Hawaii and Alaska, the territorial system provided a structure for the creation of democratic political structures throughout the United States. These systems created democracy in reality. Unlike almost every other expanding polity, the United States did not subordinate newly acquired territory. The new states created through the territorial system were also among the most democratic in the Union. In the nineteenth century, that meant that new western states had more elected offices and lower requirements for suffrage and office holding than the thirteen original states located on the eastern seaboard. These systems also created democracy in perception. By the end of the nineteenth century, Americans had concluded that they were able to expand democracy in a way that no other country could match. This belief in a uniquely American capacity for democratization helped justify the American territorial acquisitions of the late nineteenth century in the Caribbean and the Pacific. While such places might not become states, they would nonetheless benefit from the education in democracy they would receive from the United States. That experience in turn fueled the belief among many Americans that they could redeem Western Europe after both world wars. Americans claimed that postwar reconstruction after 1918 and postwar occupation after 1945 would provide opportunities for the United States to instruct Europeans in democratic principles. Americans also believed that their efforts in the Pacific after World War II would enable them to democratize Japan as well. Few Americans have disagreed with these principles. Indeed, much of the debate has not been over democratization per se, but rather the question of whether the United States has been true to that commitment. Filipinos repeatedly accused the United States of betraying its commitment to democracy and self-government during the half century of U.S. rule. Puerto Ricans have criticized the federal government for rigging the language of referendums in such a way that it prevents Puerto Ricans from voting in favor of either statehood or independence. Critics have pointed to places like Latin America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, where the United States installed brutal dictatorships during the cold war era. Although some of that criticism questioned whether the United States had a right to shape the governments of foreign countries, it

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was the fact that those governments were dictatorships that most often generated the opposition. Critics have charged the federal government with hypocrisy and have demanded that the United States adhere to its goal of promoting democracy. That criticism became loudest in the last quarter of the twentieth century and was directed particularly at U.S. policy in the developing world. In Afghanistan and Iraq Americans remained true to these objectives and arguments. Most revealing have been the ways American policymakers have rationalized the missions in both countries. In 2001 and 2003, the United States claimed that military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq was a vital necessity for the nation’s security. After removing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the United States claimed that it needed to keep troops in Afghanistan and Iraq not only to prevent an Islamist resurgence that would constitute a threat to the United States but also because the United States had a responsibility to provide for the reconstruction of countries where it had made war. Central to that process was a long-term commitment to creating democratic political cultures in both countries. It bears repeating that critics in the United States have not questioned the value of democratization as a goal of national policy. Instead, they have questioned whether the federal leadership has actually been motivated by that goal or is realistically able to achieve it. This does not mean that the United States has always made good on its promises of democratization or that the American vision of democracy has always been beneficial. Observers around the globe have commented on the fact that the United States has labeled foreign governments as “undemocratic” simply because they failed to meet a very specific American notion premised on a specific set of political institutions and behaviors. But democratization itself remains the stated goal of the United States. There are few critics of democracy itself. The center of debate is, instead, whether the United States can or should be the agent of democratization in other countries.

INSTITUTIONS Americans have long claimed that their democracy is strong because its rests on a foundation of strong institutions. This is partly a self-congratulatory claim, providing a way for Americans to take pride in their national achievements. But it is not an inaccurate claim. More important, it is a revealing claim, one that gets to the heart of how Americans—whether they hold public office or not—have responded to the notion of empire. Once again, it also connects the nation’s nineteenth-century continental history to its twentieth-century global history and finally to twenty-first century challenges. The United States continues to operate on the assumption that institutions can serve as a safeguard against the pitfalls of empire, but with very specific limits. In fact, the moments when Americans have chosen not to create or reinforce certain institutions have also been a product of the centuries-long struggle with empire. In Iraq since the demise of Saddam Hussein the institutions of primary concern have been the elected system of government leadership, the bureaucratic structure of national governance, and the military structure of self-defense. These were the same institutional

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structures that federal leaders had proposed first for new territories in the North American West and later for the nation’s overseas holdings. In the territorial system, the federal government provided the institutions of civil government until local residents were able to do so themselves. Meanwhile, the United States Army carried out the crucial role of establishing white supremacy over Indians and African Americans until local institutions (including militias and police forces) could do the same. The United States did much the same in the Philippines. The United States Army supported the rule of U.S. officials against Philippine rebels at the turn of the twentieth century. Americans then commanded Filipino troops, building a local military that was supposed to defend the islands in the future. A similar structure of institutional development applied in the occupations after World War II and in South Vietnam, but with very different results. As it had in the Philippines, the United States began the occupations of Germany, Japan, and Austria by disbanding their military structures and focusing on the creation of elected and bureaucratic structures of civilian administration. As the Soviet Union appeared increasingly threatening, the United States advocated the limited rearmament of all three nations. In Southeast Asia, the United States initially claimed it was creating a South Vietnamese military to confront the threat from North Vietnam. When American policymakers concluded that the leadership in Saigon was unable to develop an effective military strategy, they quickly subordinated the South Vietnamese military to the American forces that arrived in the mid-1960s. The Vietnamization policy constituted one final, failed effort to create independent civil and military institutions in South Vietnam. In all these circumstances, leadership of these institutions increasingly came under the control of local residents. In the territorial West, appointed officials known personally by the president usually assumed the first public offices, but among their primary tasks was the identification of local residents who would be eligible for later appointment. In some cases, these local appointees were U.S. citizens who had recently moved from existing states, but as time passed the list of officials included local residents like Francophone Louisianans or Hispanic New Mexicans. Meanwhile, statehood and the creation of new elected offices finalized the transfer of power away from Washington, creating new leadership cadres in each new state. The United States applied these principles around the world. In the Philippines, Germany, Japan, Austria, and South Vietnam, the United States selected particular members of each nation’s political elite for leadership roles. This structure has reappeared most clearly in Iraq. L. Paul Bremer, the chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, was very much in the tradition of the territorial governors and, to a lesser degree, in the tradition of the occupation leaders after World War II. Like most territorial governors, Bremer was a civilian with broad-reaching powers that emanated directly from the administration. Assigned to assist the local population through the construction of an effective government, he was free to make decisions without the risk of immediate political interference from a voting population or a national legislature. Nineteenth-century territorial officials acted in much the same way.

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Occupation officials in the 1940s followed a similar approach although most of them were military officers whose mandates and leadership styles were different. Critical to understanding the transition to local governance is realizing that many of the local appointees were hardly American lackeys, and they often came into office with their own agendas. The task for them was to secure their reputation with the Americans without losing credibility with their local constituencies. That was easier in the territorial West, where white residents became American citizens by federal law and international treaty. For example, white Louisianans who welcomed the Louisiana Purchase felt few qualms about federal appointment, only irritation when the federal government seemed to drag its feet about permitting local control over the government, economy, and society in the Louisiana Purchase territories. It was a different matter altogether for the first Filipinos to secure high office under the United States because they served their own people but owed their positions to a conquering nation. The stresses and strains that emerge from this system are on display daily in Afghanistan and Iraq. In Afghanistan, the United States has staked its own future on President Hamid Karzai. Karzai sometimes must toe the line from Washington, but other times he has initiated policies that have generated considerable anger and opposition in the United States. Whatever the drawbacks, that opposition actually helps Karzai, who has been quick to point out to Afghans that American complaints are proof that he is more than a foreign puppet. The situation has been even more complicated in Iraq. Some of the Americans’ favorite candidates for leadership in a post-Saddam Iraq have struggled to establish support among Iraqis. Meanwhile, critics in the United States have charged that these Iraqi politicos have limited appeal to the local population and, worse still, dubious credentials. Those arguments became most apparent in the case of Ahmad Chalabi, a staunch critic of Saddam Hussein who was quickly tapped by the Bush administration for high office in 2003, only to face accusations of misleading American officials. He subsequently struggled to secure elected office in Iraq. These circumstances are hardly unique to America. Every empire has conducted some policy of institutional development. For the British, constructing educational institutions was a major component of their imperial project. For the Japanese, economic and transportation infrastructure became vital to empire building in East Asia at the turn of the twentieth century. All empires build local military units to suppress dissent against imperial power. And these institutions often had leaders born in imperial possessions. But the long-term function of these institutions was often different. Historically, institution building provided a means for empires to establish permanent control over their colonies. In the end, that dream proved elusive, and newly independent countries quickly adapted or eliminated the institutions created by their imperial overlords. For the United States, institution building has often been explained as a necessary step toward independence, not permanent rule. The United States has not always been true to that mission and has attempted to preserve indefinitely its control over nations that have fought to secure their independence. But the fact that Americans must claim that

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Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, met with the head of U.S. Central Command Gen. John Abizaid in the presidential palace in Kabul, Friday Nov. 26, 2004. Abizaid, who commanded American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, met with Karzai after visiting troops for Thanksgiving. Source: AP Images/Amir Shah

institutions will promote independence suggests just how important independence has been in the ways Americans seek to avoid the pitfalls of empire.

INDEPENDENCE Few words have more resonance with Americans than “independence.” After all, the United States came into being through a declaration of independence. But the notion of independence runs deeper, especially when it comes to politics and the definitions of empire. The presence—or absence—of independence has always been crucial to Americans’ notion that their extended polity is not an empire. And the notion of independence has also been at the heart of how Americans perceive their solutions to the pitfalls of empire, for in embracing independence Americans claim that they have created connections that are stronger than any empire. When Americans fashioned the Northwest Ordinance, they did so with a clear vision of independence and dependence. They understood empires as political structures where colonial peripheries suffered in a subordinate, dependent political status and relied on the mother country for every right they received. Some colonies—especially island colonies—depended on the mother country for the raw materials they needed to survive. The white residents of European colonies depended on the mother country for defense against neighboring empires, Indians, and enslaved African Americans. In sharp contrast to the condemnation of dependence, the American Revolution made an art form of celebrating independence. This began at the individual level, with white settlers enjoying the freedom to own land, to mobilize politically, and to make their own choices in life. It extended to the regional level, where each state was independent of its

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neighbor. Finally, it applied to the Continental Congress and later to the federal government. In both cases, the central government enjoyed certain powers but also faced specific constitutional restrictions that were supposed to prevent it from stripping the independence of people, localities, or states. Americans extended the celebration of independence to the creation of new states. Critical to the territorial structure was the promise that new polities created on the nation’s periphery would become states that were not only equal to other states but that were also independent of them. That was particularly important to states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia, all of which were created from the western frontiers of existing states (Virginia and North Carolina). New state equality also guaranteed that all new states (and Congress has created thirty-seven of them) are not beholden to any other state; neither does the federal government wield any extra power over them once they cease to be federal territories. The philosophy of new state equality was particularly attractive to western settlers. They demanded independence for themselves as individuals as well as polities. In some cases, those demands reached extremes that the government rejected, especially when some western settlers believed they should not be bound by laws governing property ownership or governing relations with Indians. Nonetheless, the celebration of independence has remained an indelible part of the culture of the western United States, taking numerous forms in the nation’s politics and culture. Americans claimed that equality and independence for new states would not only make the United States superior to European empires in its commitment to political principle, it would actually make the nation stronger. Americans had seen how inequality between imperial centers and colonial peripheries led to endless conflict and, eventually, to the collapse of empires. Americans concluded that the British, Spanish, and French empires in the Western Hemisphere had all collapsed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, not because they had surrendered too much power to their colonists, but because they had granted too little. By preserving relationships of hierarchy and dependence, these empires had guaranteed that local resistance would eventually explode into full-blown independence movements. American experiences in the nineteenth century proved the validity of this argument. Equality and independence among states preserved the union as it expanded into the West. Americans even found ways to situate the Civil War in this narrative, with Unionists claiming that southerners had lost sight of the nation’s principles and Confederate apologists rationalizing secession as an assertion of independence and equality against a federal government that sought to reduce the South to economic and political dependence. During the twentieth century, however, Americans initially struggled with the implications of these beliefs. The United States preserved Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines in a dependent status. In Cuba, American policymakers developed one solution. By permitting formal independence but preserving influence through provisions like the Platt Amendment, the United States created a model of strategic dependence. The United States extended that principle through its power over the Cuban government, a model it applied in other areas of Latin America, particularly Nicaragua. In Puerto Rico,

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the federal government developed another solution that rationalized a different form of dependence. Insisting that Puerto Rico could never thrive as an independent nation, American policymakers claimed that the United States provided vital support. In addition, by extending U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, American policymakers claimed that the residents of Puerto Rico enjoyed personal independence that equaled that of mainland residents. In addition to explicit forms of political dependency, it soon became clear that the United States had effectively established economic dependency. But it was the Philippines that became the standard for how the United States applied independence to places that would not become states. Through the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934, the United States established a road map and timetable for independence. Most important, Americans claimed that by surrendering authority, the United States would actually gain power. With the Philippines re-created as a stable democracy that recognized its shared interest with the United States, and with independence itself preempting a more powerful anticolonial movement against the United States, independence helped forge an alliance between the United States and the Philippines that has remained intact ever since. The Philippines’ pathway to independence provided a template that the United States also applied to post–World War II occupations. Once again, the United States pledged to pursue independence rather than dependence. Once again, that process required the creation of democratic institutions. And once again, Americans operated on the assumption that granting independence to conquered peoples would create stronger alliances. Americans later concluded that they had been correct in all these assumptions. The Philippines remains closely tied to the United States in both diplomatic and economic terms. Germany and Japan became steadfast allies throughout the cold war. The real validation for this system also emerged in situations where nations have been forced to secure independence for themselves. In countries where the United States preserved dependence—in places like Cuba, Nicaragua, and South Vietnam—the resentment was so strong that the final collapse of U.S. authority produced governments that were aggressively antagonistic to the United States. Many of those countries looked to the Soviet Union for new sources of support. But the dependent relationships between Moscow and the Soviet satellites likewise proved unsustainable. Not only did people in Eastern Europe and West Asia depose governments installed by the Soviet Union, but many of those countries sought alliances with the United States and Western Europe. As these earlier examples suggest, running the line between dependence and independence in Iraq and Afghanistan has proven enormously difficult. The United States has certainly claimed to be pursuing its age-old goal of promoting national independence. Likewise, the United States maintains that surrendering power will actually reinforce alliances. Yet there are plenty of people in the United States and in Iraq and Afghanistan who disagree. They have claimed that the United States seeks only to preserve both countries in a permanent state of economic and political dependency. These competing narratives were on display in a moment that many Americans treated merely as political comedy. When Muntadhar al-Zaidi, an Iraqi journalist, threw his shoes at George W. Bush in December 2008, al-Zaidi yelled “This is a farewell . . . you

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dog!” Some Iraqis celebrated the man for articulating their own belief that the United States had overstayed its welcome. Both the U.S. and the Iraqi leadership responded that the United States was withdrawing its forces and that the man’s ability to express himself as a journalist was exactly the civil right that Saddam Hussein denied to Iraqis.4 The problem was how he chose to do so. With Americans celebrating an Iraq where average citizens enjoyed unprecedented freedom of speech, an Iraqi court sentenced al-Zaidi to three years for physically attacking government officials. Al-Zaidi soon enjoyed his own support from Iraqis who shared his outlook and said that imprisoning a man for opposing the United States only proved his claims of imperialism. Indeed, in this debate word choice was more than mere semantics. While the Bush administration chose the word “liberators,” critics used the word “occupiers.” And they did not mean the rehabilitative occupations of Germany and Japan following World War II but instead a form of permanent occupation designed to deny political rights rather than promote them. Occupation also has a particularly potent meaning in the contemporary politics of the Middle East. It is a term most prominently associated with Israeli policy in places comprising the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that are often called the “occupied territories.” But it also has a potent meaning outside of the Israeli context in a part of the world that experienced lengthy colonial rule. Nationalist movements throughout the Middle East and West Asia specifically criticized the various empires of the world for promoting political repression and suppressing economic development. These movements likewise claimed that independence—in the form of self-governing countries—would bring both political and economic benefits. Nothing displayed the power of this rhetoric more clearly than the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein. A brutal dictator who specifically denied most forms of independence, he regularly described his regime as a bulwark against the dependence embodied in the imperialist goals of the United States and other major powers. As a result, independence had its own distinct narratives in the United States and in Iraq and Afghanistan. This may explain why some Americans argued that the formal occupation of both countries was actually finished when Iraq and Afghanistan drafted their own constitutions. Constitution writing was a rite of passage in every federal territory and has played an absolutely crucial role in the American approach to empire. The United States inscribed the requirement of constitution writing into its plans for Philippine independence and for the creation of the commonwealth of Puerto Rico. Constitution writing was a necessary final step for Germany and Japan after World War II. Their constitutions served two purposes. They became the formal instruments for recreating both countries as independent, self-governing polities. But creating constitutions that enshrined the principles and protections of individual freedom proved to many Americans that both countries had discarded their totalitarian pasts.

OPPOSITION If one thing has been clear in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is that plans for political development can face enormous dissent. Seven years after the start of Operation

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Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and five years after Operation Iraqi Freedom, even the most optimistic veterans of the Bush administration have conceded that both countries continue to endure tremendous violence. The question is how to understand and situate that violence. The United States has always faced some level of resistance when it has sought to govern foreign territory and foreign people. Critical to understanding this apparent contradiction is to focus on how American policymakers conceived of their opponents and how the people who found themselves governed by the United States conceived of the benefits and disadvantages of American rule. At first glance, the United States seems to have historically avoided much of the opposition that faced other empires. Where other empires faced internal dissent and eventual destruction through the preservation of unequal and dependent colonies, the United States became strong and remained unified through the creation of equal and independent states. After the Civil War, Reconstruction provided for the rapid incorporation of the old Confederacy, recreating a union that has remained in place to this day. After World War II, the residents of Germany, Japan, and Austria may have disliked the occupation or opposed some of its features, but they never expressed that opposition in violent ways. Nonetheless, violent dissent was commonplace in other circumstances. It took form most often in the resistance of Native Americans, who opposed the forced relocation and political subordination imposed on them by the United States. Likewise, throughout the southwestern territorial frontier enslaved African Americans had formed revolts or simply run away from their masters’ plantations. During Reconstruction, white southerners directed their violent resistance not against white representatives of the federal government but rather against black southerners. Violent resistance was also common throughout the twentieth century. Filipinos who believed they had only exchanged Spanish colonialism for American colonialism launched a lengthy guerrilla war to establish their own independence. Vietnamese who believed the United States was merely the latest colonial power in Southeast Asia successfully repulsed the American project in South Vietnam. In Latin America, the residents of numerous countries joined revolutionary movements that directly blamed the United States for supporting dictatorial regimes in the Western Hemisphere. These resistance movements were as varied as the countries in which they occurred. Nonetheless, they share several common features. In most cases, these were movements by people who concluded that federal rule posed a direct threat to their own independence. Throughout the nineteenth century, the strict color line for American citizenship determined who resisted and who did not. White settlers, who enjoyed all the benefits of citizenship and who (equally important) had numerous nonviolent means of political mobilization, had no reason to resist federal rule. Francophone Louisianans and white New Mexicans, for example, participated politically and expressed their dissent. Nonwhites not only endured policies that promoted their suffering but were expressly excluded from most forms of nonviolent political mobilization. The federal government sought to undermine the power and unity of Indian leadership. Slaves were prohibited from mass meetings. After the failure of Reconstruction, the system of Jim Crow used law, threats, and violence to prevent black political mobilization.

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For all these reasons, the United States faces unprecedented challenges in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the U.S. response to dissent is very different than it was on the territorial frontier. Despite considerable structural similarities between territorial rule and U.S. governance in Iraq and Afghanistan, the political and moral circumstances surrounding them could not be more different. In the nineteenth century, the federal government needed to win only the support of white settlers. It never pretended that the system was somehow supposed to provide equality for nonwhites. And when nonwhites resisted, federal troops were relentless in pursuing a campaign of conquest. In the contemporary world, these policies of inequality and conquest are anathema to the reigning definitions of human rights. This means that in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. government as well as the governments it has helped to create in both countries must commit themselves to winning support among all the constituencies of both countries. Likewise, the U.S. military cannot pursue campaigns of conquest or eradication against dissenting groups. The U.S. military and its allies are hard at work combating the insurgencies in both countries, but the United States has been quick to explain that they are targeting only those people who have chosen to reject peaceful protest in favor of violence. Consider the examples of ethnic extermination and waterboarding. In the nineteenth century, with little opposition either domestically or internationally, the United States almost eradicated Native American peoples. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States used waterboarding to extract information about Philippine rebels. A century later, the United States military must go out of its way to claim that it does not attack civilians, and the George W. Bush administration faced intense criticism for its use of waterboarding. Let me be clear about the purpose of this comparison. Although there is certainly no moral equivalence to be drawn between Indians defending their land against the encroachment of white settlers and Iraqi insurgents or the Taliban, the similarities and differences in the federal reactions to these groups are revealing strictly for purposes of understanding the continuities and changes in the American struggle with empire. In almost every instance when the United States has faced concerted resistance, it has pursued its traditional strategies: channeling resistance into nonviolent forms of protest or using force to crush its opponents. But the critical change has been the collapse of the racial dimensions of that policy. No longer operating from a public celebration of white supremacy, the United States must now follow a more restrained policy that needs to win over the hearts and minds of an entire country, not just those who might already be inclined to support U.S. policy. Achieving all of those goals has proven elusive. Whether those goals will remain elusive is one of the great unknowns—and one of the great sources of debate—in both Iraq and Afghanistan. If those futures are less clear, the impact of governing Iraq and Afghanistan is more so. Both cases have transformed the federal government, but this, too, is only par for the course in the American struggle with empire.

STATE BUILDING

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Much of the argument over U.S. policy in Afghanistan and Iraq has turned on the issue of nation building, the capacity of any government or group to create a cohesive national

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entity where one has not existed before. From an American perspective, nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq has been inextricably linked to state building in the United States. First and most obviously, the United States has followed policies that it first developed to create new states in the nineteenth century. But state building can have another meaning: the powers and capacities of the federal apparatus. Governing Iraq and Afghanistan transformed the state capacities of the United States. But this should come as no surprise, for the federal system as we know it emerged largely in response to the challenge of empire. The impact is quite literally as old as the republic. When states ceded their western lands to the Continental Congress in the 1780s, Americans concluded that they needed a more powerful and centralized administrative structure to meet the considerable demands of governing a western empire. Those principles took institutional form in the Northwest Ordinance (which established the specific national commitment to the West) and in the Constitution (which provided the institutional mechanisms for governing the West). Throughout the nineteenth century, western governance was among the most timeconsuming and costly projects facing the federal government. Employing territorial officials, surveying western land, and securing federal authority over Native Americans shaped the contours of the federal system and vastly increased the scope of federal administrations. The Mexican War precipitated the wholesale restructuring of the federal government, not only through the vast increase in territory the United States needed to govern, but also by inspiring the creation of the U.S. Department of the Interior as the federal agency assigned to supervise the task of western government. The territory acquired through the Spanish-American War led to similar changes in federal capacity. If governing the North American West fueled the growth of the United States Army, governing in the Pacific and the Caribbean fueled a similar growth in the United States Navy. With the United States possessing territory on such a vast scale, simple tasks like delivering the mail or sending telegrams became massive endeavors. During the cold war, the United States devoted unprecedented resources to governing foreign territory. The largest task was the occupation of the conquered Axis powers, but establishing bases and asserting leadership in regional security arrangements transformed the United States from a relatively isolated nation into one that asserted its power on a global scale. To pursue its agendas in Afghanistan and Iraq, the George W. Bush administration likewise assumed enormous powers. Members of the cabinet, especially Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, claimed that centralizing decisions within the administration and increasing the powers of certain federal agencies would better enable the United States to combat its enemies. By the time he left office, however, Bush faced widespread criticism. Some claimed the increased power had led the administration to violate individual freedoms and liberties. Others condemned the price tag of such a vast increase in state capacity. This was most striking among Bush’s fellow Republicans, some of whom charged the president with abandoning the party’s commitment to small government and fiscal restraint (Document 6.9). Regardless of whether they supported the administration, Americans agreed that governing Afghanistan and Iraq

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had transformed both the administration and the federal government. After coming into office asserting the traditional Republican call for reducing the size, scope, and expense of the federal government, George W. Bush left office with an executive branch of vastly expanded powers and a federal government that had transformed its overseas structure in response to the challenge of empire.

THE MEANS

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Why has the United States engaged in the project of governing foreign people and foreign territory? The question itself, more than any answer, reveals how people have debated the American struggle with empire. People around the world have asked this question. Particularly revealing is the fact that they ask not only about the implications of U.S. power but also about the motivations Americans have when wielding it. In their efforts to discern those motivations, people have sought to answer the broader question of the whether the United States has been a positive or negative force in the world. The reasons for acquiring territory and people, and means of governing them, have been at the core of how people around the world have debated the American struggle with empire. Why the United States would acquire territory is inextricably linked to the broader criticism of empires, a criticism that the United States helped to create. Obviously, national leaders habitually rationalize their decisions, sometimes honestly and sometimes not. In the United States, however, the debate over governing foreign territory and foreign people has always spilled out far beyond the White House or Congress. In 1803, Americans engaged in a wholesale debate about the benefits of the Louisiana Purchase. Most of the pamphleteers arguing in favor of the purchase did not celebrate the acquisition of territory per se, but rather the fact that the United States had brought a resolution to the struggle to control the Mississippi River and had done so peacefully. Americans specifically contrasted their actions with those of the European empires. Rather than acquire territory through force in order to subject the local residents to despotic rule, the United States acquired territory through peaceful negotiations, with the express purpose of extending liberty. Critics charged that the acquisition was merely a power play on the part of the administration of Thomas Jefferson, which sought both to strip Europeans of their leverage in North America and to create new states that would swamp Congress with Democratic-Republicans, diluting the power of the Federalists. Forty years later, as the administration of James Polk prepared for war against Mexico, critics charged that this was a war of aggression against a peaceful neighbor. Most important, they claimed that starting a war in the absence of a legitimate cause was a sign of the worst sort of imperialism. Advocates of war with Mexico responded that the United States would rescue the Southwest from the imperial despotism of Mexico, extending freedom into the Southwest. Critical to these claims was the notion that the United States had legitimate cause to declare war on Mexico. The Polk administration had indeed fabricated the pretext for war, converting a minor border dispute into a major conflict. But the need to do so was revealing in its own right.

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Theodore Roosevelt attempted to transform these definitions of empire. After a century in which Americans claimed that their actions did not make them an empire, Roosevelt argued that Americans could redefine imperialism for the better. In his 1900 speech to the Republican National Convention, he argued that the United States had a mandate to become an empire. Yet he, too, cast a disparaging tone on the other empires of the world. Roosevelt may have privately admired the British Empire, but he knew better than to celebrate it publicly in an American political culture where the American Revolution had made Britain synonymous with the worst features of imperial rule. The American definition of empire became further complicated in the second half of the twentieth century. Imperialism ceased to be the traditional process through which one country acquired foreign territory and foreign people. Increasingly, the term referred to the American use of power overseas. An aggressive, interventionist foreign policy alone could constitute imperialism. Although they come from different ends of the political spectrum Pat Buchanan and Noam Chomsky never fully define the term “empire,” but both seemed to use it as a code word for a certain form of aggressive internationalism (Documents 5.13 and 5.18). By the close of the twentieth century, the language of criticism against empires was fully developed. In this lexicon, empires asserted control over people and territory in pursuit of their own crass interests. Empires deployed their power without concern for those who suffered as a result. When it came to the United States, the federal leadership often deflected these claims by insisting that it was in fact spreading freedom. Critics insisted this was a simplistic deceit used to rationalize government actions. By the early twenty-first century, most members of the Bush administration were quick to assert that they were not, in fact, behaving in an imperialistic manner. They returned to the oldest of claims: that the United States wielded its power as a justifiable act of selfdefense but also to spread democracy and to liberate others. Critical to this claim was the notion that U.S. involvement in both countries was a temporary expedient until both countries were ready to govern themselves. But others were quick to criticize the administration, and for similar reasons. In the same way that the administration denied it was behaving as an empire, “imperialism” became a popular phrase to decry U.S. policy. Critics argued that the administration, seeking to determine the fates of sovereign nations without just cause or moral authority, was deploying national power in inappropriate ways. Criticism from countries that only recently secured their independence from colonial rule was equally interesting. A participant in an April 2003 protest in India stated, “Baghdad may have fallen to U.S. forces, but we shall continue to protest against American imperialism and its attempt to control human civilization.” In Jakarta, Indonesia, protesters chanted slogans, including “America, imperialist, No. 1 terrorist!” The language of anti-imperialism had particular strength in these countries, as it has in many other places marked by hard-fought efforts in the twentieth century to secure independence from imperial rulers.5 American policymakers dismissed these claims of imperialism, but they had real sticking power around the world. Critics could easily point to moments when the United States had used its power to impose governments onto people without their consent. Likewise, there was a long-standing body of criticism that asked whether the United

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States involved itself in other countries in the pursuit of its own interests (oil, American business opportunities, national security) at the expense of the people who lived in those countries. Meanwhile, the very war that Americans claimed to be fighting was against an organization that had long situated anti-imperialism at the center of its ideology. AlQaida advocated not only a religious agenda but also a geopolitical one. Osama bin Laden joined the Islamist movement in Afghanistan, fighting against the Soviet Union. Decrying Soviet imperialism, bin Laden was on hand to see the fall of Soviet power. Many of those who have studied bin Laden have concluded that his own opposition to the United States reached its height in the wake of the first Gulf War. With the United States deploying its power to bases throughout the Middle East, and Middle Eastern countries deferring to U.S. decision making, it seemed to bin Laden that the United States was dictating terms to the Islamic world. Among the few vocal advocates of U.S. interventionism was the British prime minister, Tony Blair. Speaking to the U.S. Congress in 2003, he stated “How hollow would the charges of American imperialism be when these failed countries are and are seen to be transformed from states of terror to nations of prosperity” (Document 6.7). Perhaps so, but Blair was in the minority among world leaders. Indeed, Blair was directing his comments against critics not only in the Middle East but also in Europe. Particularly striking was the criticism leveled against the United States by France and Germany. Both nations, which have their own long histories of imperial ventures, were quick to denounce U.S. policy in Iraq. That criticism emerged not only from public attitudes toward the United States but also from the rejection of colonial precedents in Europe. France experienced a long and bitter argument over its imperial history, with many condemning a national history of conquest. In Germany, imperialism is inseparable from the rise of Nazism. Blair’s decision to preserve a strong alliance with the United States and keep troops in Iraq and Afghanistan cost him dearly, undermining not only his electoral popularity but also generating a consensus among British commentators that the alliance with the Bush administration was a permanent stain on his record that precluded Blair from joining the list of great prime ministers. Meanwhile, a host of British writers engaged in their own efforts to evaluate American actions and, in turn, to understand the U.S. role in the world at the turn of the twenty-first century. Most of their books were framed around the notion of empire and its various derivatives: superempire, neoempire, and neoimperialism, among others. Many of these authors believed that the United States and observers around the world had a great deal to learn from the experience of Great Britain and, to a lesser degree, from the experience of continental Europe. Of particular concern to many of these authors was the notion that empires inevitably collapse, especially when they lose sight of their core concerns or the limitations of their power.6 The choice of words is important here. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, people often referred to the United States as the world’s only remaining superpower. The notion of a superpower was commonplace during the cold war and had became the standard term for referring to the United States and the Soviet Union, with other countries (particularly China) occasionally vying for that title. But now much of the commentary

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has been refocused on empire. The problem is that the definition of empire is usually a European one, considering how European countries created imperial structures throughout the rest of the world. The United States had a very different imperial history. It may have led to the same destination—with the United States deploying its power and ruling other countries on a global scale—but the United States took a very different route to get there. Americans in turn appropriated this global debate for their own purposes. For those who agreed with the criticism, it meant that other countries had a perspective that Americans had not experienced or that people around the world could understand U.S. actions from a distance while Americans were standing too close to see the big picture. For those who disagreed, critics in other countries—or for that matter in the United States—failed to grasp either the dangers of terrorism or the benefits to other countries of U.S. involvement in their affairs. Distance did not grant those international critics a better perspective. Rather, they were too far away to see the truth. Equally important, however, discussions both inside and outside the United States have failed to grasp the historical contingency of the American struggle with empire, the ways in which the United States has differed from other empires, and the ways in which the American notion of empire created the road map that the Bush administration followed in Iraq and Afghanistan. European observers have been writing from an experience in which their empires acquired foreign territory and ruled foreign peoples who, though part of an imperial whole, were nonetheless unequal. Critical to preserving those empires had been the task of subduing nationalist movements that threatened imperial rule. Within countries that recently emerged from colonial rule by the world’s empires—empires that were not limited to Europe—concentrations of power within imperial states usually meant diminished political rights, suffering, and underdevelopment. Whether they had been governed by countries like Britain, Germany, the Soviet Union, the Ottoman Empire, Japan, or China, these people, not surprisingly, shared a similar critique of empire. But the United States has governed foreign people and foreign territory differently from other empires, for better or for worse. First and foremost is the issue of population. Empires traditionally saw colonies as sources not only of land and resources but also of populations. Those populations provided both labor and glory. During the nineteenth century, the United States had specifically sought to reduce the number of Native Americans. That task provided the foundation for white settlers to believe that there was indeed such a thing as an empire without colonial subjects. Meanwhile, the creation of new states enabled white citizens to believe that there was such a thing as an empire without colonies. The memory of this tradition still radiated throughout American political thought in the late twentieth century.

