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The Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars
93 Plays1 year ago
This episode discusses the histories of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars.
Host: Ray Haberski
Guest: Christopher McKnight Nichols
Audio Engineers: Jason M. Kelly and Kelly Kerr
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Transcript
Introduction to War and National Identity
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Justice and War in American History podcast. I'm Jason Kelly. And I'm Ray Habersky. War has long been an indelible part of America's story, shaping national identity, values, and principles. The experience of war has transformed the lives of each generation. And because of this, it has historically elicited impassioned debates and conflicting perspectives.
00:00:28
Speaker
This podcast aims to explore this history by bringing together a diverse range of voices, veterans, active service members, citizens and scholars. Through our conversations, we will consider the ways in which war has shaped and reshaped notions of justice. In the process, we will engage with broad themes such as duty, heroism, suffering, loyalty and patriotism.
Season Overview: Comparing Wars
00:00:50
Speaker
Our broad framework during this season is to compare and contrast the histories of the Spanish-American
00:00:56
Speaker
Philippine American and Vietnam wars, wars that had a profound effect on the people of the United States. The National Endowment for the Humanities has generously provided funding for this project, making it possible to have conversations about the effects of war on American veterans, their families, and the generations who bear witness to conflict.
Focus on the Spanish-American War
00:01:21
Speaker
Welcome back to the Justice and War in American History podcast. This is our second episode, and today the topic is the Spanish-American War with our guest, Christopher McKnight Nichols.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, so in this episode, Chris and I will talk about the history, the really bizarre history in some ways of the American entry into a war against the Spanish in Cuba and the expansion of that war into the Philippines. And in particular, what makes it so weird is that the war was over relatively quickly.
00:01:54
Speaker
against the Spanish, but developed into something much broader with the people in the Philippines, which then engendered a very sharp reaction in the domestic political arena. And Chris really goes quite deeply into how that reaction domestically set up a lot of what Americans think about war for the rest