BUSH’S EMPIRE, BUSH’S QUANDARY All of these factors were colliding in 2007 when George W. Bush addressed the American people about the surge. Some of those forces were the very real circumstances in Iraq. Americans and Iraqis were dying, and the existing political and military structures in the country seemed unable to solve the problem. But the forces of culture and memory were

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also colliding: the memories of empire that had taken very different forms around the world and the culture of governing foreign territory and foreign people that had been such a constant feature of the American experience (Document 6.17). Bush got what he wanted. His administration had already committed itself to the surge, and there was no groundswell of opposition. The United States dispatched twenty thousand troops to Iraq and extended the tours of four thousand others. Although some members of Congress spoke out against the surge, they did not possess the political means to prevent the military from moving forward. And in the months that followed, many of those supporting the surge felt vindicated. As the number of civilian and military deaths declined, it seemed that the additional troops and the new tactics they implemented were helping Iraq make real progress toward the broader goal of stability and security. But the surge further fueled the claims of critics, who argued that the Bush administration had forced the United States into a war in Iraq that had no end in sight. Increasingly, the criticism focused not simply on the Bush administration but also on the Iraqi government. Critics charged that Americans were dying as they carried out a job that Iraqis were failing to do themselves. They added that the United States was paying billions of dollars to support Iraq while Iraq itself was reaping the windfall of billions of dollars in oil revenue. In other words, both the administration and its critics had returned to the terms that had always governed the American struggle with empire. The administration argued that the United States had international responsibilities and that the United States could govern foreign people and foreign territory without descending into the pitfalls of other empires. Critics charged that the United States had a responsibility to promote democracy, independence, and institutional development. They added that only the worst sorts of empires proceeded into wars of aggression on flimsy ideological rationales. People in Iraq made their own arguments, just as local residents always had. They argued that the United States might have responsibilities to Iraq, but that the federal government was far too slow in respecting the independence of Iraqi citizens and the Iraqi government. Still others believed that the war itself was an act of aggression, the sort of thing that empires had always done. All sides were at odds. Yet all sides were standing on the same common ground (Document 6.16). And it was well-trod ground. Since 1776, Americans had been arguing about the meaning of empire and about the particular challenge of governing foreign territory and foreign people. That argument now reached around the world, involving not only people and territory but the disparate notions of empire.

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Document 6.1 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Afghanistan and Iraq, 2001 Under provisions of a federal law passed in 1961, the U.S. Department of State generates annual reports on the human rights practices of every country on Earth, with the notable exception of the United States. To explain the human rights situation of a particular country, these reports also attempt to provide an overview of that country’s politics, economy, and society. The following document contains the introductory commentaries from the reports on Afghanistan and Iraq released in 2001. These reports serve a variety of useful purposes. First, they provide a snapshot of the federal government’s official outlook on both countries before the September 11, 2001, attacks. Second, they helped constitute the foundation for the American decision to overthrow the governments in both countries. Although the Bush administration emphasized the necessity of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a broad antiterrorism policy, the administration added that the suffering by citizens of both countries provided further justification for U.S. actions. Third, these reports display many of the domestic factors in both countries that informed U.S. policy in the years that followed. For example, the political repression the reports describe convinced some American policymakers that residents would greet the United States as a liberator. Likewise, the report on Afghanistan describes economic underdevelopment that would become a crucial concern of U.S. officials after 2001. The Iraq report also discusses the ethnic tensions within Iraqi society, tensions that critics later argued the administration failed to adequately assess.

Afghanistan Country Reports on Human Rights Practices Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor 2000 February 23, 2001 Afghanistan* continued to experience civil war and political instability for the 21st consecutive year. There was no functioning central government. The Pashtun-dominated ultra-conservative Islamic movement known as the Taliban controlled approximately 90 percent of the country, including the capital of Kabul, and all of the largest urban areas, except Faizabad. A Taliban edict in 1997 renamed the country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, with Taliban leader Mullah Omar as Head of State and Commander of the Faithful. There is a six-member ruling council in Kabul, but ultimate authority for Taliban rule rested in Mullah Omar, head of the inner Shura (Council), located in the southern city of Kandahar. Former President Burhanuddin Rabbani claimed to be the head of the Government, controlled most of the country’s embassies abroad, and retained Afghanistan’s United Nations seat after the U.N. General Assembly again deferred a decision on Afghanistan’s credentials during the September General Assembly session. Rabbani and his military commander, Ahmed Shah Masood, both Tajiks, also

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maintained control of some largely ethnic Tajik territory in the country’s northeast. Masood’s forces were within rocket range of Taliban-held Kabul until late July 1999, but since then the Taliban has pushed them back, capturing large areas. In 1999 the Taliban summer offensive pushed Masood’s forces out of the Shomali plain, north of Kabul. Towards the middle of June, the Taliban resumed its offensive, and captured the northeastern city of Taloqan. Commander Masood and commanders under the United Front for Afghanistan (UFA), also known as the Northern Alliance, continue to hold the Panjshir valley and Faizabad. The U.N. Secretary General’s Personal Representative to Afghanistan Fransesc Vendrell engaged in extensive discussions with various Afghan parties and interested nations throughout the year, but there has been little visible progress in ending the conflict. A group of representatives from the six nations bordering Afghanistan plus the United States and Russia met several times during the year to explore ways to end the conflict. During the year, a process to convene a Loya Jirga, or Grand Assembly of traditional leaders, which was focused around former King Zahir Shah and based in Rome, slowly began to gather support. Other initiatives, such as the Bonn process and the Cyprus process, began to cooperate with the Rome-based initiative. A number of provincial administrations maintained limited functions, but civil institutions were rudimentary. There is no countrywide recognized constitution, rule of law, or independent judiciary. In 1999 the Taliban claimed that it was drafting a new constitution based on Islamic law, but during the year there were no further announcements regarding a constitution. The Taliban remained the country’s primary military force. Taliban and members of other warring Afghan factions committed numerous serious human rights abuses in areas they occupied. Agriculture, including high levels of opium poppy cultivation, was the mainstay of the economy. For the second year in a row, the country was the largest opium producer in the world. The agriculture sector suffered a major setback due to the country’s worst drought in 30 years. Experts estimate that the drought may affect more than half of the population, with 3–4 million severely affected. The drought has affected all areas of the country, causing an increase in internal displacement, loss of livestock, and loss of livelihood. The crop loss in some areas was estimated to be 50 percent. Approximately 80 percent of the livestock of the Kuchi nomads reportedly has perished, and the Argun reservoir which supplied water to 500,000 farmers and to Kandahar has run dry, as have 8 rivers in the region. In addition to the drought, the agricultural sector continues to languish because of a lack of resources and the prolonged civil war, which have impeded reconstruction of irrigation systems, repair of market roads, and replanting of orchards in some areas. The presence of millions of landmines and unexploded ordnance throughout the country has restricted areas for cultivation and slowed the return of refugees who are needed to rebuild the economy. Trade was mainly in opium, fruits, minerals, and gems, as well as goods smuggled to Pakistan. There were rival currencies, both very inflated. Formal economic activity remained minimal in most of the country, especially rural areas, and was inhibited by recurrent fighting and by local commanders’ roadblocks in nonTaliban controlled areas. The country also is dependent on international assistance. Per capita income, based on World Bank figures, is about $280 per year. Reconstruction was

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continuing in Herat, Kandahar, and Ghazni, areas that are under firm Taliban control. Areas outside of Taliban control suffered from brigandage. The overall human rights situation remained extremely poor, and the Taliban continued to commit numerous serious and systemic abuses. Citizens were unable to change their government or choose their leaders peacefully. The Taliban carried out summary justice in the areas they controlled, and reportedly were responsible for political and other extrajudicial killings, including targeted killings, summary executions, and deaths in custody. There were allegations that Taliban forces were responsible for disappearances. The Taliban imposed strict and oppressive order by means of stiff punishments for crimes in the areas that they controlled. The Taliban’s Islamic courts and religious police, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Suppression of Vice (PVSV), enforced their ultra-conservative interpretation of Islamic law. The PVSV has carried out punishments such as stoning to death, flogging, public executions for adultery, murder, and homosexual activity, and amputations of limbs for theft. For lesser infractions, Taliban militiamen often judged accused offenders and meted out punishments, such as beatings, on the spot. Prison conditions were poor. The Taliban arbitrarily arrested and detained persons and infringed on citizens’ privacy rights. The Taliban’s military offensive and capture of Taloqan forced tens of thousands of civilians to flee their homes. Taliban forces were responsible for indiscriminate bombardment of civilian areas. Civil war conditions and the unfettered actions of competing factions effectively limited the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and association. Freedom of religion is restricted severely and Taliban members vigorously enforced their interpretation of Islamic law. Freedom of movement is also limited. Years of conflict have left approximately 258,600 citizens internally displaced, while more than 2.8 million of the country’s population of approximately 25.8 million live outside the country as refugees. Although the continued fighting has discouraged many refugees from returning to their country, 133,600 refugees voluntarily returned from Iran during the year under a U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees–Iran agreement on voluntary repatriation. An additional 50,000 are estimated to have returned outside the framework of this agreement. All factions have harassed domestic and international NGO’s. The human rights situation for women was extremely poor. Violence against women remained a problem throughout the country. Women and girls were subjected to rape, kidnaping, and forced marriage. Taliban restrictions against women and girls remained widespread, institutionally sanctioned, and systematic. The Taliban imposed strict dress codes and prohibited women from working outside the home except in limited circumstances in the health care field and in some humanitarian assistance projects. Despite these formal restrictions, the treatment of women and girls in Taliban-controlled areas improved slightly for the second year in a row, mainly due to lack of enforcement. Although girls were prohibited formally from attending school, several organizations were able to run elementary schools and home schools with girls in attendance despite the formal prohibition. Nonetheless, there was widespread and widely accepted societal discrimination against women and girls throughout the country. The Taliban detained persons because of their ethnic origins. Worker rights were not defined. Child labor persists.

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The human rights situation in areas outside of Taliban control also remained extremely poor, and Masood’s forces and the Northern Alliance members committed numerous, serious abuses. Masood’s forces continued sporadic rocket attacks against Kabul. Anti-Taliban forces bombarded civilians indiscriminately. Various factions infringed on citizens’ privacy rights. Armed units of the Northern Alliance, local commanders, and rogue individuals were responsible for political killings, abductions, kidnapings for ransom, torture, rape, arbitrary detention, and looting. During the year, a degree of “enforcement fatigue” seems to have led to an informal easing of various restrictions. Reports suggest that activities such as nonformal education for girls and women working in self-employed sectors increasingly are tolerated if engaged in quietly. Many households in urban areas own television sets. Significantly, the Taliban forces did not engage in the scorched earth policy of previous campaigns when they burned homes, killed livestock, uprooted orchards, and destroyed irrigation systems. . . . *The U.S. Embassy in Kabul has been closed for security reasons since January 1989. Information on the human rights situation is therefore limited. This report focuses on the over 90 percent of the country under Taliban control. Source: “Afghanistan 2000,” Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State, February 23, 2001), www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2000/sa/721.htm.

Iraq Country Reports on Human Rights Practices Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor 2000 February 23, 2001 Political power in Iraq lies exclusively in a repressive one-party apparatus dominated by Saddam Hussein and members of his extended family. The provisional Constitution of 1968 stipulates that the Arab Ba’th Socialist Party governs Iraq through the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), which exercises both executive and legislative authority. President Saddam Hussein, who is also Prime Minister, Chairman of the RCC, and Secretary General of the Regional Command of the Ba’th Party, wields decisive power. Saddam Hussein and his regime continued to refer to an October 1995 nondemocratic “referendum” on his presidency, in which he received 99.96 percent of the vote. This “referendum” included neither secret ballots nor opposing candidates, and many credible reports indicated that voters feared possible reprisal for a dissenting vote. Ethnically and linguistically the Iraqi population includes Arabs, Kurds, Turkomans, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Armenians. The religious mix is likewise varied and consists of Shi’a and Sunni Muslims (both Arab and Kurdish), Christians (including Chaldeans and Assyrians), Jews (most of whom have emigrated), and a small number of Mandaeans. Civil uprisings have occurred in recent years, especially in the north and the south. The

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Government has reacted with extreme repression against those who oppose or even question it. The judiciary is not independent, and the President may override any court decision. The Government’s security apparatus includes militias attached to the President, the Ba’th Party, and the Interior Ministry. The security forces play a central role in maintaining the environment of intimidation and fear on which government power rests. Security forces committed widespread, serious, and systematic human rights abuses. The Government owns all major industries and controls most of the highly centralized economy, which is based largely on oil production. The economy was damaged by the Iran-Iraq and Gulf Wars, and Iraq has been under U.N. sanctions since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Sanctions ban all exports, except oil sales, under U.N. Security Council Resolution 986 and subsequent resolutions (the “oil-for-food” program). Under the program, Iraq also is permitted, under U.N. control, to import food, medicine, supplies for water, sanitation, electricity, agricultural, and educational projects, and spare parts for the oil sector. The Government’s human rights record remained extremely poor. Citizens do not have the right to change their government. The Government continued to execute summarily perceived political opponents and leaders in the Shi’a religious community. Reports suggest that persons were executed merely because of their association with an opposition group or as part of a continuing effort to reduce prison populations. The Government continued to be responsible for disappearances and to kill and torture persons suspected of—or related to persons suspected of—economic crimes, military desertion, and a variety of other activities. Security forces routinely tortured, beat, raped, and otherwise abused detainees. Prison conditions are extremely poor. The authorities routinely used arbitrary arrest and detention, prolonged detention, and incommunicado detention, and continued to deny citizens the basic right to due process. The judiciary is not independent. The Government continued to infringe on citizens’ privacy rights. The Government restricts severely freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, religion, and movement. The U.N. Commission on Human Rights and the U.N. General Assembly passed resolutions in April and November respectively criticizing the Government’s suppression of these freedoms. Human rights abuses remain difficult to document because of the Government’s efforts to conceal the facts, including its prohibition on the establishment of independent human rights organizations, its persistent refusal to grant visits to human rights monitors, and its continued restrictions designed to prevent dissent. Denied entry to Iraq, the Special Rapporteur bases his reports on the Government’s human rights abuses on interviews with recent emigres from Iraq, interviews with opposition groups and others that have contacts inside Iraq, and on published reports. Violence and discrimination against women occur. The Government has enacted laws affording a variety of protections to women; however, it is difficult to determine the practical effects of such protections. The Government neglects the health and nutritional needs of children, and discriminates against religious minorities and ethnic groups. The Government restricts severely trade union rights. Child labor persists, and there were instances of forced labor.

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The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) have controlled most areas in the three northern provinces of Erbil, Duhok, and Sulaymaniah since the Government withdrew its military forces and civilian administrative personnel from the area after the 1991 Kurdish uprising. The KDP and the PUK fought one another from 1994 through 1997. In September 1998, they agreed to unify their separate administrations and to hold new elections in July 1999. The cease-fire has held; however, reunification measures have not been implemented. The KDP, PUK, and opposition groups committed human rights abuses. The PUK held municipal elections in February, the first elections held in the Kurdish-controlled areas since 1992. Foreign and local election observers reported that the elections generally were fair. . . . Source: “Iraq 2000,” Country Reports on Human Rights Practices (Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, U.S. Department of State, February 23, 2001), www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2000/nea/787.htm.

Document 6.2 Joint Resolution Authorizing the Use of Force in Response to the 9/11 Attacks, September 18, 2001 In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, American policymakers announced that the attacks had been the work of al-Qaida, an international terrorist group operating around the world but headquartered in Afghanistan. The Bush administration made clear that the use of military force was the only way to respond. The Senate initiated a resolution supporting the use of force. The House of Representatives concurred, and on September 18, 2001, the joint resolution became official. This statement provided crucial support for the administration’s emerging plan to deploy American power against terrorism on a global scale. In the years that followed, Congress passed subsequent resolutions authorizing the use of force. Although these subsequent resolutions were longer and more detailed than the first, the September 18 resolution remained the foundation for the administration’s claim that Congress had provided broad-reaching authorization for overseas activity. The administration specifically claimed this resolution and others like it provided the constitutional authority for the ongoing military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Joint Resolution To authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States. Whereas, on September 11, 2001, acts of treacherous violence were committed against the United States and its citizens; and Whereas, such acts render it both necessary and appropriate that the United States exercise its rights to self-defense and to protect United States citizens both at home and abroad; and

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Whereas, in light of the threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by these grave acts of violence; and Whereas, such acts continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States; and Whereas, the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States: Now, therefore, be it Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE. This joint resolution may be cited as the ‘Authorization for Use of Military Force.’

SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES. (a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons. (b) War Powers Resolution Requirements—(1) SPECIFIC STATUTORY AUTHORIZATION- Consistent with section 8(a)(1) of the War Powers Resolution, the Congress declares that this section is intended to constitute specific statutory authorization within the meaning of section 5(b) of the War Powers Resolution. (2) APPLICABILITY OF OTHER REQUIREMENTS- Nothing in this resolution supercedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution. Speaker of the House of Representatives. Vice President of the United States and President of the Senate. Source: Authorization for Use of Military Force, S. J. Res. 23, 107th Cong., 1st. sess. (September 18, 2001), http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107:S.J.RES.23.ENR:.

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Document 6.3 Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq, 2003 One of the driving forces in the debate over U.S. action in Iraq concerned whether the federal government adequately understood the challenges of governing the country. The following document played a crucial role in that process in numerous ways. First, it was part of the policy planning process. Produced by the National Intelligence Council in January 2003, “Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq” informed decision making within the Bush administration, which was already mobilizing for military operations in Iraq. Second, it became part of the debate about the wisdom of the administration’s decisions. American journalists first reported details of the report in 2006. The following year, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released the document, and Americans both in and out of public office immediately began arguing about its implications. Critics charged that the document proved that the Bush administration had advance warning of the numerous sources of internal conflict that would likely explode if the United States invaded Iraq. Others, claiming instead that the report suggested manageable sources of tension, argued that the document had not predicted resistance at such a level.

At the request of the Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State, this Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) examines the internal dynamics of Iraq that will frame the challenges for whatever government succeeds the regime of Saddam Husayn. It discusses the main political, economic, humanitarian, and security Issues inside Iraq that are likely to demand attention during approximately the first three to five years after Saddam departs. In particular, it looks at the prospects for representative government in Iraq and at the ethnic, tribal, and religious forces that will affect its development. How these issues unfold would depend heavily on the events leading to Saddam’s removal. The effects of his ouster through the invasion of Iraq by a Coalition military force could vary significantly according to the duration of the war, the damage it caused, and such other factors as the size and cohesiveness of the Coalition. Subsequent occupation by a Coalition force obviously would make that force the dominant influence on events in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the invasion. This assessment makes no projections about specific wartime scenarios or the policies of an occupying force. Nor does it focus primarily on the immediate humanitarian demands or need to locate weapons of mass destruction that would be handled by the Coalition military forces in the first days after a war. Instead, it identifies and analyzes the medium- to long-term challenges that any post-Saddam authority in Iraq necessarily would face. . . .

Key Judgments (U) Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq The greatest medium-to-long-term challenge in Iraq if Saddam Husayn were ousted would be the introduction of a stable and representative political system in place of Saddam’s apparatus of oppression. The building of an Iraqi democracy would be a long, difficult, and probably turbulent process, with potential for backsliding into Iraq’s tradition of authoritarianism.

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• Iraqi political culture does not foster liberalism or democracy. Iraq lacks the experience of a loyal opposition and effective institutions for mass political participation. Saddam’s brutal methods have made a generation of Iraqis distrustful of surrendering or sharing power. • The principal positive elements in any effort at democratization would be the current relative weakness of political Islam in Iraq and the contributions that could be made by four million Iraqi exiles—many of whom are Westernized and well educated—are by the now-impoverished and underemployed Iraqi middle class. Iraq would be unlikely to split apart, but a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so. • Sunni Arabs would face possible loss of their longstanding privileged position while Shia would seek power commensurate with their majority status. • Kurds could try to take advantage of Saddam’s departure by seizing some of the large northern oilfields, a move that would elicit forceful responses from Sunni Arabs [redacted] • Score-settling would occur throughout Iraq between those associated with Saddam’s regime and those who have suffered most under it. Iraq’s large petroleum resources—its greatest asset—would make economic reconstruction less difficult than political transformation. Iraq’s economic options would remain few and narrow, however, without forgiveness of debt, a reduction in reparation’s from the previous Persian Gulf war, or something akin to a Marshall Plan. • Iraq’s economic and financial prospects would vary significantly depending on how much damage its oil facilities sustained in a war. If they remained relatively unscathed and any administrative issues involving organization of Iraq’s oil industry were resolved, it would be possible to increase oil production within three months from 2.4 million barrels per day (b/d) to 3.1 million b/d. • A less oil-dependent economy with a strong private sector would be required to generate the more than 240,000 new jobs needed each year to accommodate the rapidly growing labor force. . . . The foreign and security policies of a new Iraqi government necessarily would defer heavily in the near term to the interests of the United States, United Nations, or an international Coalition but also would reflect many continuing Iraqi perceptions and interests. . . . • These threat perceptions, along with a prideful sense of Iraq’s place as a regional power, probably would sustain Iraq’s interest in rebuilding its military. Unless guaranteed a security umbrella against its strategic rivals, Iraq’s interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction would eventually revive.

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• A new Iraqi government would have little interest in supporting terrorism, although strong Iraqi sympathy for the Palestinians would continue. If Baghdad were unable to exert control over the Iraqi countryside, al-Q’aida or other terrorists groups could operate from remote areas. . . .

Discussion (U) Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq The ouster of Iraqi dictator Saddam Husayn would pose a variety of significant policy challenges for whoever assumes responsibility for governing Iraq. These include political transformation, controlling internal strife, solving economic and humanitarian challenges, and dealing with persistent foreign policy and security concerns. The greatest medium-tolong-term challenge would be in fashioning an even partially liberal, democratic, and stable polity in place of the system of oppression that Saddam has maintained. Political transformation is the task in which the underlying problems are most deeply rooted in Iraq’s history and culture and least susceptible to outside intervention and management.

(U) The Historical Legacy Iraq’s experience with democratic—or even representative—political institutions has been limited. Its experiments in pluralism ended long ago, and the socio-economic foundations for a more open political system that were laid in the 1960s and 1970s have collapsed. • Iraq’s most promising experiment with representative institutions took place under the Hashemite monarchy (1920–1958), when political parties operated more freely than at any other time in the country’s history. Although personal ties, traditional patronclient relationships, and management by the regime greatly influenced the political process, the Iraqi Chamber of Deputies was a somewhat representative body. • Formal suffrage requirements in Iraq were comparatively liberal during the monarchy. However, low levels of education and literacy, the absence of transportation and media networks, and the overweaning influence of tribal shaykhs in the countryside meant that, outside the cities or among rural elites, voting rates were low and the integrity of the ballot was questionable. • Modern participatory mass politics was only beginning to emerge when the monarchy was overthrown in a military coup in 1958. Iraq’s leaders have struggled to create an Iraqi national identity since the country was created following World War I out of three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Sunni Arab minority has provided most of Iraq’s leaders, continuing a traditional leadership arrangement established during Ottoman rule and sustained through the British mandate. Individual Kurds and Shias, as well as Christians and Jews, have held influential positions, but such exceptions were not indicative of Sunni power-sharing. Prior to 1968, the merchant class, the alema, and some tribal shaykhs were influential in government and within their own communities. . . .

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(U) Iraq’s Political Culture: Implications for Democracy The undemocratic nature of Iraq’s political culture means that any development of stable democracy there would be a long and probably difficult process. Saddam’s brutal regime has left its mark on the Iraqi psyche. . . . Iraq’s political culture largely is bereft of the social underpinnings that directly support development of broad-based participatory democracy. The non-regime political elite has largely disappeared through exile or death. More than 70 percent of the population has been born and reached adulthood since Operation Desert Storm and know only war, sanctions, deprivation, and Saddam’s rule. Few Iraqis have any firsthand experience with pro-Saddam Iraq. Development of a new political culture more conducive to democracy would require building upon the now-impoverished but still talented Iraqi middle class. Despite their economic straits, many members of this social stratum—a least those who were adults before deprivations began during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s—may retain attitudes similar to those of liberal bourgeoisie in developed democracies. The political attitudes of their offspring could be more problematic. Stable democracy in Iraq would require development of a new system of political parties with nationwide constituencies cutting across ethno-religious boundaries. . . . The idea of free and democratic elections, although somewhat alien, probably would be a popular concept with the vast majority of the Iraqi population. But the practical implementation of democratic rule would be difficult in a country with no concept of loyal opposition and no history of alternation of power. Those groups that retained a power base following Saddam’s removal would be reluctant to voluntarily relinquish whatever influence they had until they felt sufficiently secure—on a personal as well as a group level. . . . • Although Iraqis might be enthusiastic about casting votes, we do not know what their perception of “democracy” is. Many Iraqi citizens probably would continue to rely heavily on authority figures for their well-being and direction. The history of strong authoritarian rule has left most Iraqis heavily reliant on the central government. Unless Saddam’s removal were followed by re-establishment of a strong and central authority, many Iraqis would begin looking toward more traditional regional, tribal, or religious authorities for support and guidance. • Some Iraqis would be quick to blame economic problems and other difficulties in their daily lives on a breakdown of the previous order. There might be some longing for the more functional aspects of Saddam’s authoritarian regime, similar to nostalgia for an undemocratic past observed in other states that have undergone major loosening of their political system (such as South Africa and the former Soviet Union). The lack of ingrained democratic traditions, innate distrust of other groups, and the tendency to substitute tribal, ethnic, or sectarian loyalties will impede the development of a stable democracy. Initial expressions of enthusiasm for democratic norms and procedures—not only from ordinary Iraqis, but from any new Iraqi government, which would want to stay in good graces with the US-led Western democracies—would not

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reflect a sudden alteration of that culture. A stable and democratic Iraqi political system, if one emerges, is likely to be the result of a long evolution that supplants traditional loyalties and practices. . . . • Even with a long-term political evolution, sustained nurturing of democratic institutions would be needed to minimize the chance of drift toward the authoritarian patterns that have dominated Iraq’s 90-year history.

(U) Political Islam A factor in favor of possible democratization of Iraq is the relatively low politicization of Iraqi Shiism—the country’s majority Islamic creed—particularly in comparison to Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia and the Persian variant of Shiism practiced in Iran. This does not mean, however, that the trend could not take root in post-war Iraq, particularly if economic recovery were slow and foreign troops remained in country for a long period. Academic research indicates that the political vitality of Iraqi Shiism declined throughout the 20th century. . . . No major fundamentalist trend within either the Shia or Sunni communities emerged under the Ba’th—possibly as a result of the regime’s repression. Travelers to Iraq report that members of the younger generation are more attracted to fundamentalism than their parents were—perhaps in reaction to the failure of the Iraqi state as well as to the same developments that have boosted political Islam elsewhere in the region. A more politically open society could provide fertile ground for these nascent fundamentalist tendencies. The ability of fundamentalism to take hold in Iraq would depend in large pact on how quickly Iraq recovered economically from the lingering effects of sanctions.

(U) Discredited Arab Nationalism Another favorable factor, and an unintended consequence of Saddam’s rule, has been that one of the prime Arab alternatives to democracy—secular authoritarian nationalism—has been discredited. The appeal of this variety of authoritarianism would be likely to be restricted to a small minority that directly benefited from Saddam’s regime. . . .

(U) Domestic Divisions and Conflict Any new authority in Iraq would face a country with societal fractures and significant potential for violent conflict among domestic groups if not prevented by an occupying force. Some of the domestic divisions are emotion-laden but less visceral and extreme than in some countries in which ethnic conflict has been the basis for genocide. The principal division is the three-way split among Sunni Arab, Shia, and Kurd, which is based on ethnicity and religion but to some extent involves a geographic concentration of each group in the central, southern, and northern regions of Iraq respectively. . . . • These divisions have not generated constant civil war during Saddam’s tenure largely because of the de facto secession of the Kurdish north—protected by the northern nofly zone—and severe repression by the regime. . . .

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• Saddam has widened societal splits by exacerbating hostilities and suspicions among ethnic, tribal, and religious groups in an effort to co-opt some and subjugate others. Despite these societal fissures, Iraq would be unlikely to split apart. Most Iraqis have national identity and pride in being Iraqi that transcends their ethnic and religious differences. More significantly, the alternatives are not attractive. [redacted] • In the immediate aftermath of Saddam’s removal, those Iraqi forces capable of putting down unrest and restoring order would tend to employ, if not otherwise checked, the familiar tactics used under the Saddam regime, meaning quick and possibly brutal repression. • Over the longer term, the police and security forces would need to be rebuilt and restructured if they were to gain the trust of the Iraqi people and avoid the excesses similar to those under Saddam’s rule. • The Regular Army has been relatively unpoliticized below the command level and, once purged of the security and intelligence officers embedded within it, could be used for security and law enforcement until police or a local gendarme force is established. . . .

Implications for Iraqi Policy New Iraqi leaders would understand that Iraq would have to bend to the will of the international community at least as much on military and security matters as on any other aspect of policy, given the nature of the threat Saddam’s regime has posed. Nonetheless, as with aspects of broader foreign policy, there would be significant elements of continuity in Iraqi perspectives and ambitions. A combination of crushing defeat, disgust with the path on which Saddam had taken Iraq, and inspired new leadership could move Iraq in a markedly less militarist direction, somewhat like Japan after World War II. We believe it most likely, however, that any future government in Iraq would retain interest in rebuilding the Iraqi military. . . . • To counter the potential threats that Iraqis would continue to face from its neighbors. • To ensure internal security and provide domestic jobs. • To restore the pride in Iraq’s historical and regional importance that most Iraqis probably share; Iraqis would consider a significant military capability to be an essential component. A security guarantee involving a long-term foreign military presence might partially assuage the first two concerns but not the third.

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(U) Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) The issue of weapons of mass destruction would not go away, even if Saddam’s WMD programs were destroyed. Any successor regime probably would be cooperative on disarmament issues in the near term, however, to maintain international support. . . .

(U) Terrorism A new Iraqi regime would be less inclined than Saddam to support terrorism, although traditional sympathy for the Palestinians could mean continued ties to some Palestinian organizations. Sponsorship of terrorism would not be seen as fulfilling national pride or meeting regional security concerns in the same way that a strong army or WMD program might. The ability of al-Qa’ida or other terrorist groups to maintain a presence in northern Iraq (or, more clandestinely, elsewhere) would depend largely on whether a new regime were able to exert effective security control over the entire country. In addition, rogue ex-regime elements could forge an alliance with existing terrorist organizations or act independently to wage guerilla warfare against the new government or Coalition forces. . . . Source: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq, S. Rep. 110-76, http://intelligence.senate.gov/pub110thcongress.html.

Document 6.4 George W. Bush Addresses the Nation at the Start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, March 19, 2003 The following speech came at a moment of high drama. Military planners had kept the operational details and timetable secret, but few Americans were surprised when the United States attacked Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom came after weeks of troop mobilization and public debate. President George W. Bush’s speech established the objectives that framed the initial rationale for the war: preventing the Iraqi regime from generating weapons of mass destruction, interrupting the alleged connections between that regime and al-Qaida terrorists, and deposing the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. When it came to the American plans for a postwar Iraq, however, the president invoked terms that long preceded either terrorism or modern warfare. In his efforts to describe a democratized Iraq where the federal government would play a beneficial but temporary role, Bush described a developmental process that Americans had employed for more than two centuries.

My fellow citizens, at this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. More than 35 countries are

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giving crucial support—from the use of naval and air bases, to help with intelligence and logistics, to the deployment of combat units. Every nation in this coalition has chosen to bear the duty and share the honor of serving in our common defense. To all the men and women of the United States Armed Forces now in the Middle East, the peace of a troubled world and the hopes of an oppressed people now depend on you. That trust is well placed. The enemies you confront will come to know your skill and bravery. The people you liberate will witness the honorable and decent spirit of the American military. In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war or rules of morality. Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military—a final atrocity against his people. I want Americans and all the world to know that coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm. A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict. And helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment. We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat and restore control of that country to its own people. I know that the families of our military are praying that all those who serve will return safely and soon. Millions of Americans are praying with you for the safety of your loved ones and for the protection of the innocent. For your sacrifice, you have the gratitude and respect of the American people. And you can know that our forces will be coming home as soon as their work is done. Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly—yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder. We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of fire fighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities. Now that conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force. And I assure you, this will not be a campaign of half measures, and we will accept no outcome but victory. My fellow citizens, the dangers to our country and the world will be overcome. We will pass through this time of peril and carry on the work of peace. We will defend our freedom. We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail. May God bless our country and all who defend her. Source: George W. Bush, “President Bush Addresses the Nation” (remarks announcing U.S. military operations in Iraq, Oval Office, Washington, D.C., March 19, 2003), http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319-17.html.

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Document 6.5 George W. Bush Addresses the Iraqi People, April 10, 2003 Three weeks after President Bush explained Operation Iraqi Freedom to the American people, he issued the following statement to the Iraqi people. In it he reiterated many of the goals he first outlined in his March 19 speech. In this case, however, he focused greater attention on the long-term role for the United States. The speech offered a direct response to the language of anti-imperialism that had resonated throughout the Middle East for decades. But Bush’s specific response—implying that the United States was somehow different from the other Western powers that had involved themselves in Iraqi affairs—reflected Americans’ own sense of anti-imperialism, allowing the United States to deploy its power in other countries without abandoning its commitment to self-determination.

This is George W. Bush, the President of the United States. At this moment, the regime of Saddam Hussein is being removed from power, and a long era of fear and cruelty is ending. American and coalition forces are now operating inside Baghdad—and we will not stop until Saddam’s corrupt gang is gone. The government of Iraq, and the future of your country, will soon belong to you. The goals of our coalition are clear and limited. We will end a brutal regime, whose aggression and weapons of mass destruction make it a unique threat to the world. Coalition forces will help maintain law and order, so that Iraqis can live in security. We will respect your great religious traditions, whose principles of equality and compassion are essential to Iraq’s future. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave. Iraq will go forward as a unified, independent and sovereign nation that has regained a respected place in the world. The United States and its coalition partners respect the people of Iraq. We are taking unprecedented measures to spare the lives of innocent Iraqi citizens, and are beginning to deliver food, water and medicine to those in need. Our only enemy is Saddam’s brutal regime—and that regime is your enemy as well. In the new era that is coming to Iraq, your country will no longer be held captive to the will of a cruel dictator. You will be free to build a better life, instead of building more palaces for Saddam and his sons, free to pursue economic prosperity without the hardship of economic sanctions, free to travel and speak your mind, free to join in the political affairs of Iraq. And all the people who make up your country—Kurds, Shi’a, Turkomans, Sunnis, and others—will be free of the terrible persecution that so many have endured. The nightmare that Saddam Hussein has brought to your nation will soon be over. You are a good and gifted people—the heirs of a great civilisation that contributes to all humanity. You deserve better than tyranny and corruption and torture chambers. You deserve to live as free people. And I assure every citizen of Iraq: your nation will soon be free. Thank you. Source: George W. Bush, “President’s Message to the Iraqi People” (remarks describing U.S. goals and intentions in Iraq, Oval Office, Washington, D.C., April 10, 2003), http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/04/20030410-2.html.

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Document 6.6 Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation Number 1, May 16, 2003 The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was the primary institution of U.S. governance and reconstruction in Iraq. Designed to fill the gap between the initial military rule that followed the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the creation of a new Iraqi government, the CPA was the de facto leadership for the country. Lt. Gen. Jay Garner served briefly as director of the CPA before he was replaced in May 2003 by L. Paul Bremer. Bremer would become one of the most important figures in Iraq policy and perhaps the most important U.S. official actually located in Iraq itself. Among Bremer’s first tasks was to finalize the structure for the CPA. What follows is the first in a series of “regulations” designed to establish the goals, the structure, and the requirements of the CPA. Written in the technical language of twenty-first-century administration, the CPA reflected many of the same objectives of the territorial structure in the nineteenth century or the overseas governance structures of the twentieth century.

Pursuant to my authority as Administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of war, I hereby promulgate the following:

Section 1 The Coalition Provisional Authority 1) The CPA shall exercise powers of government temporarily in order to provide for the effective administration of Iraq during the period of transitional administration, to restore conditions of security and stability, to create conditions in which the Iraqi people can freely determine their own political future, including by advancing efforts to restore and establish national and local institutions for representative governance and facilitating economic recovery and sustainable reconstruction and development. 2) The CPA is vested with all executive, legislative and judicial authority necessary to achieve its objectives, to be exercised under relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of war. This authority shall be exercised by the CPA Administrator. 3) As the Commander of Coalition Forces, the Commander of U.S. Central Command shall directly support the CPA by deterring hostilities; maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity and security; searching for, securing and destroying weapons of mass destruction; and assisting in carrying out Coalition policy generally.

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Section 2 The Applicable Law Unless suspended or replaced by the CPA or superseded by legislation issued by democratic institutions of Iraq, laws in force in Iraq as of April 16, 2003 shall continue to apply in Iraq insofar as the laws do not prevent the CPA from exercising its rights and fulfilling its obligations, or conflict with the present or any other Regulation or Order issued by the CPA.

Section 3 Regulations and Orders issued by the CPA 1) In carrying out the authority and responsibility vested in the CPA, the Administrator will, as necessary, issue Regulations and Orders. Regulations shall be those instruments that define the institutions and authorities of the CPA. Orders are binding instructions issued by the CPA. Regulations and Orders will remain in force until repealed by the Administrator or superseded by legislation issued by democratic institutions of Iraq. Regulations and Orders issued by the Administrator shall take precedence over all other laws and publications to the extent such other laws and publications are inconsistent. The Administrator may also from time to time issue Public Notices. 2) The promulgation of any CPA Regulation or Order requires the approval or signature of the Administrator. The Regulation or Order shall enter into force as specified therein, shall be promulgated in the relevant languages and shall be disseminated as widely as possible. In the case of divergence, the English text shall prevail. 3) CPA Regulations and Orders shall bear the symbols CPA/REG/Date Month 2003/_ and CPA/ORD/Date Month 2003/_. A register of the Regulations and Orders shall indicate the date of entry into force, the subject matter and amendments or changes thereto, or the repeal or suspension thereof.

Section 4 Memoranda 1) The Administrator may issue Memoranda in relation to the interpretation and application of any Regulation or Order. 2) CPA Memoranda shall bear the symbols CPA/MEM/Date Month 2003/_. The provisions of Section 3 shall also apply to the promulgation CPA Memoranda.

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Section 5 Entry into force This Regulation shall enter into force on the date of signature. L. Paul Bremer, Administrator Coalition Provisional Authority Source: “Coalition Provisional Authority Regulation Number 1,” CPA/REG/16 May 2003, www.cpa-iraq.org/regulations/20030516_CPAREG_1_The_Coalition_Provisional_Authority_.pdf.

Document 6.7 Tony Blair’s Address to Congress, July 18, 2003 British prime minister Tony Blair was among President Bush’s few European allies in Operation Iraqi Freedom. As a result, he enjoyed special support within the administration. With Republicans enjoying a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, Blair was invited to address a joint session during a visit to Washington (a rare honor under any circumstance and one that Congress has only occasionally granted to foreigners). In the speech that follows, Blair was really speaking to three audiences: one in the United States, another in Great Britain, and a third in Europe. The American audience was perhaps of the least concern to Blair because all he could do was help generate support for the Bush administration. In Britain, however, Blair faced scathing criticism. Accusations ranged from claims that Blair was reviving the worst elements of Britain’s imperialist past to claims that Blair was actually undermining British power by becoming a lackey of the Americans. In continental Europe, where opposition to the war was even stronger, Blair’s support for the United States undermined relations with other European leaders. All of this could not have come at a worse time for Blair, who was struggling to cement his political legacy in Britain and establish himself as a leading statesman in European circles.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, Honorable Members of Congress, I am deeply touched by that warm and generous welcome. That is more than I deserve and more than I am used to, quite frankly. And let me begin by thanking you most sincerely for voting to award me the Congressional Gold Medal. But you, like me, know who the real heros are: those brave servicemen and women, yours and ours, who fought the war, and risk their lives still. Our tribute to them should be measured in this way: by showing them and their families that they did not strive or die in vain, but that through their sacrifice, future generations can live in greater peace, prosperity, and hope. Let me also express my gratitude to President Bush. Through the troubled times since September 11 changed our world, we have been allies and friends. Thank you, Mr. President, for your leadership. . . . Members of Congress, I feel a most urgent sense of mission about today’s world. September 11 was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue; Iraq, another act, and many further struggles will be set upon this stage before it is over. There never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary, or so misunderstood; or when,

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except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day. We were all reared on battles between great warriors, between great nations, between powerful forces and ideologies that dominated entire continents. These were struggles for conquest, for land or money. And the wars were fought by massed armies. The leaders were openly acknowledged; the outcomes decisive. Today, none of us expect our soldiers to fight a war on our own territory. The immediate threat is not conflicts between the world’s most powerful nations. And why? Because we all have too much to lose; because technology, communication, trade and travel are bringing us ever closer together; because in the last 50 years, countries like yours and mine have trebled their growth and standard of living; because even those powers like Russia or China or India can see the horizon of future wealth clearly and know they are on a steady road toward it; and because all nations that are free, value that freedom, will defend it absolutely, and have no wish to trample on the freedom of others. We are bound together as never before. This coming together provides us with unprecedented opportunity that also makes us uniquely vulnerable. And the threat comes because in another part of our globe there is shadow and darkness where not all the world is free; where many millions suffer under brutal dictatorship; where a third of our planet lives in poverty beyond anything even the poorest in our societies can imagine; where a fanatical strain of religious extremism has risen that is a mutation of the true and peaceful faith of Islam; and because in the combination of these afflictions a new and deadly virus has emerged. The virus is terrorism, whose intent to inflict destruction is unconstrained by human feeling and whose capacity to inflict is enlarged by technology. This is a battle that cannot be fought or won only by armies. We are so much more powerful in all conventional ways than the terrorists. Yet even in all our might, we are taught humility. In the end, it is not our power alone that will defeat this evil. Our ultimate weapon is not our guns, but our beliefs. There is a myth that, though we love freedom, others do not; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia’s savior. Members of Congress, ours are not Western values. They are the universal values of the human spirit. And anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police. The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack. And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea, and that idea is liberty. We must find the strength to fight for this idea and the compassion to make it universal. Abraham Lincoln said: “Those that deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves.” And it is this sense of justice that makes moral the love of liberty. In some cases, where our security is under direct threat, we will have recourse to arms. In others, it will be by force of reason. But in all cases to the same end: that the liberty we seek is not for some, but for all. For that is the only true path to victory in this struggle. . . .

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I believe any alliance must start with America and Europe. If Europe and America are together, the others will work with us. If we split, the rest will play around, play us off, and nothing but mischief will be the result of it. You may think after recent disagreements it cannot be done. But the debate in Europe is open. Iraq showed that, when, never forget, many European nations supported our action, and it shows it still when those that did not, agreed Resolution 1483 in the United Nations for Iraq’s reconstruction. Today, German soldiers lead in Afghanistan. French soldiers lead in the Congo where they stand between peace and a return to genocide. So we should not minimize the differences, but we should not let them confound us either. People ask me, after the past months when, let us say, things were a trifle strained in Europe, why do you persist in wanting Britain at the center of Europe? And I say, well, maybe if the U.K. were a group of islands 20 miles off Manhattan, I might feel differently; but, actually, we are 20 miles off Calais and are joined by a tunnel. We are part of Europe, and we want to be; but we also want to be part of changing Europe. Europe has one potential for weakness. For reasons that are obvious, we spent roughly a thousand years killing each other in large numbers. The political culture of Europe is inevitably and rightly based on compromise. Compromise is a fine thing, except when based on an illusion; and I do not believe you can compromise with this new form of terrorism. But Europe has a strength. It is a formidable political achievement. Think of the past and think of the unity today. Think of it preparing to reach out even to Turkey, a nation of vastly different culture, tradition and religion, and welcome it in. But my real point is this: now Europe is at a point of transformation. Next year, 10 new countries will join. Romania and Bulgaria will follow. Why will these new European members transform Europe? Because their scars are recent. Their memories strong. Their relationship with freedom still one of passion, not comfortable familiarity. They believe in the transatlantic alliance. They support economic reform. They want a Europe of nations, not a superstate. They are our allies, and they are yours. So do not give up on Europe. Work with it. To be a serious partner, Europe must take on and defeat the anti-Americanism that sometimes passes for its political discourse. And what America must do is show that this is a partnership built on persuasion, not command. Then the other great nations of our world and the small will gather around in one place, not many; and our understanding of this threat will become theirs. And the United Nations can then become what it should be, an instrument of action as well as debate. The Security Council should be reformed. We need a new international regime on the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. And we need to say clearly to United Nations’ members: If you engage in the systematic and gross abuse of human rights in defiance of the U.N. charter, you cannot expect to enjoy the same privileges as those that conform to it. I agree, it is not the coalition that determines the mission, but the mission, the coalition. But let us start preferring a coalition and acting alone if we have to, not the other way round. True, winning wars is not easier that way. But winning the peace is. And we have to win both.

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You have an extraordinary record of doing so. Who helped Japan renew or Germany reconstruct or Europe get back on its feet after World War II? America. So when we invade Afghanistan or Iraq, our responsibility does not end with military victory. Finishing the fighting is not finishing the job. So if Afghanistan needs more troops from the international community to police outside Kabul, our duty is to get them. Let us help them eradicate their dependency on the poppy, the crop whose wicked residue turns up on the streets of Britain as heroin to destroy young British lives as much as their harvest warps the lives of Afghans. We promised Iraq democratic government. We will deliver it. We promised them the chance to use their oil wealth to build prosperity for all their citizens, not a corrupt elite. And we will do so. We will stay with these people, so in need of our help, until the job is done. And then reflect on this: How hollow would the charges of American imperialism be when these failed countries are and are seen to be transformed from states of terror to nations of prosperity; from governments of dictatorship to examples of democracy; from sources of instability to beacons of calm? And how risible would be the claims that these were wars on Muslims, if the world could see these Muslim nations still Muslim but with some hope for the future, not shackled by brutal regimes whose principal victims were the very Muslims they pretended to protect? It would be the most richly observed advertisement for the values of freedom we can imagine. When we removed the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, this was not imperialism. For these oppressed people, it was their liberation. And why can the terrorists even mount an argument in the Muslim world that it is not? Because there is one cause terrorism rides upon, a cause they have no belief in, but can manipulate. I want to be very plain. This terrorism will not be defeated without peace in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine. Here it is that the poison is incubated. Here it is that the extremist is able to confuse in the mind of a frighteningly large number of people the case for a Palestinian state and the destruction of Israel, and to translate this, moreover, into a battle between East and West, Muslim, Jew, and Christian. We must never compromise the security of the State of Israel. The State of Israel should be recognized by the entire Arab world, and the vile propaganda used to indoctrinate children not just against Israel but against Jews must cease. You cannot teach people hate and then ask them to practice peace. But neither can you teach people peace except by according them dignity and granting them hope. Innocent Israelis suffer. So do innocent Palestinians. The ending of Saddam’s regime in Iraq must be the starting point of a new dispensation for the Middle East. Iraq: free and stable. Iran and Syria, who give succor to the rejectionist men of violence, made to realize that the world will no longer countenance it; that the hand of friendship can only be offered them if they resile completely from this malice, but that if they do, that hand will be there for them and their people. The whole of the region helped towards democracy. And to symbolize it all, the creation of an independent, viable, and democratic Palestinian state side by side with the State of Israel. What the President is doing in the Middle East is tough, but right. And let me at this point thank the President for his support and that of President Clinton before him and

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the support of Members of this Congress for our attempts to bring peace to Northern Ireland. One thing I have learned about peace processes, they are always frustrating, often agonizing, and occasionally seem hopeless; but for all that, having a peace process is better than not having one. . . . Members of Congress, if this seems a long way from the threat of terror and weapons of mass destruction, it is only to say again that the world’s security cannot be protected without the world’s heart being won. So America must listen as well as lead, but Members of Congress, do not ever apologize for your values. Tell the world why you are proud of America. Tell them when the “Star Spangled Banner” starts, Americans get to their feet: Hispanics, Irish, Italians, Central Europeans, East Europeans, Jews, Muslims, white, Asian, black, those who go back to the early settlers and those whose English is the same as some New York cab drivers I have dealt with but whose sons and daughters could run for Congress. Tell them why Americans, one and all, stand upright and respectful, not because some State official told them to but because whatever race, color, class, or creed they are, being American means being free. That is what makes them proud. As Britain knows, all predominant power seems for a time invincible, but in fact it is transient. The question is: What do you leave behind? What you can bequeath to this anxious world is the light of liberty. That is what this struggle against terrorist groups or states is about. We are not fighting for domination. We are not fighting for an American world, though we want a world in which America is at ease. We are not fighting for Christianity, but against religious fanaticism of all kinds. This is not a war of civilizations, because each civilization has a unique capacity to enrich the stock of human heritage. We are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind, black or white, Christian or not, left, right or merely indifferent, to be free; free to raise a family in love and hope; free to earn a living and be rewarded by your own efforts; free not to bend your knee to any man in fear; free to be you so long as being you does not impair the freedom of others. That is what we are fighting for, and that is a battle worth fighting. I know it is hard on America. And in some small corner of this vast country out in Nevada or Idaho, these places I have never been to but have always wanted to go, I know out there is a guy getting on with his life, perfectly happily, minding his own business, saying to you, the political leaders of this country, why me and why us and why America? The only answer is because destiny put you in this place in history in this moment in time, and the task is yours to do. And our job, my nation that watched you grow, that you have fought alongside and now fights alongside you, that takes enormous pride in our alliance and great affection in our common bond, our job is to be there with you. You are not going to be alone. We will be with you in this fight for liberty. We will be with you in this fight for liberty; and if our spirit is right, and our courage firm, the world will be with us. Thank you. Source: Congressional Record 149 (July 17, 2003), H7059–7062.

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Document 6.8 Dick Cheney on the American Capacity to Liberate and Govern Foreign Nations, 2003 During his eight years in office, Dick Cheney became the most powerful vice president in U.S. history. This was partly a result of dynamics within the Bush administration, partly the result of Cheney’s personality, and partly the result of the circumstances in which he served. Cheney had already served as White House chief of staff, member of Congress, and secretary of defense when he became George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000. Cheney’s nomination came after a quarter century in which a series of vice presidents (especially Lyndon B. Johnson and Walter Mondale) had sought to increase the policymaking powers of the vice presidency. Most important, Cheney’s immediate predecessor, Al Gore, had enjoyed unprecedented powers. Like Gore, Cheney assumed that he would play a role in the operational management of the president’s agenda. Unlike Gore, Cheney had far more experience than the president he served, and unlike Bill Clinton, George W. Bush was comfortable delegating powers to his vice president. But Cheney’s power fully emerged only after the attacks of September 11, 2001, when the vice president was revealed to be a key player (and, at times, the key player) in shaping U.S. policy. The result was to make Cheney one of the most polarizing figures in American government and a lightning rod who came to symbolize the debate over U.S. policy toward terrorism and, more specifically, toward the struggle with empire in Iraq and Afghanistan. To some, Cheney embodied fearless leadership. Because he had no plans to pursue the presidency in his own right, Cheney could take the lead in orchestrating policy without fear of criticism. To critics, Cheney helped drive the government out of control, pushing the administration toward invasion of foreign countries, torture of foreign nationals, and infringement on the civil liberties of American citizens. Meanwhile, one central question remained: Had Cheney been wise or foolish in advocating military action in Iraq? The following excerpt from the NBC Sunday morning news program, Meet the Press, captures the debate over that question.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to one of the most quoted passages from MEET THE PRESS when you were on in March, and that was trying to anticipate the reaction we would receive from the Iraqi people. Let’s watch: From videotape, March 16, 2003: VICE PRES. I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, CHENEY: my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. MR. RUSSERT: If your analysis is not correct and we’re not treated as liberators but as conquerors and the Iraqis begin to resist particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly and bloody battle with significant American casualties? VICE PRES. Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe we will be CHENEY: greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House. The president and I have met with various groups and individuals, people who’ve devoted their lives from the outside to try and change things inside of Iraq.

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The read we get on the people of Iraq is there’s no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

End videotape. MR. RUSSERT: We have not been greeted as liberators. VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I think we have by most Iraqis. I think the majority of Iraqis are thankful for the fact that the United States is there, that we came and we took down the Saddam Hussein government. And I think if you go in vast areas of the country, the Shia in the south, which are about 60 percent of the population, 20-plus percent in the north, in the Kurdish areas, and in some of the Sunni areas, you’ll find that, for the most part, a majority of Iraqis support what we did. MR. RUSSERT: People like Ahmed Chalabi, former Iraqis who came in and briefed— you talked about—did they sell us a bill of goods? Did they tell us this would be easier, that we’d be welcomed with flowers, and not the kind of armed resistance we’re being met with? VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think they felt—certainly, they were advocates of the U.S. action because they wanted to liberate Iraq from, you know, what has been one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century, the Saddam Hussein regime. And I see and receive evidence on a fairly regular basis. I mean, if you go out and look at what’s happening on the ground, you’ll find that there is widespread support. There was a poll done, just random in the last week, first one I’ve seen carefully done; admittedly, it’s a difficult area to poll in. Zogby International did it with American Enterprise magazine. But that’s got very positive news in it in terms of the numbers it shows with respect to the attitudes to what Americans have done. One of the questions it asked is: “If you could have any model for the kind of government you’d like to have”—and they were given five choices—“which would it be?” The U.S. wins hands down. If you want to ask them do they want an Islamic government established, by 2:1 margins they say no, including the Shia population. If you ask how long they want Americans to stay, over 60 percent of the people polled said they want the U.S. to stay for at least another year. So admittedly there are problems, especially in that area where Saddam Hussein was from, where people have benefited most from his regime and who’ve got the most to lose if we’re successful in our enterprise, and continuing attacks from terror. But to suggest somehow that that’s representative of the country at large or the Iraqi people are opposed to what we’ve done in Iraq or are actively and aggressively trying to undermine it, I just think that’s not true. Source: “Sunday, September 14, 2003: GUEST: Dick Cheney, vice president; Tim Russert, moderator,” Meet the Press, NBC, September 14, 2003, www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3080244/.

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Document 6.9 Criticizing the Project of Nation Building in Iraq, 2003 Even as Vice President Dick Cheney defended U.S. policy in Iraq, a growing contingent within Congress voiced opposition to the ongoing conflict. Much of this critique came from the Democrats’ side of the aisle; the following speech was an exception. Texas Republican Ron Paul echoed the Democrats’ charge that the Bush administration had misled the public about the reasons for initiating and continuing an increasingly expensive war, and he reiterated long-standing arguments about whether the United States should, or even could, impose a specific system and form of government on a foreign people.

Mr. Speaker, the neo-conservative media machine has been hard at work lately drumming up support for the $87 billion appropriation to extend the precarious occupation of Iraq. Opposition to this funding, according to the Secretary of Defense, encourages our enemies and hinders the war against terrorism. This is a distortion of the facts and is nothing more than destroying the messenger when one disapproves of the message. Those within the administration, prior to the war, who warned of the dangers and real costs were fired. Yet it now turns out that they were more right, that it would not be a cakewalk, that it would require a lot more troops, and costs would far exceed original expectations. The President recently reminded us that we went into Iraq to force Iraq’s compliance with U.N. resolutions since the U.N. itself was not up to the task. It was not for national security reasons. Yet we all know that the U.N. never endorsed this occupation. The question we in the Congress ought to ask is this: What if our efforts to Westernize and democratize Iraq do not work? Who knows? Many believe that our pursuit of nation building in Iraq will actually make things worse in Iraq, in the entire Middle East, through the entire Muslim world, and even here in the United States. This is a risky venture and this new funding represents an escalation of our efforts to defend a policy that has little chance of working. Since no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq, nor any evidence that the army of Saddam Hussein could have threatened the security of any nation, let alone the United States, a new reason is now given for the endless entanglement in a remote area of the world 6,000 miles from our homeland. We are now told that the need to be in Iraq is to fight the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11. Yet, not one shred of evidence has been produced to show that the Iraqi government had anything to do with 9/11 or the al-Qaeda. The American people are first told they have to sacrifice to pay for the bombing of Iraq. Now they must accept the fact that they must pay to rebuild it. If they complain, they will be accused of being unpatriotic and not supporting the troops. I wonder what

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a secret poll of our troops would show on whether or not they thought coming home next week indicated a lack of support for their well-being. Some believe that not raising taxes to pay for the war is a way to pay for the war on the cheap. It is not. When deficits skyrocket the Federal Government prints the money and the people are taxed by losing value in their savings and in their paychecks. The inflation tax is a sinister and evil way to pay for unpopular wars. It has been done that way for centuries. Mr. Speaker, I guess we shouldn’t worry because we can find a way to pay for it. Already we are charging our wounded soldiers $8.10 a day for food when recuperating in a hospital from war injuries. We also know that other soldiers are helping out by buying their own night vision goggles, GPSs, short wave radios, backpacks and even shoes. That is sure to help as well. . . . Seriously, though, funding for this misadventure should be denied no matter how well-meaning its supporters are. To expect a better world to come from force of arms abroad and confiscatory taxation at home is nothing but a grand illusion. The sooner we face the reality, the better. While we nation-build in Iraq in the name of defeating terrorism, we ignore our responsibilities to protect our borders at home and we compromise the liberties of our citizens with PATRIOT Act types of legislation. There are two main reasons we need to reject the foreign policy of the past 50 years that has been used to rationalize our presence in Iraq. First, the practical: We cannot expect to force Western, U.S.-style democracy on a nation that for over 1,000 years learned to live with and accept an Islamic based legal system. No matter what we say or believe, to the Iraqis they have been invaded by the Christian West, and whether it is the United States, U.N. or European troops that are sent to teach them the ways of the West it will not matter. Second, we have no constitutional authority to police the world or involve ourselves in nation building, in making the world safe for our style of democracy. Our founders advised against it and the early Presidents followed that advice. If we believe strongly in our ideals, the best way to spread them is to set a good example so that others will voluntarily emulate us. Force will not work. Besides, we do not have the money. The $87 billion appropriations request should be rejected. Source: Congressional Record 149 (September 16, 2003), H8261–H8262.

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Document 6.10 Iraq: Next Steps, September 2003 On September 24–25, 2003, L. Paul Bremer testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Only a few months into his tenure as director of the Coalition Provisional Authority, Bremer enjoyed general respect from senators of both parties. This remained the case even as Democrats became increasingly outspoken in their own criticism of the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq. The insurgency that took form after the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime had begun, but few American policymakers perceived the lengthy broadreaching campaign of violent resistance the insurgency would become. The document that follows consists of an excerpt of the committee’s hearings on September 25, 2003, when Bremer made his opening statement and faced initial questions. Bremer himself spoke optimistically of the administration’s plans in Iraq. The committee chair, Republican senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, was supportive but nonetheless pressed Bremer and, implicitly, the administration to develop a specific timetable and a tangible set of goals. Democratic senator Joe Biden was more openly critical of the administration, calling on Bremer to be more forthcoming than his superiors in Washington. For his part, Bremer rejected the calls for a timetable, advocating instead an approach that responded to the shifting circumstances in Iraq. Bremer, Lugar, and Biden approached the task from very different perspectives. Nonetheless, they all shared similar assumptions about the process and the goals of governing foreign territory and foreign people. Bremer made the most explicit connections to the nation’s past, invoking his own understanding of the lessons from the two world wars. Meanwhile, Bremer’s broad overview of the administration’s policy—stabilization followed by economic and political development and concluding with a new constitution that would establish Iraq as an independent democracy—contained all the hallmarks of the American struggle with empire.

Senator Richard Lugar. We look forward today to your status report on the ongoing war and on the complex political and economic reconstruction efforts in Iraq. After today, the Foreign Relations Committee will have held 12 hearings on Iraq so far this year. We have maintained this focus, not simply to generate public information or opportunity to second guess strategy, but because we believe Congress can and should be helpful in developing and supporting effective policies in Iraq. The United States must succeed in Iraq. And I am hopeful that you will ask us for any legislation authority or financing that you lack. The most immediate question is the shape of the $87 billion supplemental request from President Bush. But our committee is addressing Iraqi reconstruction in a wide strategic framework that includes such topics as Iraq’s relationship to the war on terrorism generally, its impact on America’s international relationships, and its effect on the broader political and economic dynamics in the Middle East. Personally, I have advocated a 5-year plan in Iraq, not because I believe the United States must stay in Iraq for exactly that length of time, but because I believe such a plan would demonstrate commitment, promote realistic budgeting, and help prevent policy drift. . . .

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To set the stage for our inquiries today, I would offer the following set of questions, which I believe are covered in your testimony, to explore as Senators have opportunities: What would a 5-year plan for Iraq look like and how much would it cost? How long will the $87 billion from the supplemental last? How long will the $21 billion of that targeted for reconstruction last? Will the United States commitment help generate international contributions at the Donor Conference in October or at other conferences surely to come? How does oil revenue fit into the projections of reconstruction financing, quite apart from the overall budget of the country? Do you have the right people in place in Iraq? Are there enough Arab linguists, international economists, public diplomacy experts, development analysts, and technical experts? What skills do our personnel lack? Can expanded international involvement improve our capabilities? . . . Senator Biden. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, Mr. Ambassador. I realize this has been an interesting time coming back home. You are probably anxious to get back to Iraq. Ambassador Bremer. Well, I have better electricity supply in Iraq, Senator. Senator Biden. And probably fewer questions. But, Mr. Ambassador, I want to thank you for being here and thank you for making yourself available to some of my colleagues yesterday, I assume, in informal sessions; you did it for both Democrats and Republicans. And I want to say at the outset that your being made available is—we are thanking you for it but it is an absolute, positive necessity. Failure to do so would not be in your thinking; the Congress, as you can tell, is very concerned about what is going on. I hope the vast majority of the Members of Congress and both parties still have open minds. I, for one, think we need to stay the course. And we need to fund this operation, as expensive as it is. . . . And I commend you for being willing to take on this job. I am sure some of your friends had to counsel you it was a bad idea but I am glad you did it. I commend you for the level of energy and focus you have brought to this to turn around a situation that I think is imminently salvageable. You brought something else to the table, even more critical to the willingness of the American people and the Congress to continue to support this endeavor in Iraq; and that is honesty. You are the first guy that told us the facts, told us the truth; the others did not lie, the others just either did not know or did not say what they knew. During your visit in July, you began to make clear what many in this committee have been saying for the past year, that reconstructing Iraq will be a lot more difficult than winning “the war” and will take tens of billions of dollars over several years and require tens of thousands of American troops for an extended deployment.

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Prior to that, we had heard obfuscation upon obfuscation, rosy scenarios, and a word which has worked its way into the lexicon of some in this administration: “unknowable.” If I hear the word “unknowable” one more time from this administration, I would suggest that they, in their effort to stay in power say: Vote for us, we are the unknowables, we do not know anything. In fact, the problem and the prescriptions for post-war Iraq were absolutely knowable; not in detail but absolutely knowable. From the hearings this committee convened well over a year ago under both chairmanships, from the work of our leading think tanks, left, right, and center, and from within the administration itself, thanks to the State Department’s Future of Iraq Project, which developed detailed plans for post-war Iraq, a lot was knowable. Instead, the administration waited until the eleventh hour to begin planning. Its leading members believed we would find an oil-rich, functioning country—that we would be met by cheering crowds, that all we would have to do is sweep out the top Baathist layers, implant our favorite exiles, and watch democracy take root, as the bulk of our troops returned home by Christmas. Well, the reality, as you know better than anyone in the whole world, is quite different. You have seen it. You have experienced it. And you have tried to deal with it. And as the chairman, Senator Hagel, and I have seen during our visit to Baghdad, you are going at it full tilt. Belatedly but thankfully in my view, the President made a sufficient U-turn 2 weeks ago that hopefully finally sets us in the right direction. First, he vowed to make Iraq the world’s problem, not just our own, by going back to the United Nations and seeking support of its members for troops, police, and money. Because this is a simple calculation. We have three options: one, we leave and there is chaos and there is strategic debacle; two, we stay and pay for everything; or three, we get other folks to pay. This is not hard. This is not very difficult to understand. It took awhile for the President, I think, to understand it but I do not get it. This is real simple. We leave, we pay, or we get others to help pay, in terms of their lives, in terms of their money, in terms of their troops. . . .

STATEMENT BY HON. L. PAUL BREMER, III, ADMINISTRATOR, COALITION PROVISIONAL AUTHORITY, BAGHDAD, IRAQ Ambassador Bremer. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee and thank you for this opportunity. And thank you in particular, Mr. Chairman, for your kind words about the thousands of people who are working with me, military and civilian people, not the least, of course, our men and women in the Armed Forces. But I have a lot of civilians, as you pointed out, who are working extraordinarily long hours in very difficult circumstances and in dangerous circumstances and I will certainly convey to them your comment. . . .

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President Bush’s vision . . . provides for an Iraq made secure through the efforts of Iraqis. In addition to greater security, the President’s plan provides for an Iraqi economy based on sound economic principles and bolstered by a reliable infrastructure. And finally, the President’s plan provides for a democratic and sovereign Iraq at the earliest reasonable date. If we fail to recreate Iraq as a sovereign democracy sustained by a solid economy, we will have handed the terrorists a gift. And with all respect to the Senator from Delaware, I think terrorism is a relevant consideration. It may not be the only one; there are strategic considerations, but terrorism is relevant. . . . Creating a sovereign, democratic, constitutional, and prosperous Iraq deals a blow to terrorists. It shows you can have freedom and dignity without using truck bombs to slaughter the innocent. It gives the lie to those who describe America as enemies of Islam, enemies of the Arab, or enemies of the poor. That is why the President’s request has to be seen as an important element in the global war on terrorism. Mr. Chairman, our national experience, as members of this committee know, shows how to consolidate military victory. We did not have that experience 85 years ago, when we emerged victorious from World War I. Many here opposed that war. As a Nation, we wished at the end of the war to shake the old world dust off our boots and solve the problems at home. We had spent and lent a lot of money and a lot of blood. The victors celebrated their victory, mourned their dead, and demanded the money they were owed. We won the war but we did not consolidate the peace. We know the results of that policy. Extremism, bred in a swamp of despair, bankruptcy, and unpayable debts, gave the world fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. And the result was another world war. After that conflict, we showed that we had learned that military victory must be followed by a program to secure the peace. In 1948, America’s greatest generation recognized that military victory was hollow if democracy was not reinforced against tyranny. Democracy could not flourish unless Europe’s devastated economies were rebuilt. That generation responded with the boldest, most generous, and most productive act of statesmanship in the past century, the Marshall Plan, what Winston Churchill called “the most unsordid act in history.” When Secretary of State George Marshall first described the Marshall Plan at Harvard, he laid out some truths that I think, Mr. Chairman, resonate today. I quote: “Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.” Highlighting the importance of approaching the issues at the highest level, Marshall added, “Any assistance that this government may render in the future should provide a cure rather than a mere palliative.” The Marshall Plan, enacted, as members know, with overwhelming bipartisan support, set war-torn Europe on the path to freedom and prosperity, which Europeans enjoy today. After 1,000 years as the cockpit of war, Europe has become the cradle of peace in two short generations. The Marshall Plan was a real investment in American national security. The grants to Iraq the President seeks bespeak a grandeur of vision equal to the one which created the free world at the end of World War II. Iraqis living in freedom with

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dignity will set an example in this troubled region, which so often spawns terrorists. A stable, peaceful, economically productive Iraq will serve American interests by making America safer. Here are a few of the things I want to point out about this supplemental request. As Senator Biden has asked, we have a plan with milestones, dates, and benchmarks. No one part of this $87 billion supplemental is dispensable and no part is more important than the others. This is a carefully considered integrated request. This request is urgent. The urgency of military operations is self-evident. The funds for nonmilitary action in Iraq are equally urgent. Most Iraqis welcomed us as liberators. And we glowed with pleasure at that welcome. But now the reality of foreign troops on the streets is starting to chafe. Some Iraqis are beginning to see us more as occupiers than liberators. Let us not hide the fact. Some of this is inevitable. But faster progress on reconstruction will help. Unless this supplemental passes quickly, Iraqis face an indefinite period with blackouts 8 hours daily. The link to the safety of our troops is indirect but no less real. The people who ambush our troops are small in number and do not do so because they have undependable electric supplies. But the population’s view of America is directly linked to their cooperation in hunting down those people who do attack us. Early progress gives us an edge against the terrorists. . . . Today, Iraq has almost $200 billion in debt and reparations hanging over its head as a result of Saddam’s economic incompetence and aggressive wars; $200 billion. Iraq is in no position to service its existing debt, let alone to take on more. Mountains of unpayable debt contributed heavily to the instability that paved Hitler’s path to power; the giants of the post-World War II generation recognized this. And as you know, Mr. Chairman, the vast majority of Marshall Plan funds were in the form of grants. The President’s first priority in the plan for Iraq is security, security provided by Iraqis and to Iraqis. That security extends to our forces and changes Iraq from a logistics and planning base for terrorists and criminals into a bulwark against them. The President’s plan envisions three pillars of security: public safety, police, border enforcement, fire brigades, and a communications system; second, national defense, a new army and civil defense system; and finally, a justice system affecting courts and prisons. This security assistance to Iraq benefits the United States in four immediate ways. First, Iraqis will be more effective than we are. As talented and courageous as our forces are, they can never replace an Iraqi policeman who knows his beat, who knows his people, their language, their customs, and their rhythms. Iraqis want Iraqis to provide their security, and so do we. Second, as these Iraqi security forces assume their duties, they replace coalition troops in many of the roles that generate frustration, friction, and resentment; things like conducting searches, manning checkpoints, and guarding installations. Third, this in turn frees up coalition forces for the mobile, sophisticated offensive operations against former regime loyalists and terrorists for which they are best suited. And finally, these new Iraqi forces reduce the overall security demands on coalition forces and speed the day that we all hope for, when we can bring our troops home.

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Security is the first and indispensable element of the President’s plan, as you mentioned in your statement, Mr. Chairman. But it is not by itself sufficient to assure success, because a security system resting only on arms is a security system that will fail. Recreating Iraq as a nation at peace with itself and with the world, an Iraq that terrorists flee from rather than flock to, requires more than people with guns. A good security system cannot persist on the knife-edge of economic collapse. . . . Mr. Chairman, the Iraqi Government, by these measures, has put in place the legal procedures for encouraging a vibrant private sector, what I call the legal infrastructure. But those policies will come to nothing if Iraq must try to reestablish itself on an insufficient and unreliable electric grid or in a security environment that puts a stick in the spokes of the wheels of commerce. Iraq cannot realize its potential to return quickly to the world stage as a responsible player without the services essential to a modern economy. We have made significant progress, as those of you who have visited Iraq learned when you were there, in restoring essential services. The widely predicted humanitarian crisis did not happen. There was no major flow of refugees. As you pointed out, all of Iraq’s 240 hospitals and 90 percent of its health clinics are up and running. The schools are open. The universities held their exams. There is an adequate supply of food. And there are no signs of epidemics. We have already cleared thousands of miles of irrigation canals across the country. Electric service—electric power service will reach pre-war levels within this next month. But the remaining demands are vast, which is why most of the President’s request for nonmilitary assistance is for infrastructure programs. On another front, there is already good news, as members of this committee know. The democratization of Iraq, on which so much global attention has been focused, is further advanced than many casual readers of the newspapers might know; although I know members of the committee, particularly those who were in Iraq, who saw a town council meeting, are aware of how far things have come. We have encouraged a quick political transformation and laid out a clear seven-step process leading to Iraqi sovereignty. Three of the seven steps have already been taken. The Governing Council came into being on July 13. Second, the Governing Council appointed a preparatory committee to write a constitution. And on September 1, the Governing Council took the third step, appointing a very able group of 25 ministers to run the ministries governments. I might add here, Mr. Chairman, that I learned that of the 25 ministers, 17 have Ph.D.s, which must make it not only the best-educated cabinet in Iraq’s history but probably one of the world’s best-educated cabinets. And I do not know if any of the members had a chance to meet two of the ministers who have been here this week. If you did not, I regret it. The Minister of Public Works and the Minister of Electricity have been here, both of whom are experts in their field. The Minister of Agriculture is an agronomist, the Minister of Water Resources a water hydrologist. These are people who really know what they are doing. They do not just have a Ph.D. in some theoretical field, they have expertise in their ministries.

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There are four remaining steps. The fourth step is writing a constitution. We hope that the Iraqi Governing Council will move quickly to convene a constitutional convention to write that constitution. The fifth step is ratifying that constitution. The sixth step will follow that ratified constitution with free democratic elections. And the seventh step will be when we, the Coalition Authority, can transfer all sovereignty back to an elected democratic Iraqi Government. And I might add, Mr. Chairman, nobody looks more forward to that day than I, except perhaps my wife. . . . Source: Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “Iraq: Next Steps—What Will an Iraq 5-Year Plan Look Like?” Statement by L. Paul Bremer, 108th Cong., 1st sess., September 24, 2003, http://bulk.resource.org/gpo.gov/hearings/108s/91434.txt.

Document 6.11 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): Origin, Characteristics, and Institutional Authorities, April 2004 By the spring of 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority was at the center of events in both Iraq and the United States. In Iraq, the CPA remained in charge of civil administration. As the armed insurgency continued, the CPA also worked alongside the military to pacify Iraq. With the CPA and the military clearly under U.S. control, both institutions were also the means through which officials in the Bush administration sought to coordinate activities in Iraq. Achieving both peace and stability was crucial to Iraqis, who remained the primary victims of the violence as well as the economic downturn that came with the invasion. Meanwhile, in the United States popular opposition to the war in Iraq grew. Members of Congress who had either sided with the administration or had chosen not to oppose it had become increasingly vocal in their criticism. It was in these circumstances that the Congressional Research Service (CRS) conducted a detailed institutional history of the CPA. Created in 1917, the CRS is supposed to provide policy research to Congress, offering the legislative branch the sort of research support that exists (albeit on a much greater scale) in the executive agencies of the federal government. The author of the institutional history, CRS analyst L. Elaine Halchin, sought to explain how the CPA had come into being. In the process, she detailed both the similarities and differences connecting or separating the CPA from similar institutions of American territorial and overseas governance. Like earlier government structures, the CPA enjoyed broad-reaching powers that were supposed to establish federal rule while providing for the establishment of local selfgovernment. At the same time, the creation of the CPA’s structure seemed more elusive and problematic than anything the United States had constructed in the federal territories, in noncontiguous possessions like the Philippines, and in Europe after the two world wars.

Summary Responsibility for overseeing reconstruction in post-conflict Iraq initially fell to the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA). Established in early

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2003, ORHA was headed by Lieutenant General Jay M. Garner, U.S. Army (ret.). By June 2003, ORHA had been replaced, or subsumed, by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), which is led by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III. It is unclear whether CPA is a federal agency. Competing, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, explanations for how it was established contribute to the uncertainty about its status. The lack of an authoritative and unambiguous statement about how this organization was established, by whom, and under what authority leaves open many questions, particularly in the areas of oversight and accountability. Some executive branch documents support the notion that it was created by the President, possibly as the result of a National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD). (This document, if it exists, has not been made available to the public.) The other possibility is that the authority was created by, or pursuant to, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 (2003). Given that its organizational status is uncertain, an examination of selected features of CPA might be instructive in assessing what type of organization it is. The authority is closely aligned with the Department of Defense (DOD): the Under Secretary of Defense has designated the Secretary of the Army as executive agent for CPA. Other significant features of the authority include its Office of Inspector General (OIG), which is expected to work closely with the DOD and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Offices of Inspector General; the extent of its procurement activities; its regulatory authority; and its Program Review Board. CPA already has been the subject of several protests related to contracts it awarded, and, although the resolution of these protests has not shed any light on CPA’s status, this area of procurement can be instructive. An undated organization chart provides some insight into the structure of the authority, although it does not include some key offices and positions, such as the Deputy Administrator, the OIG, and the legislative affairs staff. . . .

Establishment of CPA Detailed information that explicitly and clearly identifies how the authority was established, and by whom, is not readily available. Instead, there are two alternative explanations for how it was established: one version suggests that the President established CPA; the other suggests that it was established pursuant to a United Nations (U.N.) Security Council resolution. While these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, the lack of a clear, authoritative, and unambiguous statement about how this organization was established and its status (that is, is it a federal agency or not) leaves open many questions, particularly regarding the area of oversight and accountability. . . . According to this excerpt, the authority is an entity of the federal government. Nonetheless, questions remain regarding how CPA was established, who established it, the precise nature of its relationship to DOD (including DOD components) and other federal entities, and whether CPA is a federal agency or some other type of government organization. Another unanswered question concerns the scope of CPA’s authority when functioning in its capacity as an entity of the U.S. government. Information provided by CPA itself indicates that its sector program management offices (SPMOs) are part of the federal government. (The CPA’s PMO is supported by

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six SPMOs.) In a written response to a question asked at a January 21, 2004, preproposal conference on contracting opportunities, the CPA stated that “the Sector Program Management Office (SPMO) is a Government entity.”

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 A second possibility is that United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483 (2003) was instrumental in creating the authority, a view supported by several documents released by the executive branch. A solicitation issued by the Pentagon Renovation Office, on behalf of CPA, for procuring PMO support services, stated in the “overview”: “The CPA was enacted by the United Nations Security Council under Resolution 1483 (2003).” Other government documents, including the President’s proposed budget for FY2005 and P.L. 108–106, stated that the authority was established pursuant to Resolution 1483. This statement does not necessarily contradict the language found elsewhere in the FY2004 emergency supplemental stating that CPA is an entity of the U.S. government, for the reason discussed above. Nevertheless, repeated references to Resolution 1483 might be viewed by some as implying that the resolution alone authorized or established a coalition-based organization in Iraq, or might contribute to confusion about the organizational status of the authority. . . . Lending support to the notion that the authority is not a federal agency, but instead is an amorphous international organization, are statements by the Department of the Army. In 2003, two protests were filed with the General Accounting Office (GAO) by Turkcell Consortium, which challenged CPA’s issuance of licenses for mobile telecommunications services in Iraq. GAO dismissed both protests without having to rule on the status of CPA. In a letter submitted to GAO during the protest process, the U.S. Army Legal Services Agency was unequivocal in its argument that CPA is not a federal agency: The CPA is not a Federal agency. Rather, as the HCA [CPA’s Head of Contracting Activity] explains: The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) is a multi-national coalition that exercises powers of government temporarily in order to provide for the effective administration of Iraq during the period of transitional administration, to restore conditions of security and stability, to create conditions in which the Iraqi people can freely determine their own political future, including by advancing efforts to restore and establish national and local institutions for representative governance and facilitating economic recovery and sustainable reconstruction and development. CPA is vested with all executive, legislative and judicial authority necessary to achieve its objectives, to be exercised under relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, including Resolution 1483 (2003), and the laws and usages of war. This authority is exercised by the CPA Administrator. . . .

Selected Characteristics of CPA The asserted lack of clarity concerning authorizing authority and establishment of the CPA arguably extends to its status within the executive branch. It is not clear whether the authority is a federal agency, or can be treated as such. What is known is that the CPA is neither an executive department nor a government corporation. Executive departments

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are identified by statute, and government corporations are “corporation[s] owned or controlled by the Government of the United States.” If the authority is a federal government entity, it may be an independent establishment, which is defined as “an establishment in the executive branch (other than the United States Postal Service or the Postal Rate commission) which is not an Executive department, military department, Government corporation, or part thereof, or part of an independent establishment.” If it is determined that the authority is an independent establishment, it also would be considered an executive agency. Other possibilities are that CPA is a component of DOD, or that it is not a federal government entity. Due to its unusual status, this examination of certain of its characteristics or features might be instructive. . . .

CPA’s Relationship to the Department of Defense While it is clear that, ultimately, the CPA Administrator answers to the President, it is also clear that the Administrator reports to the Secretary of Defense as well. Administratively, Ambassador Bremer and the authority fall under the Department of the Army. For Ambassador Bremer, this means that his salary, Executive Level III, is paid by the Army. A report prepared by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), dated March 10, 2004, shows that 558 federal government employees are detailed to CPA. The largest contingents are from the Department of Defense (455) and the Department of State (85). Other agencies contributing personnel include the Department of Transportation (2), the Department of the Treasury (6), the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (1), OPM (1), the U.S. Navy (2), and unknown (6). Three detailees are ambassadors, 65 are from the Foreign Service, 411 are identified as “federal civilian workers,” and the remaining 79 are members of the Senior Executive Service (SES). (CPA also employs individuals from coalition partner countries.) A document available on the Army Civilian Personnel On-Line (CPOL) website indicates that all CPA civilian employees were realigned in 2003 to Army rolls. . . .

Regulatory Authority The CPA Administrator exercises rule-making authority, which apparently is derived from the executive authority invested in CPA by the President. Unlike the heads of federal agencies, however, the Administrator apparently has not followed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which governs informal and formal rule making. For example, the authority has not announced any proposed, interim, or final regulations in the Federal Register. . . .

Policy Issues Discussion of CPA While a letter exists that states that the United States, and the United Kingdom, created the authority, and there are several documents that suggest that CPA is a U.S. government entity, the status of this organization remains open to question. No explicit, unambiguous, and authoritative statement has been provided that declares how the

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authority was established, under what authority, and by whom. Instead, the Army maintains, for example, that the CPA is not a federal agency, but an international coalition similar to a NATO-based organization, SFOR. Other executive branch documents state, or imply, that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1483 was instrumental in creating CPA. Perhaps this ambiguity allows the authority to perform multiple roles, each with its own chain of command, stakeholders or constituents, funding, and accountability policies and mechanisms. A statement in the FY2004 emergency supplemental—“in its [CPA] capacity as an entity of the United State government”—suggests that U.S. government entity is only one of CPA’s roles. Other roles might include temporarily aiding in the governing of Iraq and serving as part of a coalition. Possibly, the mix of arrangements allows CPA to operate with greater discretion and more authority, and have access to more resources than if it was solely a federal agency, or an arm of the United Nations. CPA personnel also might be able to work more efficiently and effectively under this mix. By operating under more than one set of laws, regulations, and policies, CPA possibly could expand the scope and reach of the organization’s authority beyond what it would be otherwise. For example, the CPA Administrator drafted the regulations, orders, memoranda, and public notices that apply to Iraq; and the Program Review Board has jurisdiction over four funding sources, including appropriated funds. An advantage of having the CPA treated as part of the Department of Defense is that the chain of command runs through the executive branch, which would not occur if CPA were purely an international organization or coalition. Billing itself as an international coalition, while eschewing the label “federal agency,” might be construed as an effort to make the organization more palatable, at least symbolically, to Iraqis and others. For example, the CPA website address ends “.com” and the PMO website ends “.net.” United States government website addresses typically end “.gov.” Furthermore, the Iraqi flag is the only flag that appears on the two websites. No flags from coalition countries are displayed. Potential drawbacks of this arrangement are that the lines of authority and accountability could become tangled, or even obscured. CPA personnel possibly could find it difficult to understand and delineate clearly—on a daily basis—the organization’s different roles and associated funds, laws, and rules. Personnel might be hampered by this tangle of resources, laws, and documents, and could find themselves engaging in questionable, if not unethical or criminal, activities. This scenario also could prove challenging for organizations that are attempting to monitor CPA and its activities. When the authority makes a decision or expends funds, it might not be clear to external parties under what authority it is acting. Without transparency, the CPA might give the appearance of shifting funds, personnel, and tasks among different roles. Further compounding the problem, oversight initiatives might be met with the response that the activity in question was carried out under an authority over which the oversight body— Congress—has no jurisdiction. While greater transparency possibly could help to clarify CPA’s role(s), knowing how CPA was established and under what authority would go a long way in helping to determine whether it is a federal agency, the scope of its authority, and the forms, types, and mechanisms of accountability to which it is subject. These

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questions will remain relevant even after CPA’s scheduled dissolution on June 30, 2004, for questions may remain about what it did, how it spent money, and what it accomplished. While information gleaned from CPA personnel would be potentially useful in the near future, it also could be useful in the long-term in informing any future efforts to provide aid to countries faced with similar problems. . . .

Conclusion The Coalition Provisional Authority represents a multinational effort to rebuild Iraq, restore stability, and aid in establishing an interim Iraqi government. While its mission statement is fairly clear, other aspects of the authority are more obscure, particularly how it was established, under what authority, and by whom (within the U.S. government). Available information about the authority found in materials produced by the Administration alternatively: (1) deny that it is a federal agency; (2) state that it is a U.S. government entity; (3) suggest that it was enacted under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1483; (4) refer to it, and OHRA, as “civilian groups . . . reporting to the Secretary [of Defense]”; 115 and (5) state that it was created by the United States and United Kingdom. Without a clear, unambiguous statement that declares the CPA’s organizational status and clarifies its relationship with DOD and other federal agencies, various questions may be left unanswered, including whether, and to what extent, CPA might be held accountable for its programs, activities, decisions, and expenditures. Source: L. Elaine Halchin, The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): Origin, Characteristics, and Institutional Authorities, Report no. RL32370 (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, April 29, 2004), http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL32370_20040409.pdf.

Document 6.12 The UN Plans for Iraq’s Future, 2004 The role of the international community was among the most highly contested issues surrounding the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. American officials celebrated their allies for providing troops or logistical support and were not shy in voicing their anger when other countries chose not to support U.S. military operations in either country. At the same time, the United States always assumed that it would play the leadership role in military planning and civil administration. Meanwhile, the United Nations struggled to assert a role for itself in the proceedings. From its inception, the UN had promoted self-determination, human rights, and peaceful conflict resolution. How to achieve those goals—and even how to define them—had long divided member nations. American critics charged the United Nations was corrupt or that it transferred difficult tasks to the United States. Others claimed the UN too often sided with the United States, the country where the UN actually met and that provided the largest single share of UN funding. In the case of Afghanistan, the UN had supported the American-led coalition that deposed the Taliban in 2001–2002. In the case of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell made

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a direct appeal to the UN membership, claiming that Iraq was creating weapons of mass destruction that could easily fall into the hands of terrorists. The UN was unconvinced, and when the United States invaded Iraq anyway, some claimed the United States supported UN authority only when it was convenient. When coalition officials failed to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, critics charged the United States had falsified evidence. The following document captures these tense relations while further elaborating the complex international circumstances in which the United States governed foreign people and foreign territory. The UN voted in favor of a rapid transition to self-government in Iraq. In the end, the document had to please everybody but succeeded in satisfying nobody. Americans were irritated by what they saw as UN interventionism and the UN’s failure to acknowledge the benefits of the U.S. move to end the regime of Saddam Hussein. Critics charged the UN had not gone far enough in denouncing American action in Iraq. Nonetheless, all parties were quick to take credit for the move to Iraqi self-government. The annex to the resolution, including statements from both the U.S. and Iraqi governments, suggests how both nations, like the UN, sought to explain their roles in the process of shaping Iraq’s future.

Security Council Distr.: General 8 June 2004 Resolution 1546 (2004) Adopted by the Security Council at its 4987th meeting, on 8 June 2004 The Security Council, Welcoming the beginning of a new phase in Iraq’s transition to a democratically elected government, and looking forward to the end of the occupation and the assumption of full responsibility and authority by a fully sovereign and independent Interim Government of Iraq by 30 June 2004, Recalling all of its previous relevant resolutions on Iraq, Reaffirming the independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity of Iraq, Reaffirming also the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future and control their own natural resources, Recognizing the importance of international support, particularly that of countries in the region, Iraq’s neighbours, and regional organizations, for the people of Iraq in their efforts to achieve security and prosperity, and noting that the successful implementation of this resolution will contribute to regional stability, Welcoming the efforts of the Special Adviser to the Secretary-General to assist the people of Iraq in achieving the formation of the Interim Government of Iraq, as set out in the letter of the Secretary-General of 7 June 2004 (S/2004/461), Taking note of the dissolution of the Governing Council of Iraq, and welcoming the progress made in implementing the arrangements for Iraq’s political transition referred to in resolution 1511 (2003) of 16 October 2003, Welcoming the commitment of the Interim Government of Iraq to work towards a federal, democratic, pluralist, and unified Iraq, in which there is full respect for political and human rights,

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Stressing the need for all parties to respect and protect Iraq’s archaeological, historical, cultural, and religious heritage. . . . Determining that the situation in Iraq continues to constitute a threat to international peace and security, Acting under Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations, 1. Endorses the formation of a sovereign Interim Government of Iraq, as presented on 1 June 2004, which will assume full responsibility and authority by 30 June 2004 for governing Iraq while refraining from taking any actions affecting Iraq’s destiny beyond the limited interim period until an elected Transitional Government of Iraq assumes office as envisaged in paragraph four below; 2. Welcomes that, also by 30 June 2004, the occupation will end and the Coalition Provisional Authority will cease to exist, and that Iraq will reassert its full sovereignty; 3. Reaffirms the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future and to exercise full authority and control over their financial and natural resources; 4. Endorses the proposed timetable for Iraq’s political transition to democratic government including: (a) formation of the sovereign Interim Government of Iraq that will assume governing responsibility and authority by 30 June 2004; (b) convening of a national conference reflecting the diversity of Iraqi society; and (c) holding of direct democratic elections by 31 December 2004 if possible, and in no case later than 31 January 2005, to a Transitional National Assembly, which will, inter alia, have responsibility for forming a Transitional Government of Iraq and drafting a permanent constitution for Iraq leading to a constitutionally elected government by 31 December 2005; 5. Invites the Government of Iraq to consider how the convening of an international meeting could support the above process, and notes that it would welcome such a meeting to support the Iraqi political transition and Iraqi recovery, to the benefit of the Iraqi people and in the interest of stability in the region; 6. Calls on all Iraqis to implement these arrangements peaceably and in full, and on all States and relevant organizations to support such implementation; 7. Decides that in implementing, as circumstances permit, their mandate to assist the Iraqi people and government, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General and the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), as requested by the Government of Iraq, shall: (a) play a leading role to: (i) assist in the convening, during the month of July 2004, of a national conference to select a Consultative Council; (ii) advise and support the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, as well as the Interim Government of Iraq and the Transitional National Assembly, on the process for holding elections; (iii) promote national dialogue and consensus-building on the drafting of a national constitution by the people of Iraq;

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(b) and also: (i) advise the Government of Iraq in the development of effective civil and social services; (ii) contribute to the coordination and delivery of reconstruction, development, and humanitarian assistance; (iii) promote the protection of human rights, national reconciliation, and judicial and legal reform in order to strengthen the rule of law in Iraq; and (iv) advise and assist the Government of Iraq on initial planning for the eventual conduct of a comprehensive census; 8. Welcomes ongoing efforts by the incoming Interim Government of Iraq to develop Iraqi security forces including the Iraqi armed forces (hereinafter referred to as “Iraqi security forces”), operating under the authority of the Interim Government of Iraq and its successors, which will progressively play a greater role and ultimately assume full responsibility for the maintenance of security and stability in Iraq; 9. Notes that the presence of the multinational force in Iraq is at the request of the incoming Interim Government of Iraq and therefore reaffirms the authorization for the multinational force under unified command established under resolution 1511 (2003), having regard to the letters annexed to this resolution. . . . 18. Recognizes that the Interim Government of Iraq will assume the primary role in coordinating international assistance to Iraq. . . . 31. Requests that the United States, on behalf of the multinational force, report to the Council within three months from the date of this resolution on the efforts and progress of this force, and on a quarterly basis thereafter; 32. Decides to remain actively seized of the matter.

Annex Text of letters from the Prime Minister of the Interim Government of Iraq Dr. Ayad Allawi and United States Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to the President of the Council 5 June 2004 Republic of Iraq Prime Minister Office Excellency: On my appointment as Prime Minister of the Interim Government of Iraq, I am writing to express the commitment of the people of Iraq to complete the political transition process to establish a free, and democratic Iraq and to be a partner in preventing and combating terrorism. As we enter a critical new stage, regain full sovereignty and move towards elections, we will need the assistance of the international community. The Interim Government of Iraq will make every effort to ensure that these elections are fully democratic, free and fair. Security and stability continue to be essential to our

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political transition. There continue, however, to be forces in Iraq, including foreign elements, that are opposed to our transition to peace, democracy, and security. The Government is determined to overcome these forces, and to develop security forces capable of providing adequate security for the Iraqi people. Until we are able to provide security for ourselves, including the defence of Iraq’s land, sea and air space, we ask for the support of the Security Council and the international community in this endeavour. We seek a new resolution on the Multinational Force (MNF) mandate to contribute to maintaining security in Iraq, including through the tasks and arrangements set out in the letter from Secretary of State Colin Powell to the President of the United Nations Security Council. The Government requests that the Security Council review the mandate of the MNF at the request of the Transitional Government of Iraq, or twelve months from the date on which such a resolution is adopted. In order to discharge the Iraqi Government’s responsibility for security, I intend to establish appropriate security structures that will allow my Government and Iraqi security forces to progressively take on that responsibility. One such structure is the Ministerial Committee for National Security, consisting of myself as the Chair, the Deputy Prime Minister, and the Minister of Defense, Interior, Foreign Affairs, Justice, and Finance. The National Security Advisor, and Director of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service will serve as permanent advisory members of the committee. This forum will set the broad framework for Iraqi security policy. I intend to invite, as appropriate, the MNF commander, his Deputy, or the MNF Commander’s designative representative, and other appropriate individuals, to attend and participate as well, and will stand ready to discuss mechanisms of coordination and cooperation with the MNF. Iraqi armed forces will be responsible to the Chief of Staff and Minister of Defense. Other security forces (the Iraqi police, border guards and Facilities Protection Service) will be responsible to the Minister of the Interior or other government ministers. In addition, the relevant ministers and I will develop further mechanisms for coordination with the MNF. Intend to create with the MNF coordination bodies at national, regional, and local levels, that will include Iraqi security forces commanders and civilian leadership, to ensure that Iraqi security forces will coordinate with the MNF on all security policy and operations issues in order to achieve unity of command of military operations in which Iraqi forces are engaged with MNF. In addition, the MNF and Iraqi government leaders will keep each other informed of their activities, consult regularly to ensure effective allocation and use of personnel, resources and facilities, will share intelligence, and will refer issues up the respective chains of command where necessary, Iraqi security forces will take on progressively greater responsibility as Iraqi capabilities improve. The structures I have described in this letter will serve as the fora for the MNF and the Iraqi government to reach agreement on the full range of fundamental security and policy issues, including policy on sensitive offensive operations, and will ensure full partnership between Iraqi forces and the MNF, through close coordination and consultation. Since these are sensitive issues for a number of sovereign governments, including Iraq and the United States, they need to be resolved in the framework of a mutual understanding on our strategic partnership. We will be working closely with the MNF leadership in the coming weeks to ensure that we have such an agreed strategic framework.

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We are ready to take sovereign responsibility for governing Iraq by June 30. We are well aware of the difficulties facing us, and of our responsibilities to the Iraqi people. The stakes are great, and we need the support of the international community to succeed. We ask the Security Council to help us by acting now to adopt a Security Council resolution giving us necessary support. I understand that the Co-sponsors intend to annex this letter to the resolution on Iraq under consideration. In the meantime, I request that you provide copies of this letter to members of the Council as quickly as possible. (Signed) Dr. Ayad Allawi The Secretary of State, Washington 5 June 2004 Excellency: Recognizing the request of the government of Iraq for the continued presence of the MultiNational Force (MNF) in Iraq, and following consultations with Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of the Iraqi Interim Government, I am writing to confirm that the MNF under unified command is prepared to continue to contribute to the maintenance of security in Iraq, including by preventing and deterring terrorism and protecting the territory of Iraq. The goal of the MNF will be to help the Iraqi people to complete the political transition and will permit the United Nations and the international community to work to facilitate Iraq’s reconstruction. The ability of the Iraqi people to achieve their goals will be heavily influenced by the security situation in Iraq. As recent events have demonstrated, continuing attacks by insurgents, including former regime elements, foreign fighters, and illegal militias challenge all those who are working for a better Iraq. Development of an effective and cooperative security partnership between the MNF and the sovereign Government of Iraq is critical to the stability of Iraq. The commander of the MNF will work in partnership with the sovereign Government of Iraq in helping to provide security while recognizing and respecting its sovereignty. To that end, the MNF stands ready to participate in discussions of the Ministerial Committee for National Security on the broad framework of security policy, as referred to in the letter from Prime Minister of the Interim Government of Iraq Allawi dated June 5, 2004. On the implementation of this policy, recognizing that Iraqi security forces are responsible to the appropriate Iraqi ministers, the MNF will coordinate with Iraqi security forces at all levels—national, regional, and local—in order to achieve unity of command of military operations in which Iraqi forces are engaged with the MNF. In addition, the MNF and the Iraqi government leaders will keep each other informed of their activities, consult regularly to ensure effective allocation and use of personnel, resources, and facilities, will share intelligence, and will refer issues up the respective chains of command where necessary. We will work in the fora described by Prime Minister Allawi in his June 5 letter to reach agreement on the full range of fundamental security and policy issues, including policy on sensitive offensive operations, and will ensure full partnership between MNF and Iraqi forces, through close coordination and consultation. His Excellency Mr. Lauro L. Baja, Jr. President of the Security Council, United Nations New York, New York

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S/RES/1546 (2004) Under the agreed arrangement, the MNF stands ready to continue to undertake a broad range of tasks to contribute to the maintenance of security and to ensure force protection. These include activities necessary to counter ongoing security threats posed by forces seeking to influence Iraq’s political future through violence. This will include combat operations against members of these groups, internment where this is necessary for imperative reasons of security, and the continued search for and securing of weapons that threaten Iraq’s security. A further objective will be to train and equip Iraqi security forces that will increasingly take responsibility for maintaining Iraq’s security. The MNF also stands ready as needed to participate in the provision of humanitarian assistance, civil affairs support, and relief and reconstruction assistance requested by the Iraqi Interim Government and in line with previous Security Council Resolutions. In addition, the MNF is prepared to establish or support a force within the MNF to provide for the security of personnel and facilities of the United Nations. We have consulted closely with UN officials regarding the United Nations’ security requirements and believe that a brigade-size force will be needed to support the United Nations’ security effort. This force will be under the command and control of the MNF commander, and its missions will include static and perimeter security at UN facilities, and convoy escort duties for the UN mission’s travel requirements. In order to continue to contribute to security, the MNF must continue to function under a framework that affords the force and its personnel the status that they need to accomplish their mission, and in which the contributing states have responsibility for exercising jurisdiction over their personnel and which will ensure arrangements for, and use of assets by, the MNF. The existing framework governing these matters is sufficient for these purposes. In addition, the forces that make up the MNF are and will remain committed at all times to act consistently with their obligations under the law of armed conflict, including the Geneva Conventions. The MNF is prepared to continue to pursue its current efforts to assist in providing a secure environment in which the broader international community is able to fulfil its important role in facilitating Iraq’s reconstruction. In meeting these responsibilities in the period ahead, we will act in full recognition of and respect for Iraqi sovereignty. We look to other member states and international and regional organizations to assist the people of Iraq and the sovereign Iraqi government in overcoming the challenges that lie ahead to build a democratic, secure and prosperous country. The co-sponsors intend to annex this letter to the resolution on Iraq under consideration. In the meantime, I request that you provide copies of this letter to members of the Council as quickly as possible. Sincerely, (Signed) Colin L. Powell Source: UN Security Council, Document no. S/RES/1546(2004), “Resolution 1546 (2004),” June 8, 2004, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N04/381/16/PDF/N0438116. pdf?OpenElement.

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Document 6.13 National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, November 2005 Throughout much of 2004, the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq took shape in response to the U.S. elections, especially the presidential contest between George W. Bush and Senator John F. Kerry. Both candidates and many within the American electorate treated the election as a mandate on the wars in both countries, but especially in Iraq, which remained the more controversial of the two conflicts. Bush proclaimed his reelection in November a validation of his administration’s policies, and with the Republicans enjoying majorities in both houses of Congress, the administration remained committed to its own plan for governing both countries. A year after the election, Iraq continued to suffer from political instability and violent insurgency. In November 2005, the National Security Council produced the following document in an attempt to articulate both short-term and long-term planning in Iraq. The NSC normally operates under rules of strict secrecy, and this statement of a national strategy in Iraq was less of an attempt to divulge high government decision making than to explain broad-reaching objectives in Iraq. The document also invoked the most timehonored principles of the American struggle with empire, emphasizing the importance of democratization, economic and institutional development, and eventual independence for Iraq.

OUR NATIONAL STRATEGY FOR VICTORY IN IRAQ: Helping the Iraqi People Defeat the Terrorists and Build an Inclusive Democratic State PART I—STRATEGIC OVERVIEW “Our mission in Iraq is clear. We’re hunting down the terrorists. We’re helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We’re advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and grandchildren.”

—President George W. Bush, June 28, 2003

VICTORY IN IRAQ DEFINED As the central front in the global war on terror, success in Iraq is an essential element in the long war against the ideology that breeds international terrorism. Unlike past wars, however, victory in Iraq will not come in the form of an enemy’s surrender, or be signaled by a single particular event—there will be no Battleship Missouri, no Appomattox. The ultimate victory will be achieved in stages, and we expect:

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• In the short term: • An Iraq that is making steady progress in fighting terrorists and neutralizing the insurgency, meeting political milestones; building democratic institutions; standing up robust security forces to gather intelligence, destroy terrorist networks, and maintain security; and tackling key economic reforms to lay the foundation for a sound economy. • In the medium term: • An Iraq that is in the lead defeating terrorists and insurgents and providing its own security, with a constitutional, elected government in place, providing an inspiring example to reformers in the region, and well on its way to achieving its economic potential. • In the longer term: • An Iraq that has defeated the terrorists and neutralized the insurgency. • An Iraq that is peaceful, united, stable, democratic, and secure, where Iraqis have the institutions and resources they need to govern themselves justly and provide security for their country. • An Iraq that is a partner in the global war on terror and the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, integrated into the international community, an engine for regional economic growth, and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region.

VICTORY IN IRAQ IS A VITAL U.S. INTEREST • The war on terrorism is the defining challenge of our generation, just as the struggle against communism and fascism were challenges of the generations before. As with those earlier struggles, the United States is fully committed to meeting this challenge. We will do everything it takes to win. • Prevailing in Iraq will help us win the war on terror. • The terrorists regard Iraq as the central front in their war against humanity. And we must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war on terror. • Osama Bin Laden has declared that the “third world war . . . is raging” in Iraq, and it will end there, in “either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.” • Bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri has declared Iraq to be “the place for the greatest battle,” where he hopes to “expel the Americans” and then spread “the jihad wave to the secular countries neighboring Iraq.” • Al Qaida in Iraq, led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, has openly declared that “we fight today in Iraq, and tomorrow in the Land of the Two Holy Places, and after there the west.” • As the terrorists themselves recognize, the outcome in Iraq—success or failure— is critical to the outcome in the broader war on terrorism.

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• What happens in Iraq will influence the fate of the Middle East for generations to come, with a profound impact on our own national security. • Ceding ground to terrorists in one of the world’s most strategic regions will threaten the world’s economy and America’s security, growth, and prosperity, for decades to come. • An emerging democracy in Iraq will change the regional status quo that for decades has bred alienation and spawned the transnational terrorism that targets us today. • The terrorists’ perverse ideology is countered by the advance of freedom and the recognition that all people have the right to live under democracy and the rule of law, free from oppression and fear, with hope and optimism for the future.

THE BENEFITS OF VICTORY IN IRAQ • Helping the people of Iraq is the morally right thing to do—America does not abandon its friends in the face of adversity. Helping the people of Iraq, however, is also in our own national interest. • If we and our Iraqi partners prevail in Iraq, we will have made America: • Safer . . . • by removing Saddam Hussein, a destabilizing force in a vital region, a ruthless dictator who had a history of pursuing and even using weapons of mass destruction, was a state sponsor of terror, had invaded his neighbors, and who was violently opposed to America; • by depriving terrorists of a safe haven from which they could plan and launch attacks against the United States and American interests; • by delivering a strategic setback to the terrorists and keeping them on the run; • by delivering a decisive blow to the ideology that fuels international terrorism, proving that the power of freedom is stronger than a perverse vision of violence, hatred, and oppression. • Stronger . . . • by demonstrating to our friends and enemies the reliability of U.S. power, the strength of our commitment to our friends, and the tenacity of our resolve against our enemies; • by securing a new friend and partner in the fight against terrorism in the heart of the Middle East. • More Certain of its Future . . . • politically, by bolstering democratic reformers—and the prospects for peaceful, democratic governments—in a region that for decades has been a source of instability and stagnation; • economically, by facilitating progressive reform in the region and depriving terrorists control over a hub of the world’s economy.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF FAILURE • If we and our Iraqi partners fail in Iraq, Iraq will become: • A safe haven for terrorists as Afghanistan once was, only this time in some of the world’s most strategic territory, with vast natural resources to exploit and to use to fund future attacks.

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• A country where oppression—and the brutal imposition of inhumane practices, such as those of the Taliban in Afghanistan—is pervasive. • A failed state and source of instability for the entire Middle East, with all the attendant risks and incalculable costs for American security and prosperity. • Furthermore, if we and our Iraqi partners fail in Iraq, the terrorists will have: • Won a decisive victor y over the United States, vindicating their tactics of beheadings, suicide bombings, and ruthless intimidation of civilians, inviting more deadly attacks against Americans and other free people across the globe. • Placed the American people in greater danger by destabilizing a vital region, weakening our friends, and clearing the way for terrorist attacks here at home. The terrorists will be emboldened in their belief that America cannot stand and fight, but will cut and run in the face of adversity. • Called into question American credibility and commitment in the region and the world. Our friends and foes alike would doubt our staying power, and this would damage our efforts to counter other security threats and to advance other economic and political interests worldwide. • Since 1998, Al Qaida has repeatedly cited Vietnam, Beirut, and Somalia, as examples to encourage more attacks against America and our interests overseas. • Weakened the growing democratic impulses in the region. Middle East reformers would never again fully trust American assurances of support for democracy and pluralism in the region—a historic opportunity, central to America’s long-term security, forever lost. If we retreat from Iraq, the terrorists will pursue us and our allies, expanding the fight to the rest of the region and to our own shores.

OUR ENEMIES AND THEIR GOALS • The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaida. These three groups share a common opposition to the elected Iraqi government and to the presence of Coalition forces, but otherwise have separate and to some extent incompatible goals. • Rejectionists are the largest group. They are largely Sunni Arabs who have not embraced the shift from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to a democratically governed state. Not all Sunni Arabs fall into this category. But those that do are against a new Iraq in which they are no longer the privileged elite. Most of these rejectionists opposed the new constitution, but many in their ranks are recognizing that opting out of the democratic process has hurt their interests. • We judge that over time many in this group will increasingly support a democratic Iraq provided that the federal government protects minority rights and the legitimate interests of all communities.

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• Saddamists and former regime loyalists harbor dreams of reestablishing a Ba’athist dictatorship and have played a lead role in fomenting wider sentiment against the Iraqi government and the Coalition. • We judge that few from this group can be won over to support a democratic Iraq, but that this group can be marginalized to the point where it can and will be defeated by Iraqi forces. • Terrorists affiliated with or inspired by Al Qaida make up the smallest enemy group but are the most lethal and pose the most immediate threat because (1) they are responsible for the most dramatic atrocities, which kill the most people and function as a recruiting tool for further terrorism and (2) they espouse the extreme goals of Osama Bin Laden—chaos in Iraq which will allow them to establish a base for toppling Iraq’s neighbors and launching attacks outside the region and against the U.S. homeland. • The terrorists have identified Iraq as central to their global aspirations. For that reason, terrorists and extremists from all parts of the Middle East and North Africa have found their way to Iraq and made common cause with indigenous religious extremists and former members of Saddam’s regime. This group cannot be won over and must be defeated—killed or captured—through sustained counterterrorism operations. • There are other elements that threaten the democratic process in Iraq, including criminals and Shi’a religious extremists, but we judge that such elements can be handled by Iraqi forces alone and/or assimilated into the political process in the short term.

THE STRATEGY OF OUR ENEMIES • Despite their competing goals, these disparate enemy elements share a common operational concept: Intimidate, coerce, or convince the Iraqi public not to support the transition to democracy by persuading them that the nascent Iraqi government is not competent and will be abandoned by a Coalition that lacks the stomach for this fight. • The enemy’s strategy, in short, is to intimidate, terrorize, and tear down—a strategy with short-term advantage because it is easier to tear down than to build up. But this strategy is not sustainable in the long term because it is rejected by the overwhelming mass of the Iraqi population. • Enemy Lines of Action. The enemy seeks to . . . • Weaken the Coalition’s resolve, and our resolve at home, through barbaric masscasualty attacks, public slaughter of Iraqi civilians and hostages, infliction of casualties on Coalition forces, and use of the media to spread propaganda and intimidate adversaries. • Destroy confidence in the Iraqi government by sabotaging key essential service (oil and electricity) nodes and by derailing the political process. • Damage trust in Iraqi Security Forces through propaganda, infiltration, and barbaric attacks on the weak and the innocent.

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• Sabotage Iraqi unity through propaganda against the Shi’a majority punctuated with attacks intended to spark sectarian conflict and civil war. • Establish safe havens to plan attacks and conduct intimidation campaigns. • Expand the fight to neighboring states and beyond.

OUR STRATEGY FOR VICTORY IS CLEAR • Our Strategy is Clear: We will help the Iraqi people build a new Iraq with a constitutional, representative government that respects civil rights and has security forces sufficient to maintain domestic order and keep Iraq from becoming a safe haven for terrorists. To achieve this end, we are pursuing a comprehensive approach that involves the integrated efforts of the entire United States Government, the Iraqi government, and Coalition governments, and encourages the active involvement of the United Nations, other international organizations, and supportive regional states. • Our strategy involves three integrated tracks—political, security, and economic— each with separate objectives, but together helping Iraqis to defeat the terrorists, Saddamists, and rejectionists, and secure a new democratic state in Iraq.

The Political Track (Isolate, Engage, Build) • Objective: To help the Iraqi people forge a broadly supported national compact for democratic government, thereby isolating enemy elements from the broader public. • To achieve this objective, we are helping the Iraqi government: • Isolate hardened enemy elements from those who can be won over to a peaceful political process by countering false propaganda and demonstrating to the Iraqi people that they have a stake in a viable, democratic Iraq. • Engage those outside the political process and invite in those willing to turn away from violence through ever-expanding avenues of peaceful participation. • Build stable, pluralistic, and effective national institutions that can protect the interests of all Iraqis, and facilitate Iraq’s full integration into the international community.

The Security Track (Clear, Hold, Build) • Objective: To develop the Iraqis’ capacity to secure their country while carrying out a campaign to defeat the terrorists and neutralize the insurgency. • To achieve this objective, we are helping the Iraqi government: • Clear areas of enemy control by remaining on the offensive, killing and capturing enemy fighters and denying them safe-haven. • Hold areas freed from enemy control by ensuring that they remain under the control of a peaceful Iraqi government with an adequate Iraqi security force presence. • Build Iraqi Security Forces and the capacity of local institutions to deliver services, advance the rule of law, and nurture civil society.

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The Economic Track (Restore, Reform, Build) • Objective: To assist the Iraqi government in establishing the foundations for a sound economy with the capacity to deliver essential services. • To achieve this objective, we are helping the Iraqi government: • Restore Iraq’s neglected infrastructure so it can meet increasing demand and the needs of a growing economy. • Reform Iraq’s economy, which has been shaped by war, dictatorship, and sanctions, so that it can be self-sustaining in the future. • Build the capacity of Iraqi institutions to maintain infrastructure, rejoin the international economic community, and improve the general welfare of all Iraqis. . . . Source: National Strategy for Victory in Iraq (Washington, D.C.: National Security Council, 2005), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq_strategy_nov2005.html.

Document 6.14 Debating the Situation in Afghanistan and Iraq, 2004–2008 U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq cast ripples that extended through the nation’s politics and culture. One of those effects was to generate a torrent of books that sought to make sense of American decision making and its impact on Americans, Afghans, and Iraqis. What follows are excerpts from a few of those books. They represent only a particular subset of the vast published record of American action in Afghanistan and Iraq. First and foremost, these books are not part of the large body of books concerned with military operations. Instead, these books (with the exception of Douglas Feith’s book) focus on the aftermath of U.S. military action. All of them address how American policymakers responded to the particular challenge of governing foreign territory and foreign people. These books include the work of policymakers, journalists, and veterans, the three groups that have taken the lead in attempting to analyze American action and its effects. Although the first commentary in print appeared in the editorial and op-ed pages of American newspapers, some early book-length analyses came from academic presses. The first excerpt here is by William E. Odom, a retired army general and former director of the National Security Agency, and Robert Dujarric, a research fellow at the National Institute for Public Policy. In America’s Inadvertent Empire, Odom and Dujarric attempted to engage in a systematic analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of a foreign policy premised on the extension and use of American power overseas. Odom and Dujarric explicitly state that their primary concern is the impact of this policy on the United States, and they ask whether it is, in fact, in the interest of the United States (rather than the benefit of other nations and their residents) for the United States to assume the role it now plays in the world. Of particular concern to them is the unilateral nature of the Bush administration’s actions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To suggest, as both pundits and political leaders periodically do, that the United States should retreat to isolation is to advocate the diminution of the wealth of both the United

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States and its allies. To insist that the United States conduct its foreign policy mainly on the basis of unilateralism is to promote the destruction of the American empire. To pursue the expansion of democracy without first achieving constitutional breakthroughs is to increase the prospects of tyranny. To assume that international markets can work without governance is to invite economic decline in international trade and investment. To fail to recognize the many different roles that military power plays in sustaining the American empire, especially as a substitute for supranational political-military authority, is to risk unhinging the present international political and economic order. . . . Both devices, separation of powers and public-regarding ideology, are vitally important to the constitutional stability of the United States. They are barriers to the abuse of public power that could lead to tyranny. What are the devices at the international level that sustain the quasi-constitutional character of the American empire? What keeps U.S. leaders from abusing the vast power at their disposal? The American empire is by no means a replica of the U.S. government. There is no clear balance between three governing branches. Power has been checked not by separate branches of government but by the willingness of American leaders and voters to put international liberal institutions ahead of narrower U.S. national interests. American presidents have, for the most part, acted as though they were checked by some kind of international legislature and high court. Source: William E. Odom and Robert Dujarric, America’s Inadvertent Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 204, 206–207.

Like Odom and Dujarric, Matthew Morgan similarly sought to apply principles of political theory and institutional analysis to the situation in Afghanistan, but he operated from a very different perspective. Like Odom, Morgan was a military man. A graduate of West Point who also completed work at Harvard Business School, his service in military intelligence included a tour in Afghanistan. But when Morgan wrote his own book-length study of Afghanistan, A Democracy Is Born, he emphasized the way that conceptions of democracy and representative government needed to emerge from the lived experience of the Afghans, who had endured violence, poverty, and upheaval. Morgan concluded that a combination of American policy and popular mobilization in Afghanistan had created the foundations of a stable democratic order that would fuel both freedom and prosperity. The ongoing threats that Morgan saw were Afghans who were rooted in Afghanistan’s past, primarily those who felt threatened by the prospect of a more modern Afghanistan. Leaving its tradition of the anarchic chaos and the “might-makes-right” regimes of the past, Afghanistan’s movement to self-governance is as revolutionary as any other in history. The change is more dramatic than the American Revolution, when the new American democracy maintained a representative form of government similar to our British roots in developing its new constitution. The change is more positive than the French Revolution, which resurged into tyranny and anarchy at various points. The Afghan Revolution of democratic governance, albeit aided and guided by international military and political powers, is thus one of the most historic events of our time. . . .

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Afghanistan is by no means on an unobstructed path to democracy. Numerous challenges face the country. . . . First, the narcotics industry is booming. This threatens the government, whose options to restrict the drug trade are limited due to the fragility of the Afghan economy. Second, the underdeveloped economy itself is among the challenges facing democracy in Afghanistan. The lack of education, technology, and civil society present impediments to democratic progress. Third, warlordism presents a significant problem for the peaceful and lawful society needed for a successful democracy. Finally, ethnic and religious divisions are prominent, and while they do not currently manifest serious tensions, they cast an ominous shadow over Afghanistan’s nascent democracy. These ethnic divisions are especially troubling when compared to other multiethnic developing democracies that have never escaped violent rivalry. Source: Matthew J. Morgan, A Democracy Is Born: An Insider’s Account of the Battle against Terrorism in Afghanistan (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2007), ix, 157.

While authors like Morgan, Odom, and Dujarric argued about whether the United States should directly engage in governing foreign territory and foreign people, other Americans were arguing about whether the United States had indeed engaged in effective governance overseas. Much of this debate focused on Iraq, with Afghanistan often appearing as a secondary consideration. Indeed, some of the criticism directed at the Bush administration and at American commentators came from those who believed that Americans had devoted inadequate resources and attention to the reconstruction of Afghanistan, in the process undermining reform and development and missing the chance to extinguish either the Taliban or al-Qaida. In the meantime, other Americans were engaging in a lengthy dissection of policymaking in Iraq, contributing to a loud debate over the wisdom and foolishness of American decisions. Several books were blunt in their criticism. They argued that Iraq had become a disaster, with the blame extending from senior figures in the Bush administration, to the civil and military officials who took charge in Iraq, to the low-level officials who lacked adequate experience or training. These critics charged that ideology had clouded the minds of American policymakers and that incompetence throughout the American administration had undermined the efforts in Iraq of Americans who were committed to the project of Iraqi reconstruction. This critique was crystallized in two books, both published in 2006 by journalists who had obser ved the situation in Iraq firsthand. In the first, Rajiv Chandrasekaran charged that the Bush administration, vastly underestimating the challenge of empire in Iraq, had created an anemic administrative structure populated by an inadequately small number of civil officials, many of them entirely unqualified for their specific tasks. The following passage comes from the opening of his book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone, and captures Chandrasekaran’s claim that Iraq was coming apart even as Americans and Iraqis were celebrating the restoration of Iraqi self-rule.

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It was June 2004, and the end of American rule in Iraq was less than a month away. Inside the marble-walled palace, the headquarters of the occupation administration, a few bureaucrats remained cloistered in their air-conditioned offices, toiling for eighteen hours a day to check off one more item on the grand to-do list before they flew home. One woman I knew, a mother of four from Delaware, was scrambling to enlist Iraqis to reopen Baghdad’s stock exchange. A lawyer who had once clerked for Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist was poring over a draft edict requiring Iraqi political parties to engage in American-style financial disclosure. A blond Californian in his early twenties was creating PowerPoint presentations to send back to Washington showing that the Americans were making progress, that life in Iraq was improving by the day. These were the exceptions. Most people in the palace had simply given up, seeking instead the solace and fin de siècle merriment of the pool. As the sun set, they repaired to the Sheherazade Bar at the al-Rasheed Hotel, where they drank Turkish beer, Lebanese wine, and third-rate blended Scotch. They shopped for watches, lighters, and old Iraqi banknotes that bore the visage of Saddam Hussein. . . . It was in the palace garden that I met with John Agresto for the first time. He had arrived in Baghdad nine months earlier to undertake the daunting task of rehabilitating Iraq’s university system. . . . His agitation grew as he spoke. Then he fell silent, staring at the pool and puffing away. After a moment, he turned to me, his face grave, and said, “I’m a neoconservative who’s been mugged by reality.” Source: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone (New York: Knopf, 2006), 4–5.

Thomas Ricks shared Chandrasekaran’s criticism of the U.S. governance in Iraq. His attention focused on the way civil and military decision making in Washington prevented the United States from capitalizing on its breathtaking battlefield victories at the start of the war. Ricks heaped particular scorn on the Coalition Provisional Authority, claiming that L. Paul Bremer’s administration made specific blunders that translated into corruption while fueling the ongoing insurgence within Iraq. The combination of all these moves—a prolonged foreign occupation that was built on de-Baathification, dissolution of the military, and economic upheaval—radically undercut social stability and built opposition to the American presence. “What we have done over the last six months in al Anbar has been a recipe for instability,” Keith Mines would write in a November memo. “Through aggressive de-Baathification, the demobilization of the army, and the closing of factories the coalition has left tens of thousands of individuals outside the economic and political life of the country.” Taken together, Bremer’s approach had for many Iraqis a punitive feel, a result that was a key misstep. . . . It didn’t take long for Iraqi resentment to become palpable. Maj. Christopher Varhola, a reservist trained as an anthropologist, recalled being at a meeting in the Green Zone in

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late May 2003 between Hume Horan, a senior CPA official, and a group of about 270 tribal leaders. The general mood was one of impatience with the American effort and a suspicion that it was intentionally slow. Sheikh Munther Abood of Amara began by thanking Horan for the removal of Saddam Hussein. But, he continued, we needed to know if the United States believed itself to be an occupier or a liberator. Horan, an honest man, replied that he believed the U.S. was somewhere “in between” those two approaches. Source: Thomas E. Ricks, Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin, 2006), 165–166.

L. Paul Bremer, the leader of the CPA, of course disagreed with Ricks. Bremer’s 2006 memoir, published the same year as Ricks’s and Chandrasekaran’s books, sought to refute the growing criticism of U.S. policy in Iraq. Bremer hardly denied there were problems in Iraq. To the contrary, he acknowledged that his own administration had failed to achieve many of its goals. Nonetheless, he argued that critics failed to acknowledge the considerable accomplishments in Iraq. Bremer chronicled how, after Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and the chaos of the U.S. invasion, Iraq had built the foundations of a democratic government and was institutionalizing basic civil liberties that were unprecedented in the nation’s history. Bremer’s book also reflects another important development: it was only one in a series of personal memoirs by men and women who had taken part in the American ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Ranging from members of the cabinet to enlisted personnel in the U.S. military, these men and women were quick to say how participating in the American struggle with empire had changed them as individuals. Defying terrorists and pundits alike, Iraqis by the millions voted in the country’s first truly democratic elections in January 2005. Who can forget the image of thousands of Iraqi men and women waving their purple-stained fingers in pride? Nothing could better illustrate the thirst for self-government felt by the majority of the Iraqi people. Fully 31 percent of the deputies elected were women, one of the highest percentages in the world (and twice that in the U.S. Congress). The terrorists and other antidemocratic forces recognize the threat to them posed by self-governing Iraqi citizens. And so they have stepped up their attacks on the very people they seek to rule. The terrorists will not succeed because the Iraqi people and their allies will not allow it. Recently, voices have been heard in America calling for the withdrawal of our forces or for setting a clear deadline for their return to the U.S. This would be an historic mistake, only service to encourage the terrorists to wait us out before renewing their attacks. It would signal a defeat for America’s interests, not just in Iraq, but in the wider region. Terrorists everywhere would take heart. Source: L. Paul Bremer, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope, with Malcolm McConnell (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 397.

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If Bremer was arguing against critics when it came to the daily administration in Iraq, Douglas Feith was a more unapologetic defender of the Bush administration itself. An attorney by training, he served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2001 to 2005. During that period, he was a crucial member of the cadre within the administration that advocated the United States deploy its power against terrorists and nations suspected of supporting them, even if it required the United States to pursue unilateral action in the face of international opposition. A 2007 Pentagon report later accused Feith of misleading Congress and the public by providing misleading intelligence reports linking al-Qaida to the Iraqi government. The following year, Feith published his own memoir, devoting most of his attention to the military struggle against terrorism. The passage that follows concerns Feith’s own conclusion of how and why the Bush administration chose to engage itself in the project of governing foreign territory and foreign peoples. Rumsfeld was determined not to do “nation-building” as the United States typically did it in the 1990s. Rumsfeld wanted the United States to help the Afghans build their own nation, not to commit to building it for them. If the dad never lets go of his kid’s bicycle seat, he warned, the kid will become a forty-year-old man who can’t ride a bicycle. (This was the logic, of course, behind Rumsfeld’s insistence that Karzai handle the warlord challenge without U.S. forces.) Rumsfeld also took issue with the term “reconstruction.” He pointed out that our aid would be building many things from scratch, not rebuilding them. Afghanistan, after all, was among the most wretched countries in the world—poorer even than most states in sub-Saharan Africa. It had been pummeled by the Soviet invasion, civil disorder, and Taliban oppression—and for the past four years, moreover, blasted by drought. . . . I do not doubt that President Bush meant what he said when he spoke high-mindedly of his policies and the unselfish, humanitarian benefits he hoped to achieve. But to my knowledge—and contrary to what his critics have charged—he never argued, in public or private, that the United States should go to war in order to spread democracy. While he was willing to conclude that the United States might have to got to war in self-defense, I have never heard him say that we should do so simply or primarily to help a foreign prodemocracy movement oust a dictator. Source: Douglas J. Feith, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism (New York: Harper, 2008), 149 and 234.

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Document 6.15 George W. Bush Explains the Surge, January 10, 2007 If the Bush administration claimed the 2004 election was a mandate of support of its policies, it was forced to concede that the 2006 election was a rejection in the clearest possible terms. Democrats won majorities in both houses of Congress after twelve years of Republican control. Meanwhile, opinion polls made clear that the Democrats’ victory rested in no small part on popular discontent with the progress of the war in Iraq. But those political circumstances only mirrored opinions within the civil and military branches of the government, as American policymakers (including many within the Bush administration) became increasingly frustrated with the ongoing insurgency. Military leaders had long requested more troops in Iraq. By the end of the year, senior administration officials agreed that a sudden increase in troops might enable the United States to apply pressure systematically against the insurgency throughout the country. In January 2007, President Bush made the following statement explaining his decision to deploy additional troops to Iraq, a decision that soon became known as the “surge” in popular and journalistic circles. Bush’s speech focused primarily on military goals. At the same time, however, Bush also explained how military operations would serve the broader goal of enabling the United States to create a stable, democratic Iraq that no longer required U.S. troops. The speech also included terminology that became increasingly common in the years that followed. Bush emphasized that the surge would provide short-term military assistance, while the Iraqi government needed to assume greater responsibility in creating long-term solutions. It was the same language that became commonplace in the speeches of the presidential candidates who soon launched their campaigns for the 2008 election.

Good evening. Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror—and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America’s course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror. When I addressed you just over a year ago, nearly 12 million Iraqis had cast their ballots for a unified and democratic nation. The elections of 2005 were a stunning achievement. We thought that these elections would bring the Iraqis together, and that as we trained Iraqi security forces we could accomplish our mission with fewer American troops. But in 2006, the opposite happened. The violence in Iraq—particularly in Baghdad— overwhelmed the political gains the Iraqis had made. Al Qaeda terrorists and Sunni insurgents recognized the mortal danger that Iraq’s elections posed for their cause, and they responded with outrageous acts of murder aimed at innocent Iraqis. They blew up one of the holiest shrines in Shia Islam—the Golden Mosque of Samarra—in a calculated effort to provoke Iraq’s Shia population to retaliate. Their strategy worked. Radical Shia elements, some supported by Iran, formed death squads. And the result was a vicious cycle of sectarian violence that continues today.

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The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people—and it is unacceptable to me. Our troops in Iraq have fought bravely. They have done everything we have asked them to do. Where mistakes have been made, the responsibility rests with me. It is clear that we need to change our strategy in Iraq. So my national security team, military commanders, and diplomats conducted a comprehensive review. We consulted members of Congress from both parties, our allies abroad, and distinguished outside experts. We benefitted from the thoughtful recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan panel led by former Secretary of State James Baker and former Congressman Lee Hamilton. In our discussions, we all agreed that there is no magic formula for success in Iraq. And one message came through loud and clear: Failure in Iraq would be a disaster for the United States. The consequences of failure are clear: Radical Islamic extremists would grow in strength and gain new recruits. They would be in a better position to topple moderate governments, create chaos in the region, and use oil revenues to fund their ambitions. Iran would be emboldened in its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Our enemies would have a safe haven from which to plan and launch attacks on the American people. On September the 11th, 2001, we saw what a refuge for extremists on the other side of the world could bring to the streets of our own cities. For the safety of our people, America must succeed in Iraq. The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad. Eighty percent of Iraq’s sectarian violence occurs within 30 miles of the capital. This violence is splitting Baghdad into sectarian enclaves, and shaking the confidence of all Iraqis. Only Iraqis can end the sectarian violence and secure their people. And their government has put forward an aggressive plan to do it. Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have. Our military commanders reviewed the new Iraqi plan to ensure that it addressed these mistakes. They report that it does. They also report that this plan can work. Now let me explain the main elements of this effort: The Iraqi government will appoint a military commander and two deputy commanders for their capital. The Iraqi government will deploy Iraqi Army and National Police brigades across Baghdad’s nine districts. When these forces are fully deployed, there will be 18 Iraqi Army and National Police brigades committed to this effort, along with local police. These Iraqi forces will operate from local police stations—conducting patrols and setting up checkpoints, and going door-to-door to gain the trust of Baghdad residents. This is a strong commitment. But for it to succeed, our commanders say the Iraqis will need our help. So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I’ve committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them—five brigades—will be deployed to Baghdad. These troops will work alongside Iraqi units and be embedded in their formations. Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

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Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences: In earlier operations, Iraqi and American forces cleared many neighborhoods of terrorists and insurgents, but when our forces moved on to other targets, the killers returned. This time, we’ll have the force levels we need to hold the areas that have been cleared. In earlier operations, political and sectarian interference prevented Iraqi and American forces from going into neighborhoods that are home to those fueling the sectarian violence. This time, Iraqi and American forces will have a green light to enter those neighborhoods—and Prime Minister Maliki has pledged that political or sectarian interference will not be tolerated. I’ve made it clear to the Prime Minister and Iraq’s other leaders that America’s commitment is not open-ended. If the Iraqi government does not follow through on its promises, it will lose the support of the American people—and it will lose the support of the Iraqi people. Now is the time to act. The Prime Minister understands this. Here is what he told his people just last week: “The Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for any outlaws, regardless of [their] sectarian or political affiliation.” This new strategy will not yield an immediate end to suicide bombings, assassinations, or IED attacks. Our enemies in Iraq will make every effort to ensure that our television screens are filled with images of death and suffering. Yet over time, we can expect to see Iraqi troops chasing down murderers, fewer brazen acts of terror, and growing trust and cooperation from Baghdad’s residents. When this happens, daily life will improve, Iraqis will gain confidence in their leaders, and the government will have the breathing space it needs to make progress in other critical areas. Most of Iraq’s Sunni and Shia want to live together in peace—and reducing the violence in Baghdad will help make reconciliation possible. A successful strategy for Iraq goes beyond military operations. Ordinary Iraqi citizens must see that military operations are accompanied by visible improvements in their neighborhoods and communities. So America will hold the Iraqi government to the benchmarks it has announced. To establish its authority, the Iraqi government plans to take responsibility for security in all of Iraq’s provinces by November. To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country’s economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis. To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs. To empower local leaders, Iraqis plan to hold provincial elections later this year. And to allow more Iraqis to re-enter their nation’s political life, the government will reform deBaathification laws, and establish a fair process for considering amendments to Iraq’s constitution. America will change our approach to help the Iraqi government as it works to meet these benchmarks. In keeping with the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, we will increase the embedding of American advisers in Iraqi Army units, and partner a coalition brigade with every Iraqi Army division. We will help the Iraqis build a larger and better-equipped army, and we will accelerate the training of Iraqi forces, which remains the essential U.S. security mission in Iraq. We will give our commanders and civilians greater flexibility to spend funds for economic assistance. We will double the number of

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provincial reconstruction teams. These teams bring together military and civilian experts to help local Iraqi communities pursue reconciliation, strengthen the moderates, and speed the transition to Iraqi self-reliance. And Secretary Rice will soon appoint a reconstruction coordinator in Baghdad to ensure better results for economic assistance being spent in Iraq. As we make these changes, we will continue to pursue al Qaeda and foreign fighters. Al Qaeda is still active in Iraq. Its home base is Anbar Province. Al Qaeda has helped make Anbar the most violent area of Iraq outside the capital. A captured al Qaeda document describes the terrorists’ plan to infiltrate and seize control of the province. This would bring al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq’s democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad. Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing al Qaeda leaders, and they are protecting the local population. Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops. These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to keep up the pressure on the terrorists. America’s men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan—and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq. Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria. These two regimes are allowing terrorists and insurgents to use their territory to move in and out of Iraq. Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq. We’re also taking other steps to bolster the security of Iraq and protect American interests in the Middle East. I recently ordered the deployment of an additional carrier strike group to the region. We will expand intelligence-sharing and deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies. We will work with the governments of Turkey and Iraq to help them resolve problems along their border. And we will work with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating the region. We will use America’s full diplomatic resources to rally support for Iraq from nations throughout the Middle East. Countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States need to understand that an American defeat in Iraq would create a new sanctuary for extremists and a strategic threat to their survival. These nations have a stake in a successful Iraq that is at peace with its neighbors, and they must step up their support for Iraq’s unity government. We endorse the Iraqi government’s call to finalize an International Compact that will bring new economic assistance in exchange for greater economic reform. And on Friday, Secretary Rice will leave for the region, to build support for Iraq and continue the urgent diplomacy required to help bring peace to the Middle East.

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The challenge playing out across the broader Middle East is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy, by advancing liberty across a troubled region. It is in the interests of the United States to stand with the brave men and women who are risking their lives to claim their freedom, and to help them as they work to raise up just and hopeful societies across the Middle East. From Afghanistan to Lebanon to the Palestinian Territories, millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence, and want a future of peace and opportunity for their children. And they are looking at Iraq. They want to know: Will America withdraw and yield the future of that country to the extremists, or will we stand with the Iraqis who have made the choice for freedom? The changes I have outlined tonight are aimed at ensuring the survival of a young democracy that is fighting for its life in a part of the world of enormous importance to American security. Let me be clear: The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience, and they will make the year ahead bloody and violent. Even if our new strategy works exactly as planned, deadly acts of violence will continue—and we must expect more Iraqi and American casualties. The question is whether our new strategy will bring us closer to success. I believe that it will. Victory will not look like the ones our fathers and grandfathers achieved. There will be no surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship. But victory in Iraq will bring something new in the Arab world—a functioning democracy that polices its territory, upholds the rule of law, respects fundamental human liberties, and answers to its people. A democratic Iraq will not be perfect. But it will be a country that fights terrorists instead of harboring them—and it will help bring a future of peace and security for our children and our grandchildren. This new approach comes after consultations with Congress about the different courses we could take in Iraq. Many are concerned that the Iraqis are becoming too dependent on the United States, and therefore, our policy should focus on protecting Iraq’s borders and hunting down al Qaeda. Their solution is to scale back America’s efforts in Baghdad—or announce the phased withdrawal of our combat forces. We carefully considered these proposals. And we concluded that to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government, tear the country apart, and result in mass killings on an unimaginable scale. Such a scenario would result in our troops being forced to stay in Iraq even longer, and confront an enemy that is even more lethal. If we increase our support at this crucial moment, and help the Iraqis break the current cycle of violence, we can hasten the day our troops begin coming home. In the days ahead, my national security team will fully brief Congress on our new strategy. If members have improvements that can be made, we will make them. If circumstances change, we will adjust. Honorable people have different views, and they will voice their criticisms. It is fair to hold our views up to scrutiny. And all involved have a responsibility to explain how the path they propose would be more likely to succeed.

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Acting on the good advice of Senator Joe Lieberman and other key members of Congress, we will form a new, bipartisan working group that will help us come together across party lines to win the war on terror. This group will meet regularly with me and my administration; it will help strengthen our relationship with Congress. We can begin by working together to increase the size of the active Army and Marine Corps, so that America has the Armed Forces we need for the 21st century. We also need to examine ways to mobilize talented American civilians to deploy overseas, where they can help build democratic institutions in communities and nations recovering from war and tyranny. In these dangerous times, the United States is blessed to have extraordinary and selfless men and women willing to step forward and defend us. These young Americans understand that our cause in Iraq is noble and necessary—and that the advance of freedom is the calling of our time. They serve far from their families, who make the quiet sacrifices of lonely holidays and empty chairs at the dinner table. They have watched their comrades give their lives to ensure our liberty. We mourn the loss of every fallen American—and we owe it to them to build a future worthy of their sacrifice. Fellow citizens: The year ahead will demand more patience, sacrifice, and resolve. It can be tempting to think that America can put aside the burdens of freedom. Yet times of testing reveal the character of a nation. And throughout our history, Americans have always defied the pessimists and seen our faith in freedom redeemed. Now America is engaged in a new struggle that will set the course for a new century. We can, and we will, prevail. We go forward with trust that the Author of Liberty will guide us through these trying hours. Thank you and good night. Source: George W. Bush, “President’s Address to the Nation” (remarks describing changes in U.S. policy in Iraq, White House Library, Washington, D.C., January 10, 2007), http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html.

Document 6.16 Barack Obama and John McCain Debate the Proper Governance of Foreign Peoples, January and March 2007 Senator Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president of the United States on February 10, 2007. Senator John McCain did the same on April 25, but it came as no surprise to people who had been expecting McCain to run ever since he lost the Republican nomination to George W. Bush in 2000. As a result, by the winter of 2007 both men spoke not simply as U.S. senators but as candidates articulating their own visions for what they would do as president. The following comments by McCain and Obama suggest both the differences in their outlook on Iraq and the similarities in their approach to the American struggle with empire. McCain’s comments are from a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee on January 12, 2007. Although McCain was often critical of the Bush administration, he became a stalwart advocate of the surge in Iraq. Obama delivered his comments on the Senate floor the

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following month, marking the fourth anniversary of the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Central to the Obama campaign was the claim that Obama had opposed the war from the start, and he remained deeply critical of the administration and, in 2007, of the surge. The differences between McCain and Obama are striking. At the same time, both men identified the same goals. Most obviously, they sought an end to military conflict and internal strife in Iraq. More subtly, they sought a familiar sequence of developments that mirrored the U.S. approach in other places around the world and throughout the nation’s history. Both senators imagined a future when federal resources would defuse internal strife and create the institutions of democratic government. This process in turn would lead not to conquest but to independence, with Iraq governing itself and relieving the federal government from the costs—both human and financial—of governing a place that should learn to engage in self-government.

John McCain, Remarks to the Senate Armed Services Committee I join our Chairman in welcoming our witnesses here today. I am very pleased to serve again with the returning members of our Committee and wish to welcome all of the new members to the Committee. Mr. Chairman, it is a hard thing to change course in the middle of a war. I commend the President for recognizing the mistakes of the past, and for outlining new steps on the military, economic, and political fronts. I believe that, together, these moves will give the Iraqis—and America—the best chance of success. We should make no mistake—the potentially catastrophic consequences of failure demand that we do all we can to prevail in Iraq. A substantial and sustained increase in U.S. forces in Baghdad and Anbar province is necessary to bring down the toxic levels of violence there. There is much agreement that the dire situation in Iraq demands a political solution. That is true. But we must also realize what it will take to enable any political solution. It is simply impossible for meaningful political and economic activity to take place in an environment as riddled with violence as Baghdad is today. Security is the precondition for political and economic progress. Until the government and its coalition allies can protect the population, the Iraqi people will increasingly turn to extra-governmental forces, especially Sunni and Shiite militias, for protection. Only when the government has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force will its authority have meaning, and only when its authority has meaning can political activity have the results we seek. The presence of additional coalition forces would allow the Iraqi government to do what it cannot accomplish today on its own—impose its rule throughout the country. They can do this by engaging in traditional counterinsurgency activities aimed at protecting the population and breaking the cycle of violence. In bringing greater security to Iraq, and chiefly to Baghdad, our forces would give the government a fighting chance to pursue reconciliation. As I have said before, a small, short surge would be the worst of all worlds. We need troops in the numbers required to do the job, in place for as long as it takes to complete their mission. We must ensure that we are committing sufficient numbers of additional

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troops, and I look forward to our witnesses’ testimony on this score. It would be far better to have too many reinforcements in Iraq than to suffer, once again, the tragic results of insufficient force levels. The other elements of the President’s strategy are also critical. The Iraqi government must meet new benchmarks, including a reconciliation process for insurgents and Baathists, more equitable distribution of government resources, sharing oil revenue with the entire Iraqi population, and holding provincial elections that will bring Sunnis into government. And Iraq’s neighbors need to play a more constructive role. I would like to see the Saudis, for example, fund a major jobs creation program in Iraq. The Gulf states must not fiddle while Baghdad burns. I know that some of my colleagues disagree with a troop increase in Iraq, and I have heard the calls for a withdrawal to begin in 4 to 6 months. Those who advocate such a policy have a right—even an obligation—to join the debate on this issue. But I believe these individuals also have a responsibility to tell us what they believe are the consequences of withdrawal in Iraq. Do they not fear Iranian, Saudi, and Turkish involvement in Iraq? A wider regional war? A haven for terrorists? A humanitarian catastrophe? Do they truly believe that we can walk away from Iraq? We were able to walk away from Vietnam. If we walk away from Iraq, we will be back—possibly in the context of a wider war in the world’s most volatile region. I believe that those who disagree with this new policy should indicate what they would propose to do if we withdraw and Iraq descends into chaos. We have made many, many mistakes since 2003, and these will not be easily reversed. Even greater than the costs thus far and in the future, however, are the catastrophic consequences that would ensue from our failure in Iraq. By surging troops and bringing security to Baghdad and other areas, we will give the Iraqis and their partners the best possible chances to succeed. From everything I saw during my trip to Iraq last month, I believe that success is still possible. And I would not support this new strategy if I didn’t think it had a real chance of success. But let us realize that there are no guarantees. By controlling the violence, we can pave the way for a political settlement. Once the government wields greater authority, however, Iraqi leaders must take significant steps on their own, and they must do it right away. Increasing U.S. troop levels will expose more brave Americans to danger and increase the number of American casualties. When Congress authorized this war, we were committing America to a mission that entails the greatest sacrifice a country can make, one that falls disproportionately on those Americans who love their country so much that they volunteer to risk their lives to accomplish that mission. And when we authorized this war, we accepted the responsibility to make sure they could prevail. Increasing deployments is a terrible sacrifice to impose on the best patriots among us. My travels and meeting with many service members lead me to believe, however, that these Americans will once again do everything they can to win this war. I will conclude by commending the President’s announcement Wednesday night that he plans to increase the standing size of the Army and Marine Corps by some 92,000 soldiers and Marines. Such a step is long overdue, particularly given our

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commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I believe that the increase in end strength is in the national security interests of our country. I hope it will receive the backing of all senators. Chairman Levin, thank you. I look forward to the testimony of the witnesses here today. Source: John McCain (remarks before the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Iraq, January 12, 2007), http://mccain.senate.gov/public/.

Senator Barack Obama, Remarks on the Senate Floor, March 21, 2007 Mr. President, on Thursdays, Senator Durbin and I hold a constituent coffee so we can hear from the folks back home. A young man came a few months ago who was about 25, 26 years old. He had been back from Iraq for a year. The first 6 months of that year he spent in a coma. An explosion had shattered his face, blinded him in both eyes, and has left him without the use of one arm. He told us about how he was going through rehab, and he introduced us to his family. He has a wife and two young daughters like I do, and his wife talked for a bit about the adjustments they were making at home since dad got hurt. I found myself looking at not just him, but at his wife, who loves him so much, and I thought about how their lives were forever changed because of the decision that was carried out 4 years ago. The sacrifices of war are immeasurable. I first made this point in the fall of 2002, at the end of the speech I gave opposing the invasion of Iraq. I said then that I certainly do not oppose all wars, but dumb wars—rash wars. Because there is no decision more profound than the one we make to send our brave men and women into harm’s way. I have thought about these words from time to time since that speech, but never so much as the day I saw that young man and his wife. The sacrifices of war are immeasurable. Too many have returned from Iraq with that soldier’s story—with broken bodies and shattered nerves and wounds that even the best care may not heal. Too many of our best have come home shrouded in the flag they loved. Too many moms and dads and husbands and wives have answered that knock on the door that is the hardest for any loved one to hear. And the rest of us have seen too many promises of swift victories, and dying insurgencies, and budding democracy give way to the reality of a brutal civil war that goes on and on and on to this day. The sacrifices of war are immeasurable. It was not impossible to see back then that we might arrive at the place we are at today. I said then that a war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics would lead to a U.S. occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I believed that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale or strong international support would only strengthen the recruitment arm of

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al-Qaida and erode the good standing and moral authority that took our country generations to build. There were other experts, and leaders, and everyday Americans who believed this too. I wish we had been wrong. I wish we weren’t here talking about this at the beginning of the war’s fifth year. Because the consequences of this war have been profound. And the sacrifices have been immeasurable. Those who would have us continue this war in perpetuity like to say that this is a matter of resolve on behalf of the American people. But the American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded on the streets of Fallujah. They have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on this effort— money that could have been devoted to strengthening our homeland security and our competitive standing as a nation. No, it has not been a failure of resolve that has led us to this chaos, but a failure of strategy—a strategy that has only strengthened Iran’s strategic position; increased threats posed by terrorist organizations; reduced U.S. credibility and influence around the world; and placed Israel and other nations friendly to the United States in the region in greater peril. Iraq has not been a failure of resolve, it has been a failure of strategy—and that strategy must change. It is time to bring a responsible end to this conflict is now. There is no military solution to this war. No amount of U.S. soldiers not 10,000 more, not 20,000 more, not the almost 30,000 more that we now know we are sending—can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. Our troops cannot serve as their diplomats, and we can no longer referee their civil war. We must begin a phased withdrawal of our forces starting May 1, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30, 2008. We also must make sure that we are not as careless getting out of this war as we were getting in, and that is why this withdrawal should be gradual, and keep some U.S. troops in the region to prevent a wider war and go after al Qaida and other terrorists. But it must begin soon. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict. It is time for our troops to start coming home. History will not judge the architects of this war kindly. But the books have yet to be written on our efforts to right the wrongs we see in Iraq. The story has yet to be told about how we turned from this moment, found our way out of the desert, and took to heart the lessons of war that too many refused to heed back then. For it is of little use or comfort to recall past advice and warnings if we do not allow them to guide us in the challenges that lie ahead. Threats loom large in an age where terrorist networks thrive, and there will certainly be times when we have to call on our brave servicemen and women to risk their lives again. But before we make that most profound of all decisions—before we send our best off to battle, we must remember what led us to this day and learn from the principles that follow. We must remember that ideology is not a foreign policy. We must not embark on war based on untested theories, political agendas or wishful thinking that has little basis in fact

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or reality. We must focus our efforts on the threats we know exist, and we must evaluate those threats with sound intelligence that is never manipulated for political reasons again. We must remember that the cost of going it alone is immense. It is a choice we sometimes have to make, but one that must be made rarely and always reluctantly. That is because America’s standing in the world is a precious resource not easily rebuilt. We value the cooperation and goodwill of other nations not because it makes us feel good, but because it makes all the world safer—because the only way to battle 21st century threats that race across borders—threats like terror, and disease, and nuclear proliferation—is to enlist the resources and support of all nations. To win our wider struggle, we must let people across this planet know that there is another, more hopeful alternative to the hateful ideologies the terrorists espouse—and a renewed America will reflect and champion that vision. We must remember that planning for peace is just as critical as planning for war. Iraq was not just a failure of conception, but a failure of execution, and so when a conflict does arise that requires our involvement, we must do our best to understand that country’s history, its politics, its ethnic and religious divisions before our troops ever set foot on its soil. We must understand that setting up ballot boxes does not a democracy make—that real freedom and real stability come from doing the hard work of helping to build a strong police force, and a legitimate government, and ensuring that people have food, and water, and electricity, and basic services. And we must be honest about how much of that we can do ourselves and how much must come from the people themselves. Finally, we must remember that when we send our servicemen and women to war, we make sure we have given them the training they need, and the equipment that will keep them safe, and a mission they can accomplish. We must respect our commanders’ advice not just when its politically convenient but even when it is not what we want to hear. And when our troops come home, it is our most solemn responsibility to make sure they come home to the services, and the benefits, and the care they deserve. As we stand at the beginning of the fifth year of this war, let us remember that young man from Illinois, and his wife, and his daughters, and the thousands upon thousands of families who are living the very real consequences and immeasurable sacrifices that have come from our decision to invade Iraq. We are so blessed in this country to have so many men and women like this— Americans willing to put on that uniform, and say the hard goodbyes, and risk their lives in a far off land because they know that such consequences and sacrifices are sometimes necessary to defend our country and achieve a lasting peace. That is why we have no greater responsibility than to ensure that the decision to place them in harm’s way is the right one. And that is why we must learn the lessons of Iraq. It is what we owe our soldiers. It is what we owe their families. And it is what we owe our country—now, and in all the days and months to come. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Source: Congressional Record 153 (March 21, 2007), S3457–S3458.

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Document 6.17 Past and Future in Afghanistan, 2007 Among the most common representations of the American effort to govern foreign territory and foreign people has been the image of U.S. soldiers and foreign children. These images truly exploded onto the nation’s cultural landscape during World War II, iconically captured in the numerous photographs of American soldiers distributing chocolate to European children in a way that captured how the United States planned to reconstruct Europe. The photo below from the United States Army comes from that long tradition. The caption reads “A coalition forces soldier greets a group of Afghan boys at the Sahid Ali Ahad Khan Karzi Orphanage and school in Kandahar District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, Dec. 30, 2007. Afghan National Security Forces, along with coalition forces, teamed up to deliver food, toys and clothing to the 380 children of the orphanage and provided orphanage staff members with rice, beans, and cooking oil to fill empty storeroom shelves.” How to interpret this photo stands at the center of the American struggle with empire. To some, it embodies what is best about U.S. policy: although the United States went to war with Afghanistan and is still fighting against a stubborn resistance, the U.S. goal is not to punish Afghanistan, rather the United States seeks to promote development and self-sufficiency. To others, the photo embodies the lies of U.S. policy. Critics charge that photographs like this one manipulate public opinion and evoke the sentimental appeal of American humanitarian efforts in the past to justify its actions in the present.

Source: U.S. Army photo, DefenseImagery.mil, VIRIN: 071230-A-0000X-002.

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NOTES 1. George W. Bush, “President’s Address to the Nation” (remarks describing changes in U.S. policy in Iraq, White House Library, Washington, D.C., January 10, 2007), http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070110-7.html. 2. George W. Bush, “Presidential Address to the Nation” (remarks announcing military action in Afghanistan, Treaty Room, White House, October 7, 2001), http://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/10/20011007-8.html. 3. Meet the Press, NBC, March 16, 2003, www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/cheneymeetthe press.htm. 4. “Iraqi Journalist Throws Shoes at Bush in Baghdad,” CNN, December 15, 2008, www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/12/14/bush.iraq/index.html?iref=newssearch. 5. “Thousands Protest War in India, Bangladesh,” ExpressIndia.com, April 12, 2003; “A Nation at War; Indonesians Protest the War,” New York Times, March 31, 2003. 6. Bernard Porter, Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (New York: Allen Lane, 2003).

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only the word CONCLUSION for the recto running head; you Conclusion: The Ongoing can omit the subtitle.] Struggle with Empire

n 2009, President Barack Obama found himself facing the American struggle with empire. It was a challenge that connected him to his predecessors across the political spectrum. Like Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush, Obama deployed the instruments of American power to govern foreign people and foreign territory. It was a task that was awaiting him as soon as he arrived in office, and how he would respond to the challenge of empire was among the first projects he explained to the American public. For Obama, the American struggle with empire focused on Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike his predecessor, George W. Bush, who described Afghanistan and Iraq as two fronts in the same war on terrorism, Obama claimed that in each country the United States faced distinct challenges that required different solutions. He made those distinctions—between Afghanistan and Iraq and between his administration and his predecessor’s—clear in various ways. Obama was quick to emphasize that he sought a new policy in both countries. And when he articulated those policies, he did so in separate speeches. Obama addressed Iraq policy on February 27, 2009, when he spoke to Marines at Camp Lejeune. He explained that as soon as he came into office he ordered his advisers to revisit U.S. strategy in Iraq. “Today,” he explained, “I can announce that our review is complete, and that the United States will pursue a new strategy to end the war in Iraq through a transition to full Iraqi responsibility.” A new strategy perhaps, but one that sought to achieve goals that would have been familiar to any president facing the American struggle with empire. “This strategy is grounded in a clear and achievable goal shared by the Iraqi people and the American people: an Iraq that is sovereign, stable, and self-reliant. To achieve that goal, we will work to promote an Iraqi government that is just, representative, and accountable, and that provides neither support nor safe-haven to terrorists. We will help Iraq build new ties of trade and commerce with the world. And we will forge a partnership with the people and government of Iraq that contributes to the peace and security of the region.”1 Exactly one month later, Obama detailed what he called “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” In an address to reporters at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, he claimed that “the situation [in Afghanistan] is increasingly perilous. It has been more than seven years since the Taliban was removed from power, yet war rages on, and insurgents control parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Attacks against our troops, our NATO allies, and the Afghan government have risen steadily. Most painfully, 2008 was the deadliest year of the war for American forces.” Obama claimed that the immediate needs in Afghanistan were military. “I have already ordered the deployment of 17,000 troops that had been requested by General McKiernan for many months. . . . At the same time,” Obama explained, “we will shift the 512

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emphasis of our mission to training and increasing the size of Afghan Security Forces, so that they can eventually take the lead in securing their country. That is how we will prepare Afghans to take responsibility for their security, and how we will ultimately be able to bring our troops home.”2 The Obama administration sought to make clear its commitment to Afghanistan and Iraq, but Americans still argued about what that commitment should be. From the moment U.S. troops left for Afghanistan in 2001, and especially after U.S. troops entered Iraq in 2003, Americans found themselves constantly focused on and often at odds about what role the United States should play in governing foreign territory and foreign people. Indeed, in the run-up to the 2008 election, some expected Iraq and Afghanistan to be a dominant factor in how candidates campaigned and how Americans voted. It took an economic crisis unprecedented in its speed and scale to change things, leading many Americans to focus on domestic rather than foreign affairs. The economic upheavals of 2008 punctuated a political season marked by unpredictability. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rudolph Giuliani, and Mitt Romney, candidates who seemed most likely to secure presidential nominations, fell behind as Democrats and Republicans chose two candidates—Barack Obama and John McCain—whose campaigns had seemed interesting from the start but whom many seasoned observers had given few chances of success. In November 2008, the presidential contest pitted the nation’s first African American nominee of a major party (Obama) against the nation’s oldest nominee (McCain) who had selected only the second woman and first Republican woman (Sarah Palin) to run for vice president. The Obama campaign constructed its strategy around the notion of change, but Obama activists were hardly alone. Democratic and Republican candidates alike knew only too well that the American electorate seemed increasingly disillusioned with the nation’s political leadership in Congress and the executive. Afghanistan and Iraq had been crucial to that process, with most polls finding that Americans believed the federal government was failing to achieve victory in either country. What that victory would mean was subject to debate, but few claimed that victory was in sight. These developments established the circumstances now facing both the Obama administration and the American public. Since January 2009, the administration has focused most of its energy and spent its political capital on matters of domestic policy, specifically the crisis in the nation’s economy. But as Obama’s speeches of February and March 2009 made clear, the administration could not ignore the American struggle with empire. That struggle remains as old as the republic, and it continues to shape the nation’s politics and culture. The president himself is a product of that struggle, and his own life exemplifies the varied ways that Americans have sought to govern people and territory without becoming an empire. Among the first things that many Americans learned about Barack Obama was that he was born in Hawaii, a place that demonstrated both the American capacity to reject the pitfalls of empire and the American ability to embrace the worst practices of empire. Obama was born in 1961, only two years after Hawaii became a state, the last in a long line of territories that went from political subordination to political equality through the American territorial system. At the same time, the American annexation of

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Hawaii in the late nineteenth century was an expression of the nation’s territorial acquisitiveness, while the government that Americans installed in Hawaii was a manifestation of the policy of racial supremacy that had marked so much federal policy. As a child, Obama lived for four years in Indonesia. Like so many colonies where local residents fought against Japanese occupation, the Dutch colony of Indonesia demanded its independence after World War II. The United States endorsed the move but later supported an increasingly repressive Indonesian government so long as it defended U.S. interests in the region. Finally, as a senator from Illinois, Obama represented a state that had been created through the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance, the legislation that shaped so much of the American response to the struggle for empire. Obama was not the first president to know firsthand what it meant to grow up in territory governed by the United States. Indeed, the vast majority of American presidents came from states that had first entered the Union through the territorial system. Like other Americans, they came of age surrounded by stories of the ways the United States had acquired and governed foreign territory and absorbed the people who lived there. Those stories tell a history of policy, but those stories are also deeply embedded in U.S. culture. In turn, they shape the truisms and assumptions that have guided U.S. policy. And that returns us to the two speeches of Barack Obama and the connections that link him to other presidents. In his comments on Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama emphasized the need for regional development and self-government coupled with the use of military force against violent dissenters. Many of these principles would have been entirely familiar to Thomas Jefferson as he sought a future for the Northwest Territory, or to Theodore Roosevelt who would have celebrated the principles of democratization but might have rejected the notion that the United States should surrender its authority, or to Woodrow Wilson and his commitment to the notion of national self-government even though he had rejected self-determination for Iraqis in the negotiations at Versailles, or to John F. Kennedy who in his speech to Congress had predicted that the nation’s future depended on its commitment to the independence of the old colonies of Europe, or to Ronald Reagan who embraced the American capacity to spread democracy and development, or to George W. Bush who had sought many of the same goals in Afghanistan and Iraq. After more than two centuries, Barack Obama is only the latest president to face the American struggle with empire. And the realities of that struggle inform American life today just as they did two centuries ago. Of the fifty states in the union, thirty-seven of them are the result of territorial acquisition or territorial governance. The residents of those states enjoy American citizenship and equal representation in Congress, although most are unaware of how revolutionary that system was when it was created. Meanwhile, Puerto Rico continues to occupy its nebulous status; its residents are citizens of the United States, but as a commonwealth it enjoys neither statehood nor independence. Puerto Rico is only one of several island possessions of the United States in the Caribbean and the Pacific, all of them ruled under various systems. Although the United States has closed many of the overseas military establishments it developed during the cold war, American troops and ships continue to operate from bases in foreign countries where local relations vary from welcoming to adversarial.

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Meanwhile, Afghanistan and Iraq have returned the United States to the specific task it has faced since its creation. Once again, the United States has assumed direct governance over foreign territory and foreign people. In this volume, I have sought to chronicle that process. How to interpret American action in Afghanistan and Iraq— whether to celebrate or to condemn—remains the decision not only of individual Americans but, of course, of the people in both of those countries. But I would suggest that the reaction itself is often the most revealing. In the United States, the ways that Americans understand their presence in Afghanistan and Iraq speaks volumes about the ways Americans think of themselves as a nation. NOTES 1. Barack Obama, “Remarks of President Barack Obama—Responsibly Ending the War in Iraq” (remarks as prepared for delivery, Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, February 27, 2009), www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-of-President-Barack-Obama-ResponsiblyEnding-the-War-in-Iraq. 2. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on a New Strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan” (remarks at Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Washington, D.C., March 27, 2009), www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-a-New-Strategyfor-Afghanistan-and-Pakistan.

Text Credits

Document 1.7: Jefferson, Thomas, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series. Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Document 1.10: Reprinted with the permission of LexisNexis. Document 3.14: Conrad, Robert; Sandino. © 1990 Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press. Document 4.11: Reprinted by arrangement with the Heirs to the Estate of Martin Luther King Jr., c/o Writers House as agent for the proprietor New York, NY. Copyright 1957 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., copyright renewed 1991 Coretta Scott King. Document 4.13: From The Ugly American by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. Copyright © 1958 by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, renewed 1986 by William J. Lederer. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Document 4.16: Reprinted courtesy of the General Douglas MacArthur Foundation. Document 5.1: Reprinted with permission of Julian Bond. Documents 5.7, 5.15, and 6.11: Reprinted with permission of the United Nations. Document 5.8: Reprinted with permission of South End Press from The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance, eds. Daniel B. Schirmer & Stephen Rosskamm Shalom. Document 6.7: Reprinted with permission. © 2003 NBC Universal, Inc. All rights reserved.

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American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States. 38 vols. Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832–1861.

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The American Presidency Project Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr. George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. George W. Bush presidential Web site, http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. John McCain senatorial Web site, http://mccain.senate.gov. Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library. U.S. Department of Justice. U.S. Department of State. U.S. Library of Congress. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. United Nations.

NEWSPAPERS, VIDEO,

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MEDIA OUTLETS

Atlantic Monthly. Cable News Network (CNN). Harper’s Weekly. NBC News. New York Times. Pacific Commercial Advertiser. Philippine Free Press. Puck. United States Magazine and Democratic Review.

COURT CASES Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. William M’intosh, 8 Wheat. 543 (1823). Samuel A. Worcester, Plaintiff in Error v. The State of Georgia, 31 U.S. 515 (1832). The Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831).

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LEGISLATIVE COLLECTIONS

Amercian State Papers: Documents Legislative and Executive, of the Congress of the United States. 38 vols. Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1832–1861. Annals of Congress: Debates and Proceedings of the Congress of the United States. 42 vols. Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1834–1856. Congressional Globe. Washington, D.C.: Blair and Rives, 1833–1877. Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the Third Session of the Fifty-Third Congress, 1894–95. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1895. Foreign Relations of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1861–. Public Statutes at Large of the United States of America. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1845. Treaties and Other International Agreements of the United States of America, 1776–1949. Compilation directed by Charles I. Bevans. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968. U.S. Statutes at Large. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1874–.

DOCUMENTS

AND

DOCUMENT COLLECTIONS

Boyd, Julian P., et al., eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950– (35 vols. to date). Brown, Everett Somerville, ed. William Plumer’s Memorandum of Proceedings in the United States Senate, 1803–1807. New York: Macmillan Company, 1923. Compilation of Reports of Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 1789–1901. 8 vols. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901. Farrand, Max, ed. Notes of the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911. Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. The Works of Thomas Jefferson. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–1905. Halchin, L. Elaine. The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): Origin, Characteristics, and Institutional Authorities. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Research Service, 2004. Looney, J. Jefferson, et al., eds. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004– (4 vols. to date). Marshall, Jessie Ames, ed. Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, during the Period of the Civil War. . . . Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917. Messages of the President of the United States, with the Correspondence, Therewith Communicated, between the Secretary of War and Other Officers of the Government, on the Subject of the Mexican War. Washington, D.C.: Wendell and Van Benthuysen, 1848. Morison, Elting Elmore, et al., eds. The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951. National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. Washington, D.C.: National Security Council, 2005. Peterson, Merrill D., ed. Jefferson Writings. New York: Library of America, 1984. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1957–. Ramírez, Sergio, ed. Sandino, the Testimony of a Nicaraguan Patriot: 1921–1934. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, at the First Session Thirty-ninth Congress. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1866. Richardson, James D., ed. A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789–1897. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896–1899. Rowland, Dunbar, ed. The Letter Books of William C. C. Claiborne, 1801–1816. 6 vols. Jackson: Mississippi State Archive, 1917. Rutland, Robert A., et al., eds. The Papers of James Madison: Presidential Series. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986– (6 vols. to date). Schirmer, Daniel B., and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds. The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance. Boston: South End Press, 1987. Shaw, Albert, ed. The Messages and Papers of Woodrow Wilson. New York: Review of Reviews Corporation, 1924. Thorndike, Rachel Sherman, ed. The Sherman Letters: Correspondence between General and Senator Sherman from 1837 to 1891. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1894.

520

S ELECTED B IBLIOGRAPHY

Thorpe, Francis Newton, ed. The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909. U.S. Congress. Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. “Iraq, Next Steps: What Will an Iraq 5-Year Plan Look Like?” 108th Cong., 1st sess., 2003. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004. United States–Puerto Rico Political Status Act: Field Hearing before the Committee on Resources, House of Representatives, One Hundred Fifth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 856—. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1997. Wooley, John T. and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, Santa Barbara, Calif.: University of California (hosted), Gerhard Peters (database), www.presidency.ucsb.edu.

BOOKS

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ARTICLES

Aron, Stephen. How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Barreto, Amilcar Antonio. “Statehood, the English Language, and the Politics of Education in Puerto Rico.” Polity 34, no. 1 (2001): 89–105. Billington, Ray Allen. Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Borgwardt, Elizabeth. A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005. Bradley, Mark, and Marilyn Blatt Young, eds. Making Sense of the Vietnam Wars: Local, National, and Transnational Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Brasseaux, Carl A. “Confusion, Conflict, and Currency: An Introduction to the Rebellion of 1768?” Louisiana History 18 (1977): 161–197. Bremer, L. Paul. My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope. With Malcolm McConnell. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Bresnan, John, ed. Crisis in the Philippines: The Marcos Era and Beyond. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Brown, Bill. “Waging Baseball, Playing War: Games of American Imperialism.” Cultural Critique 17 (1990): 51–78. Buchanan, Patrick J. A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s Destiny. Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1999. Calhoun, Frederick S. Uses of Force and Wilsonian Foreign Policy. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1993. Cayton, Andrew R. L. The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986. Chandrasekaran, Rajiv. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone. New York: Knopf, 2006. Chomsky, Noam. Deterring Democracy. New York: Verso, 1991. Cooper, John Milton. Breaking the Heart of the World: Woodrow Wilson and the Fight for the League of Nations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Costigliola, Frank. Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Cullather, Nick. Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States–Philippines Relations, 1942– 1960. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. New York: Macmillan, 1969; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Dower, John W. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: Norton, 1999. Dubois, Laurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004. Etherington, Norman. “Reconsidering Theories of Imperialism.” History and Theory 21 (1982): 1–36. Faragher, John Mack. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays. New York: H. Holt, 1994.

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Fatton, Robert. The Roots of Haitian Despotism. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2007. Fehrenbacher, Don Edward. The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861. New York: Harper and Row, 1976. Feith, Douglas J. War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. New York: Harper, 2008. Ferguson, Niall. Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York: Penguin Press, 2004. ———. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. New York: Allen Lane, 2003. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988. Forbes, Robert Pierce. The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Ford, Harold P. CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962–1968. Langley, Va.: History Staff, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency, 1998. Gareau, Frederick H. “Morgenthau’s Plan for Industrial Disarmament in Germany.” Western Political Quarterly 14 (1961): 517–534. Garrard, Lewis Hector. Wah-to-Yah, and the Taos Trail: or, Prairie Travel and Scalp Dances, with a Look at Los Rancheros from Muleback and the Rocky Mountain Camp-Fire. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co., 1850. Girard, Philippe R. Paradise Lost: Haiti’s Tumultuous Journey from Pearl of the Caribbean to Third World Hot Spot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Gobat, Michel. Confronting the American Dream: Nicaragua under U.S. Imperial Rule. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. Gordon-Reed, Annette. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. New York: Norton, 2008. Grant, Zalin. Facing the Phoenix: The CIA and the Political Defeat of the United States in Vietnam. New York: Norton, 1991. Greene, Jack P. Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States. New York: Norton, 1986. Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940. New York: Pantheon Books, 1998. Hartman, Gertrude. America, Land of Freedom. Boston: Heath, 1952. Hèamèalèainen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Herring, George C. America’s Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950–1975. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996. Hoffman, Ronald, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds. An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985. Hogan, Michael J. The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947– 1952. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Holt, Michael F. The Political Crisis of the 1850s. New York: Wiley, 1978. Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. Kastor, Peter J. The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Kettner, James H. The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978. Kimball, Warren F. Swords or Ploughshares? The Morgenthau Plan for Defeated Nazi Germany, 1943–1946. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1976. Kohn, Richard H. “History and the Culture Wars: The Case of the Smithsonian Institution’s Enola Gay Exhibition.” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 1036–1063. Kramer, Paul A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Kurtz, Charles M. The Saint Louis World’s Fair of 1904, in Commemoration of the Acquisition of the Louisiana Territory; a Handbook of General Information, Profusely Illustrated. St. Louis: Gottschalk Printing Company, 1903. LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1963. Lansing, Robert. The Peace Negotiations: A Personal Narrative. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921. Lederer, William J., and Eugene Burdick. The Ugly American. New York: Norton, 1958. Lee, Robert Francis. Conrad’s Colonialism. The Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1969.

522

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Leffler, Melvyn P. The Elusive Quest: America’s Pursuit of European Stability and French Security, 1919– 1933. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. ———. A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Levy, David W. The Debate over Vietnam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Liliuokalani. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1898. Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987. Lippmann, Walter. The Stakes of Diplomacy. New York: H. Holt and Co., 1915. Love, Eric Tyrone Lowery. Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Lucas, George. Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976. MacArthur, Douglas. Reminiscences. New York: Da Capo Press, 1964. Maier, Charles S. Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Malavet, Pedro A. America’s Colony: The Political and Cultural Conflict between the United States and Puerto Rico. New York: New York University Press, 2004. Manela, Erez. The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. McMahon, Robert J. The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. ———. Colonialism and Cold War: The United States and the Struggle for Indonesian Independence, 1945– 49. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Morgan, Edmund. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: Norton, 1975. Morgan, Matthew J. A Democracy Is Born: An Insider’s Account of the Battle against Terrorism in Afghanistan. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Security International, 2007. Neatby, Hilda. The Quebec Act: Protest and Policy. Scarborough, Ont.: Prentice-Hall of Canada, 1972. Nobles, Gregory H. American Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and Continental Conquest. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997. Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Odom, William E., and Robert Dujarric. America’s Inadvertent Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Onuf, Peter S. Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. ———. The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. Pastor, Robert. “The International Debate on Puerto Rico: The Costs of Being an Agenda-Taker.” International Organization 38 (1984): 575–595. Porter, Bernard. Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Price, Matthew C. The Wilsonian Persuasion in American Foreign Policy. Youngstown, N.Y.: Cambria Press, 2007. Report of Major-General E. S. Otis, U.S. Volunteers, on Military Operations and Civil Affairs in the Philippine Islands. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899. Ricks, Thomas E. Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. New York: Penguin Press, 2006. Roosevelt, Franklin D. “Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View.” Foreign Affairs 6 (1927–1928): 573–586. Rowe, John Carlos. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Rubin, Anne S. A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Santiago, Anna M., and George Galster. “Puerto Rican Segregation in the United States: Cause or Consequence of Economic Status?” Social Problems 42 (1995): 361–389. Schaller, Michael. The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. New York: Random House, 1988. “Showdown at ‘The West as America’ Exhibition.” American Art 5, no. 3 (1991): 2–11. Smith, Rogers M. Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. Stein, Roger B. “Visualizing Conflict in ‘The West as America’.” Public Historian 14 (1992): 85–91. Summerhill, Stephen J., and John Alexander Williams. Sinking Columbus: Contested History, Cultural Politics, and Mythmaking during the Quincentenary. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Taylor, Alan. American Colonies. New York: Viking, 2001. Truettner, William H., and Nancy K. Anderson. The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920. Washington, D.C.: Published for the National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991. Tucker, Robert W. Woodrow Wilson and the Great War: Reconsidering America’s Neutrality, 1914–1917. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. Turner, Frederick J. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” In Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893, 199–227. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1894. ———. “Social Forces in American History.” American Historical Review 16 (1911): 217–233. Twitchell, Ralph Emerson. The History of the Military Occupation of the Territory of New Mexico from 1846 to 1851 by the Government of the United States, Together with Biographical Sketches of Men Prominent in the Conduct of the Government during that Period. Denver: Smith-Brooks Company, 1909. Von Eschen, Penny M. Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997. Wallace, Anthony F. C. Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999. Weeks, William Earl. John Quincy Adams and American Global Empire. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992. Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. New York: Dell, 1972 [1959]. Wise, Gene. “‘Paradigm Dramas’ in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement.” American Quarterly 313 (1979): 293–337.

Index

Note: page numbers followed by f and p refer to figures and photographs, respectively. Abizaid, John, 430p Adams, Charles F., Jr., 142 Adams, John, 43 Adams, John Quincy, 43–48, 58 Adams-Oni´s (Transcontinental) Treaty, 14, 43–48 Afghanistan overview, 420–425 America’s Inadvertent Empire (Odom and Dujarric), 493–494 Blair address to Congress (2003), 460–464 A Democracy is Born (Morgan), 494–495 democratization and, 425–427 dependence, independence, and, 432 empire debate and, 515 human rights report (State Dept., 2001), 442–445 institution building and, 429 insurgency, 424 joint resolution authorizing use of force, 447–448 Obama policy, 512–513 Operation Enduring Freedom, beginning of, 422–423 resistance in, 433–435 Soviet Union, end of war with, 347 state building in U.S. and nation building in, 435–437 United Nations and, 480 Africa Bush (G.H.W.) and policy on, 395–399 African Americans. See also Slavery inequality and, 9

524

Jim Crow system and, 91, 434 in Louisiana Purchase, 11 Reconstruction and, 90 resistance by, 434 Vietnam and, 339 Aguinaldo, Emilio, 139–141, 158, 161, 327 Alaska, 95, 190, 265 Alaska natives, 190–191 Albizu Campos, Pedro, 297–298 Allawi, Ayad, 483–485 Allende, Salvador, 342 America, Land of Freedom (Hartman), 302–305 American Historical Association, 117, 196–198 American Indians. See Native Americans American Relief Administration, 205 American Revolution, 3–4, 430–431 America’s Inadvertent Empire (Odom and Dujarric), 493–494 “Annexation” (O’Sullivan), 66–68 Anti-Imperialist League, 100 Arbenz, Jacob, 263, 305 Armijo, Manuel, 70 Association of Procommonwealth Attorneys, 413–414 Association of Statehood Attorneys, 414–416 Astor, John Jacob, 42–43 Atlantic Charter (1941), 235–236 Atristain, Miguel, 80–84 Austria Allied occupation of, 260, 428, 434

German annexation of, 170, 232–233 Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution (1991), 393–394 Authorization for Use of Military Force (joint resolution, 2001), 447–448 Baja, Lauro L., Jr., 485 Baker, James, 500 Ball, George, 324 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, 351 Batista, Fulgencio, 266 Bayonet Constitution, 97–98, 131–133 Bent, Charles, 77 Biden, Joe, 469, 470–471 Bikini Island, 259 Bin Laden, Osama, 422, 439 “Birth of a New Nation” (King), 312–316 Blair, Tony, 439, 460–464 Blount, James, 122–124 Blount Report, 122–124 Boer War, 161 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 10–11, 23 Bond, Julian, 353, 354f, 355f Boone, Daniel, 49–50 Boqueto de Woieseri, John, 1f Borah, William, 230, 234–235 Boston, USS, 122, 128–131 BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) process, 351 Breckinridge, John, 28 Bremer, L. Paul, III, 424, 428, 458, 469–475, 476, 497 Britain Canada and, 4 decolonization, 262 institution building and, 429

I NDEX Iraq and, 439, 460 Native Americans and, 9 Roosevelt’s admiration of, 98, 438 Wilson’s admiration of, 165 Bryan, William Jennings, 211 Buchanan, Pat, 417, 438 Bull Moose (Progressive) Party, 163 Burton, Dan, 379, 382 Burton, Phillip, 379 Burton, Sala, 379, 383 Bush, George H. W. Africa policy, 395–399 election of, 346 Gulf War, 383–394 “new world order,” 348 Bush, George W., 419p Cheney and, 465 election of, 422–423 imperialism charges and, 438–440 on Iraq mission, 487 Iraq surge, address on (2007), 419–420, 440–441, 499–504 Iraqi people, address to (2003), 424, 457 Operation Iraqi Freedom address (2003), 424, 455–456 reelection of, 487 shoes thrown at, 432–433 state building and, 436–437 Business interests and Roosevelt Corollary, 164 Butler, Benjamin, 89–90, 102–104, 105f Cairo Declaration (1943), 237 Calhoun, John C., 73, 75–76 California, 67–68, 72–76 Calling for the Removal of United States Armed Forces from the Middle East (1990), 392–393 Canada, 3, 4 Capacity building, state, 436–437 Carter, Jimmy, 343, 344 Casey, William, 377–378

Castillo Armas, Carlos, 305, 310–311 Castro, Fidel, 266 Cedras, Raoul, 402 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 264, 306, 340, 377–383 Chalabi, Ahmad, 429 Chamorro, Violeta Barrios Torres de, 347 Chandrasekaran, Rajiv, 495–496 Charles, Eugenia, 366–369 Cheney, Dick, 349p influence of, 465 Meet the Press interview (2003), 424–425, 465–466 state building and, 436 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 54–56 Cherokee “trail of tears,” 65 Chiang Kai-shek, 229, 237 Children pictured with soldiers, 510, 510p Chile, 342 China civil war in, 229 Japanese invasion of, 170–171, 229, 230–232 Monroe Doctrine for, 232 Choctaw Protest, 57–63 Chomsky, Noam, 394–395, 438 Churchill, Winston Atlantic Charter, 235–236 Cairo Declaration, 237 Potsdam Declaration (1945), 241–243 Yalta Declaration (1945), 237–241 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 264, 306, 340, 377–383 Citizenship African Americans and, 9, 91 British, 4 Confederacy and, 89, 90, 91 in Louisiana Purchase, 11–12, 15

525

Mexican territories and, 17–18 racial policy of, 157, 160 Spanish territories and, 101, 136, 146, 160 in Transappalachian West, 7–9 Civil War, 88–90, 102–104 “Civilizing mission,” 166 Claiborne, William C. C., 11, 27–28, 89 Clark, William, 58–63, 69 Clayton, John, 72–76 Cleveland, Grover, 125–127, 133 Clinton, Bill, 350, 402–405, 465 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 513 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), 424, 458–460, 475–480, 496–497 Coffee, John, 59–63 Cold war Axis nation occupations, 253–257 collapse of cold war order, 346–347, 395 containment policy, 256–257, 264, 346 decolonization and neocolonialism, 260–266, 275 empire and, 250 NSC report 68 (1950), 290–296 postwar planning, 251–254, 269–274 role of U.S. after, 350 Soviet and U.S. spheres of influence, 253 state building and, 436 U.S. policy contradictions, 250–251 Colonial system, American distaste for, 3–4, 165 Columbus, Christopher, 352 Committee of Safety, 122 Communism. See also Cold war containment policy 256–257, 264

526

I NDEX

Guatemala and U.S. fear of, 305–311 nationalization and, 263–264 Philippines and U.S. fears of, 280–281 U.S. covert operations and fear of, 263–265 in Vietnam, 262–263 Confederacy and Reconstruction, 90–92, 106–109 Congress, U.S. Axis empire building, debates on, 229–235 Blair address (2003), 460–464 CIA, investigation of, 340 Hawaii and, 122–124, 127–131 Iraq resolutions (Gulf War), 387–394 joint resolution authorizing use of force (after 9/11), 423–424, 447–448 Kennedy address to (1961), 249–250, 320–323 Louisiana, debate on, 11–12, 28–34 Nicaragua, debates on, 378–383 Puerto Rico field hearings, 410–416 Reconstruction and, 106–109 slavery and the West, debate on, 72–76 Spanish-American War and, 100 Truman address to (1945), 245–246 War Powers Resolution (1973), 340, 357–362 Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Wilson), 174 Congressional Research Service (CRS), 475 Constitution, U.S., 7, 436 Constitution writing, 254, 258, 433 Constitutional Convention, 6–7 Containment policy, 256–257, 264, 346

Continental Congress, 6, 436 Contras, 345, 346, 377–383 Cortez, Manuel, 77–78 Corwin, Thomas, 76 Couto, Bernardo, 80–84 Covert operations anticommunism and neocolonialism, 263–265 in Guatemala, 263, 305–311 in Mexico and Chile, 342 in Nicaragua, 377–383 in Southeast Asia, 336 CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority), 424, 458–460, 475–480, 496–497 Cuba Castro revolution, 266 Chomsky on, 395 Cuban Missile Crisis, 267 Cuban-American Treaty, 179–182 Guantánamo Bay, 160 Platt Amendment, 160, 163, 172–174 Spanish-American War and, 99, 101 strategic dependence model, 431 Cuevas, Luis Gonzaga, 80–84 Currier & Ives, 105, 106f Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria), 339, 356 Czolgosz, Leon, 157 Davis, Jefferson, 91 Dawes, Henry Laurens, 113 Dawes Act (1887), 113–116 Declaration of Independence, 4, 9 Declaration of the Rights of Man (France 1789), 10 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 339, 356, 418 Democracy Afghanistan and, 495 Chomsky on, 394–395 institution building and, 427–430 in reality vs. in perception, 426

A Democracy is Born (Morgan), 494–495 Democratization, 425–427 Dependence and independence, 430–433 Desert, 88 Deterring Democracy (Chomsky), 394–395 Dewey, George, 99 Díaz, Adolfo, 220–222 Dickinson, Daniel S., 75, 76 Dictatorships in 1960s and 1970s, 342–343 anticommunist litmus test and, 263 Haiti, 170 Iraq, 433 Nicaragua, 170 Dies, Martin, 230, 232–233 Diokno, Jose W., 377 Discovery doctrine, 52 Dole, Sanford B., 86f, 125, 133 “Dollar Diplomacy,” 215–216 Dominican Republic, 395 Dujarric, Robert, 493–494 Dulles, Allen, 306, 310 Eastern Europe, 260, 346 Economic policy after WWII, 257 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 264 El Salvador, 345 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 338 Empire. See specific topics, such as territorial expansion “Empire for liberty,” 1–2, 5–6 England. See Britain Enola Gay exhibit (National Air and Space Museum), 352–353 Equality. See also Racial inequality American independence and, 4 statehood and, 6, 7–8, 431 Estrada, Juan J., 221 Estrada Palma, Tomás, 179 European colonialism, 3–4, 8–9 European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan), 249f, 253, 472 Eustis, William, 28

I NDEX “Evil empire” speech (Reagan, 1983), 333–335, 364–366 Faith, Reagan on, 333 Federal capacity building, 436 The Federalist (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay), 4 Feith, Douglas J., 498 Fiasco (Ricks), 496–497 “Filipinos Keep Out” (Ty), 283–285 Films, 340–342, 363 Fisher, John W., 311 Fitzpatrick, Daniel R., 249f Florida, annexation of, 13, 43–48 Foraker, Joseph B., 146 Foraker Act (1900), 146–152, 158 France Indochina and, 262–263, 275 Native Americans and, 8–9 Saint-Domingue slave revolt, 10–11 Transappalachian West and, 5 Freedom, Kennedy on, 249–250 Frontier, Turner on, 95–96, 117–122 Garner, Jay, 458, 476 Garrard, Lewis, 79 Geneva Conference (1954), 263 Germany Congressional debates on, 229, 232–235 empire acquisition before WWII, 170 occupation of, after WWII, 255–257, 428, 434 planning for, postwar, 269–274 Potsdam Declaration on, 241 reconstruction after WWI, 168–169 reunification of, 346 Truman on, 245 West and East, formation of, 260 Geronimo, 92, 93 Gerrard, Lewis, 77

Ghana, 314–315 Gholson, Thomas, 33–34 Giuliani, Rudolph, 513 Glenn, John, 379, 381–382 Gold Coast, 312–314 Goldwater, Barry, 377–378, 382 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 346 Gore, Al, 465 Governance Act (1804), 12, 34–39 Grant, Ulysses S., 90–91, 92–93, 110 Great Britain. See Britain The Green Berets (film), 340 Grenada, 344–345, 366–374, 399 Grew, Joseph C., 278–279 Grimshaw, William, 49–51 Griswold, Gaylord, 28 Guam, 99, 101, 259 Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, 160, 179 Guatemala, 263, 305–311 Guerilla warfare in Central America, 345, 347 Native Americans and, 347 in Philippines, 158–159, 347 Gulf War, 348–350, 383–394 Hagerty, James C., 306, 310 Haiti Aristide, restoration of, 351, 399–405 Chomsky on, 395 Clinton address to, 402–405 dictatorships in, 170 FDR on, 216–217 Roosevelt Corollary and, 163–164 withdrawal from, 169–170 Halchin, L. Elaine, 475–480 Halle, Louis J., Jr., 308–310 Hamilton, Alexander, 4 Hamilton, Lee, 500 Harper’s Weekly, 102, 105p 142–146 Hartman, Gertrude, 302–305 Hatfield, G. D., 218–219 Hawaii Bayonet Constitution, 97–98, 131–133 Blount Report, 122–124

527

Cleveland address to, 125–127 deposition of Queen and annexation of, 98, 122 first treaty with, 94 Morgan Report, 98, 127–131 Obama and, 513–514 occupation policy, 158 Pacific Commercial Advertiser editorial on, 111–112 Roosevelt on, 191 statehood, 265 Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen (Lili’uokalani), 131–136 Hearst, William Randolph, 101 Hearts and Minds (film), 341 Hemings, Sally, 9 Henry, Patrick, 417 Hilsman, Roger, 324 Hinds, John, 58–63 Hiroshima, Japan, 352–353 History of the United States (Grimshaw), 49–51 Hitler, Adolf, 171, 235, 349 Ho Chi Minh (Nguyen Ai Quoc), 262–263, 264 Hobart, Garret, 101 Holland, Henry F., 306–308 Hoover, Herbert, 168–169, 205–210 Human rights reports (U.S. State Dept., 2001), 442–447 Hussein, Saddam Bush on, 455–456 as dictator, 433 Hitler compared to, 349 overthrow of, 424 Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq (National Intelligence Council, 2003), 449–455 State Dept. human rights report on, 445 Ickes, Harold, 328 “The Ideals of America” (Wilson), 174–178 Immigration, 8, 156–157 Imperial anti-colonialism, 165

528

I NDEX

Imperial Life in the Emerald City (Chandrasekaran), 495–496 Independence and dependence, 430–433 India, 438 Indian Appropriations Act (1851), 93 Indians. See Native Americans Indochina, 262–263, 275 Indonesia, 438, 514 Industrialization, 156 Institution building, 427–430 Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Iraq, 449–455 Interior Department, 18 International Conference on Peace and the Removal of Foreign Bases, 374–377 Interrogation and torture, 158–159, 435 Interventionism. See also specific countries and wars isolationism and, 155 Roosevelt Corollary and, 164 Wilson and, 165 Iran, 263 Iran-Contra affair, 346 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis, 343 Iraq human rights report (State Dept., 2001), 445–447 Hussein as dictator in, 433 institution building in, 427–429 Kuwait invasion and Gulf War, 348–350, 383–394 Iraq Study Group, 500 Iraq War (Operation Iraqi Freedom) overview, 420–425 America’s Inadvertent Empire (Odom and Dujarric), 493–494 Blair address to Congress (2003), 460–464 Bremer testimony before Senate Committee on

Foreign Relations, 469–475 Bush address at start of (2003), 424, 455–456 Bush address on surge (2007), 419–420, 440–441, 499–504 Bush address to Iraqi people (2003), 424, 457 Cheney interview on Meet the Press (2003), 424–425, 465–466 Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), 424, 458–460, 475–480, 496–497 democratization and, 425–427 dependence, independence, and, 432–433 empire debate and, 437–440, 515 Fiasco (Ricks), 496–497 Imperial Life in the Emerald City (Chandrasekaran), 495–496 insurgency, 424 joint resolution authorizing use of force, 423–424, 447–448 McCain on, 504–507 My Year in Iraq (Bremer), 497 nation building in Iraq and state building in U.S., 435–437, 467–468 National Strategy of Victory in Iraq (NSC, 2005), 487–493 Obama on, 505, 507–509, 512 Principal Challenges in PostSaddam Iraq (National Intelligence Council, 2003), 449–455 resistance in, 433–435 soldiers with children, images of, 510, 510p United Nations and, 480–486 War and Decision (Feith), 498 Isolationism, 155, 168–170 Italy, 170, 234–235, 260

Jackson, Andrew, 15, 16, 63–66 Japan Cairo Declaration on, 237 Congressional debates on, 229–234 empire acquisition by, 170–171 in Indochina, 262 institution building and, 429 Philippines invasion and occupation, 171, 327–328 Potsdam Declaration on, 241–242 Truman on, 245 U.S. occupation of, after WWII, 254–257, 260, 330–331, 428, 434 Jay, John, 4 JCS 1067 directive (1944), 252, 269–274 Jefferson, Thomas Declaration of Independence and, 9 on “empire for liberty,” 1–2, 5–6, 13, 40–43 government enlargement and, 12 Kennedy compared to, 266 letter to Adams, 43 letter to Astor, 42–43 letter to Madison, 1–2, 13, 41–42 Louisiana Purchase and, 10 on Missouri Crisis, 14 Reagan on, 364 retirement of, 13, 14 Roosevelt (Theodore) and, 86 slavery and, 9 Jim Crow system, 91, 434 Johnson, Andrew, 90, 105, 106f Johnson, Lyndon B., 335 Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh, 52–54 Joint Committee on Reconstruction, 106 Jones-Shafroth Act (1917), 163, 201–205

I NDEX Karzai, Hamid, 423, 429, 430p Kearny, Stephen Watts, 69–70, 77 Kennan, George, 256 Kennedy, Edward M., 378, 379–380 Kennedy, John F., 249–250, 266–268, 320–323, 324 Kerry, John F., 487 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 312–316 Korea, 246–247, 372–374 Korean War, 257 Ku Klux Klan, 91, 312 Kurtz, Charles M., 182–188 Kuwait, 348–350, 383–394 Lansing, Robert, 211–213 League of Nations, 154f, 155, 167, 211 Lee, Robert E., 91 Lewis, T. G., 353, 354f, 355f Lili’uokalani, Queen, 98, 122, 125, 127, 128–136 Limerick, Patricia, 339 Lincoln, Abraham, 89, 105, 106f, 461 Lippmann, Walter, 198–200 Livingston, Robert R., 23–27 Local governance, institution building and transition to, 428–429 Lockhart, Frank P., 275–276 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 324 Louisiana, 13, 429 Louisiana Purchase Claiborne statement to residents, 11, 27–28 debate over, 437 Governance Act (1804), 12, 34–39 governance debates in Congress, 11–12, 28–34 Grimshaw on, 51 Remonstrance of 1804, 12, 39–40 treaty with France, 10–11, 23–27 Turner on, 120

Louisiana Purchase Exposition (World’s Fair of 1904, St. Louis), 161–162, 182–188, 189p Louisiana territory, 34 Lucas, George, 363 Lugar, Richard, 469–470 MacArthur, Arthur, 159, 326 MacArthur, Douglas, 159, 276–277, 326–331 Macon, Nathaniel, 31–32 Madison, James Constitutional Convention and, 6–7 The Federalist (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay), 4 Jefferson letter to, 1–2, 13, 41–42 territorial expansion and, 12–13 Maine, USS, 99 “Manifest Destiny,” 17, 66–68, 95, 145. See also Territorial expansion “Manifesto to the Nicaraguan Liberals” (Sandino), 219–220 Mao Zedong, 229, 257 Marbois, Francis Barbé, 24–27 Marcos, Ferdinand, 343, 344, 347 The Marianas, 259 Marshall, George C., 253, 472 Marshall, John Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 54–56 Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh, 52–54 Worcester v. Georgia, 56–57 Marshall Plan (European Recovery Program), 249f, 253, 472 Martinez, Bartolome, 221 Mason-Dixon Line, 14 Masood, Ahmed Shah, 442–443 McCain, John, 504–507, 513 McCutcheon, John T., 154f McDonald, James L., 60

529

McKinley, William, 86f, 99, 100f, 157, 159 McNutt, Paul V., 290 Meet the Press (NBC), 424–425, 465–466 Mexican territories. See New Mexico territory Mexican War (1846–1848) debate over, 437 events of, 17 Mormons and, 88 O’Sullivan on, 67–68 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 16f, 17, 80–84 Mexico CIA and, 342 FDR on, 216 immigration from, 156 Spain and, 3 Texas, relationship with, 15–16 Transcontinental Treaty on boundaries with, 43–48 WWI and, 166 Micronesia, 259 Military, U.S. See also specific wars capacity building and, 436 Elvis Presley in, 316, 317p institution building and, 428 Military bases, American Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process, 351 cold war and, 257 in Philippines, 258, 278–279, 283–290, 350–351, 374–377 Miller, John, 31 Mills, Ogden L., 214 Missing (film), 341 Mississippi Crisis, 10 Mississippi Territory, 7 Missouri Crisis, 14 Mitchill, Samuel, 28 Moncada, José María, 219–223 Monroe, James, 23–27, 161

530

I NDEX

Monroe Doctrine cartoon on, 162f FDR on, 215 Kennedy and, 267 Lippmann on, 200 precepts of, 161 Roosevelt Corollary, 161, 162–164, 190–196, 267 Monroe Doctrine for China, 232 Montoya, Pablo, 77–78 Morgan, Matthew, 494–495 Morgan, Tyler, 127 Morgan Report, 98, 127–131 Morgenthau, Henry, 252 Morgenthau Plan, 252 Mormons, 88 Mossadegh, Muhammad, 263 Mount Pinatubo eruption, 350–351 Muñoz Marín, José Luis Alberto, 296–297, 298–300 Mussolini, Benito, 170, 235 My Year in Iraq (Bremer), 497 Nation building and state building, 435–437, 467–468 National Air and Space Museum, 352–353 National Association of Evangelicals, 333, 364 National Intelligence Council, 449 National Museum of American Art, 352 National Security Council (NSC) National Strategy of Victory in Iraq (2005), 487–493 NSC-68 report (1950), 290–296, 334, 344 National Security Directive 45 (1990), 383–387 National Security Review 30 (1992), 395–399

National Strategy of Victory in Iraq (NSC, 2005), 487–493 Nationalization of foreign business assets in Cuba, 266 U.S. covert action and, 263–264, 308–310 Native Americans Alaska natives, 190–191 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 54–56 Choctaw Protest, 57–63 Dawes Act (1887), 113–116 Department of Justice Policy on Indian Sovereignty (1995), 405–410 Grimshaw on, 50–51 guerilla warfare and, 347 Indian Appropriations Act (1851), 93 inequality and, 8–9 Jackson’s policy of Removal, 15, 63–66 Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh, 52–54 in Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 161–162, 188, 189p personal experiences of, 339 Removal policy and “trail of tears,” 65–66, 87 reservation system, 93, 113–116 resistance by, 88, 434 Roosevelt on, 190 Sherman’s Indian policy and war against, 92–93, 110 in Southwest, 17 in Transappalachian West, 5 Worcester v. Georgia, 56–57 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 253 Naturalization, 8, 12, 157. See also Citizenship Nazism, plans for elimination of, 269–272 Neocolonialism, 264–265, 345

New Mexico territory. See also Mexican War (1846–1848) citizenship exclusions and dispossessions in, 17–18 Congressional debates on slavery and, 72–76 Kearny’s proclamation to residents (1846), 69–70 Organic Law of the Territory of New Mexico, 70–72 Taos revolt, 77–79 Vigil y Alarid letter to Kearny, 76–77 New Orleans, 89–90, 102–104, 105f New York Times, 282–283 Ngo Dinh Diem, 264, 267–268, 324–325 Ngo Dinh Nhu, 324–325 Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), 262–263, 264 Nicaragua Chamorro, election of, 347 Chomsky on, 395 Congressional debates on, 378–383 Goldwater on, 377–378 Roosevelt Corollary and, 163–164 Sandinistas and contras, 343, 345, 347, 377–383 Sandino’s condemnation of U.S. policy, 218–223 Somoza dictatorship, 170 Nicholson, Joseph, 28 Niles, John, 73, 75 Nine-Power Treaty, 230 Nkrumah, Kwame, 313–314 Non-Aligned Countries, 371–372 Noriega, Manuel, 347 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 253 North Korea, 372–374 North Vietnam. See Vietnam Northwest Ordinance (1787), 6–8, 18–23, 430, 436

I NDEX Northwest Territories. See Northwest Ordinance (1787); Transappalachian West NSC-68 report (1950), 290–296, 334, 344 Nuclear weapons, 259, 267, 352–353 Obama, Barack, 504, 505, 507–509, 512–514 Occupation of Hawaii, 158 as loaded term, 433 in Philippines by Japanese, 171, 327–328 of WWII Axis powers, 253–257, 260, 330–331, 428, 432 Odom, William E., 493–494 Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), 475–476 Ohio, 9 Okinawa, 351 Oklahoma, 87 Omar, Mullah, 442 Oni´s, Luis De, 43–48 Open Door policy, 95 Operation Desert Shield (Iraq), 348–349 Operation Desert Storm (Iraq), 348–350 Operation Enduring Freedom. See Afghanistan Operation Iraqi Freedom. See Iraq War Operation Uphold Democracy (Haiti), 351 Operation Urgent Fury (Grenada), 344–345, 366–374 Oregon territory, 72–76 ORHA (Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance), 475–476 Orleans territory, 34 Osmeña, Sergio, 276, 277, 278–279, 328 O’Sullivan, John L., 66–68

Otis, E. S., 139 “Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View” (F. Roosevelt), 214–218 Pacific Commercial Advertiser, 111–112 Pacific island territories, 259. See also Hawaii; Philippines Pacific Rim trade, in 19th century, 94–95 Paine, Thomas, 366 Pakistan, 512–513 Palin, Sarah, 513 Panama, 347 Parker, Alton, 190 Paul, Ron, 467–468 The Peace Negotiations (Lansing), 211–213 Pearl Harbor, 171 Penn, William, 364 Persian Gulf War, 348–350, 383–394 Peurifoy, John E., 310–311 Philippines Aguinaldo and resistance to U.S. rule, 139–141, 158–159 Chomsky on, 395 democracy and, 426 FDR’s Statement on the Landing of American Troops in, 243–245 guerilla warfare in, 158–159, 347 Hawaii compared to, 265 independence, correspondence on process of, 275–278 independence date, meaning of, 258 institution building in, 428 Japanese control of, 171, 258, 327–328 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Filipinos in, 161–162, 186, 188, 189p MacArthur on, 326–329

531

Marcos and elites in, 343, 344, 347 Mount Pinatubo eruption, 350–351 New York Times editorial on independence of, 282–283 Philippine Free Press editorial on U.S. military bases, 283–285 Roosevelt Corollary and, 192–196 Spanish-American War and, 99, 101, 141 Tydings-McDuffie Act and independence timetable, 169, 223–229, 258, 432 U.S. military bases in, 258, 278–279, 283–290, 350–351, 374–377 Visiting Bases Agreement (1947), 285–290 waterboarding in, 158–159, 435 Pickering, Timothy, 12, 28 Pinochet, Augusto, 342 Pitchlynn, John, 58 Pittman, Key, 230, 231 “Plan on Government in Western Territories,” 6 Platoon (film), 341 Platt, Orville, 172 Platt Amendment (1901), 160, 163, 172–174 Polk, James, 437 Population growth, 156 Potsdam Declaration (1945), 241–243 Powell, Colin L., 349p, 423, 480–481, 486 Presidential Reconstruction, 90 Presley, Elvis, 316, 317p Principal Challenges in Post-Saddam Iraq (National Intelligence Council, 2003), 449–455 Progressive (Bull Moose) Party, 163 Progressives, 163, 165

532

I NDEX

Puerto Ricans in Civic Action, 411–412 Puerto Ricans on the mainland, 258–259 Puerto Rico Albizu Campos speech (1950), 297–298 commonwealth status, 258, 298, 300–301, 514 Congressional field hearings, 410–416 democracy and, 426 dependence of, 431–432 Foraker Act (1900), 146–152, 158 independence vs. citizenship in, 159–160 Jones-Shafroth Act (1917) and citizenship, 163, 201–205 Muñoz Marín speech (1955), 298–300 nationalism, independence, and statehood, debate over, 259, 296–300, 339–340, 344, 410–416 plebiscites, 410–411 Spanish-American War and, 99, 101 Al-Qaida (al Qaeda), 422, 439, 498, 502 Quebec Act, 4 Quijano Borges, Hector, 410, 414–416 Quincy, Josiah, 31 Rabbani, Burhanuddin, 442–443 Racial inequality. See also African Americans; Native Americans and American history, study of, 338–339 Bond, election to Georgia legislature, 353 collapse of policy of, 435 Declaration of Independence and, 9 Hawaii and, 265

in island territories, 101 Reconstruction and, 90–91, 92 resistance and, 434–435 territorial expansion and, 2, 8–9 Wilson and, 165 Racial stereotypes and prejudice, 254–255 Racial supremacy Japan occupation and, 254–255 Reconstruction and, 91 Spanish territories and, 101 Turner on, 96 Vietnam and, 339 Wilson and, 165 Radical Reconstruction, 90, 92, 106–109 Ramirez de Ferrer, Miriam J., 410, 411–412 Randolph, Edmund, 7 Reagan, Ronald, 333p Carter compared to, 344 election of, 343 “evil empire” speech (1983), 333–335, 364–366 Grenada and, 366–369 Iran-Contra affair and, 346 Reconstruction, 90–93, 106–109, 106f, 434 Reminiscences (MacArthur), 326–331 Remonstrance of 1804, 12, 39–40 Removal Act (1830), 65–66 Reno, Janet, 405–410 Representative government and democratization, 425–426 A Republic, Not an Empire (Buchanan), 417 Republic of Texas, 16 Republican National Convention (1900), 101, 152, 438 Reservation system, 93, 113–116 Resistance movements, common characteristics of, 434

Rhea, John, 32–33 Ricks, Thomas, 496–497 Ritter, Donald, 379, 382–383 Rogers, W. A., 100f Romney, Mitt, 513 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 244p Atlantic Charter, 235–236 background of, 169 Cairo Declaration, 237 death of, 252 election of, 169 on Indochina, 275 JCS 1067 directive, 252, 269–274 “Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View,” 214–218 Philippines and, 277–278 political strategy, 251 Statement on the Landing of American Troops in the Philippines (1944), 243–245 Yalta Declaration (1945), 237–241 Roosevelt, Theodore admiration of empires by, 98–99 agenda as president, 157 background of, 97 Bull Moose Party and, 163 FDR and, 169 Hawaii and, 97–98 imperial policy of, 86–87 Kennedy compared to, 266 Republican National Convention address (1900), 101, 152, 438 in Spanish-American War, 99–100 Turner and, 97 as Vice President, 101–102, 157 Wilson compared to, 154–155 The Winning of the West, 97 Roosevelt Corollary, 161, 162–164, 190–196, 267 Roxas, Manuel, 290 Rumsfeld, Donald, 333p, 436

I NDEX Russert, Tim, 465–466 Russia, 95. See also Soviet Union Saint-Domingue slave revolt, 10–11 Salvador (film), 341 Samoa, 259 Sandinistas, 343, 347 Sandino, Augusto, 218–223, 343 Santa Fe, 16f Santo Domingo, 216–217 Saudi Arabia, 348, 349 Schwarzkopf, Norman, 348–349 Segregation, racial, 165 Seiberling, John, 379, 382 Self-determination. See also specific places Congressional resolutions on Iraq and, 388 Kennedy on, 267 Lansing on, 211–213 Wilson’s notion of, 167 WWII and, 171 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 469–475 September 11, 2001 (9/11) attacks, 422–423, 447, 460 Sewall, William Wingate, 99, 161 Seward, William, 95 Sheffey, Daniel, 31 Sherman, John, 86f, 110 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 93, 110 “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (Turner), 96, 117–122 Sitting Bull, 92, 93 Slavery equality and, 9 expansion of, 15 Northwest Territories and, 9 Reconstruction and, 90 resistance and revolts, 434 in Southwest, 17 Smilie, John, 12

Smith, Walter G., 123–124 “Social Forces in History” (Turner), 196–198 Somoza, Anastasio, 170 South Vietnam. See Vietnam Soviet Union Afghanistan and, 347 Africa and, 395 Central America and, 345 collapse of, 346–347, 348, 350 containment policy toward, 256–257 Cuban Missile Crisis, 267 dependence and, 432 Eastern European satellites, 260 NSC report 68 (1950) on, 290–296 Spain, 3, 8–9 Spanish-American War overview, 99–101 aftermath of, 160 Aguinaldo and Philippine resistance, 141 Harper’s Weekly article, 142–146 Treaty of Paris (1898), 101, 136–139 Specter, Arlen, 379, 380–381 The Stakes of Diplomacy (Lippmann), 198–200 Stalin, Joseph, 237–241 Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker (Lucas), 363 Star Wars (film), 341–342, 363 State building and nation building, 435–437 State Department reports on human rights, 442–447 Statehood. See also Territorial governance system equality and, 6, 7–8, 431 Hawaii, 265 Northwest Territories and, 6 Puerto Rico debate over, 259, 296–300, 339–340, 344, 410–416

533

Steintorf, Paul P., 276–277, 280–281 Stettinius, Edward, 275, 277 Stevens, John L., 123 Stimson, Henry, 275–276 Stone, Oliver, 341 Superpower, notion of, 439 Taft, William Howard in Philippines, 159 as president, 162–163 Progressives and, 163, 165 as secretary of war, 159 Taliban, 422–423, 442–445 Taos revolt, 77–79 Taylor, John, 28, 29–31 Territorial expansion Alaska, purchase of, 95 attitudes toward, 15, 16–17 in cold war, 256 Congressional debates on slavery and the West, 72–76 Deloria on, 356 democratization and, 426 Grimshaw on, 49–50 Interior Department and, 18 in Jefferson’s letter to Madison, 1–2 Louisiana Purchase, 10–13, 23–27 “Manifest Destiny,” 17, 66–68, 95, 145 New Mexico, 17–18 nonwhites and, 2, 8–9 public attitudes toward, 2–3 Texas, 15–16 Transappalachian West and empire of liberty, 4–6 Territorial governance system. See also specific territories in 1840s and 1850s, 87–89 Axis nation occupations and, 253–254 democracy and, 426 end of, 265 Governance Act (1804), 12, 34–39 institution building and, 428–429

534

I NDEX

Northwest Ordinance (1787) and, 6–8, 18–23 racial dimensions of, 157–158 Reconstruction and, 91–92 Roosevelt (Theodore) on, 86 U.S. Army and, 92 Texas, 15–16, 66–67. See also Mexican War (1846–1848) Textbooks, 302 Thoreau, Henry David, 338 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 364 Torture and interrogation, 158–159, 435 Toussaint-Louverture, 10 Trade Mississippi River and, 10, 94 Pacific, 94–95 Philippines and nationalization of, 280–281 Transappalachian West empire of liberty and, 4–6 Grimshaw on, 51 Northwest Ordinance (1787), 6–8, 18–23, 430, 436 representative government and, 426 Transcontinental (Adams-Oni´s) Treaty, 14, 43–48 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 16f, 17, 80–84 Treaty of Paris (1783), 5 Treaty of Paris (1898), 101, 136–139 Treaty of Versailles, 167, 234, 251 Trist, Nicholas P., 80–84 Truman, Harry S., 244p Congressional address (1945), 245–246 Korea, statement on liberation of (1945), 246–247 Philippine naval bases agreement (1945), 279 Philippines, statement on independence for (1945), 277–278

Potsdam Declaration (1945), 241–243 succession to presidency, 252 Tuan, M. L., 280 Turner, Frederick Jackson American Historical Association presidential address, 196–198 frontier thesis, 95–96, 117–122, 142 study of American history and, 338 Wilson and, 154, 164, 165 Ty, Leon O., 283–285 Tydings-McDuffie Act (1934), 169, 223–229, 432 The Ugly American (Lederer and Burdick), 317–320 UN General Assembly, 370–371 UN Security Council, 481–483 UN Security Council Resolution 940 (1994), 399–402 Unilateralism, 494 United Kingdom. See Britain United States Policy on Iraqi Aggression Resolution (1990), 388–391 Utah territory, 88 Velasco, Ramon L., 410, 413–414 Vice presidents, power of, 465 Vietnam 1963 coup, 324–326 guerilla warfare in, 347 Ho Chi Minh and independence, 262–263 U.S. political intervention in, 264 Viet Cong movement and U.S., 267–268, 268p Vietnam (Bond and Lewis), 353, 354f, 355f Vietnam War, 320–323, 335–338, 340–341, 357 Vietnamization, 337, 428

Vigil, Donaciano, 77–78 Vigil y Alarid, Juan Bautista, 76–77 Virginia, 5–6 War and Decision (Feith), 498 “War on terror,” 423 War Powers Resolution (1973), 340, 357–362, 391 Washington, George, 143, 364 Waterboarding, 158–159, 435 Wayne, John, 340–341 “The West as America” exhibit (National Museum of American Art), 352 White, Compton, 230–231 White, Samuel, 28, 29 White supremacy. See Racial supremacy Williams, William Appleman, 165 Wilson, Woodrow background of, 164–165 Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, 174 election of, 163, 165 FDR on, 216 “The Ideals of America,” 174–178 Kennedy compared to, 266 philosophy of, 165–166 Roosevelt Corollary and, 163–164 Roosevelt (Theodore) compared to, 154–155 stroke and death of, 168 The Winning of the West (Roosevelt), 97 Worcester v. Georgia, 56–57 World War I European reconstruction after, 168–169, 205–210 as imperial conflict, 155 post–World War II planning and, 251 Wilson and, 166 World War II

I NDEX Axis colonies, announcement of liberation of, 243–247 Axis empire dismantling plan, 236–243 colonial residents and, 261 empire acquisition leading to, 170–171 as imperial conflict, 155 occupations after, 253–257, 260, 330–331, 428, 432, 434

World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago 1893), 117, 184–185 World’s Fair of 1904, St. Louis (Louisiana Purchase Exposition), 161–162, 182–188, 189p Wright, Robert, 29 Yalta Declaration (1945), 237–241 Yellow Hair, Chief, 189p

535

Yellow journalism, 101, 141 Young, Brigham, 88 Young America, 66 Zahir Shah, King, 443 Zaidi, Muntadhar al-, 432–433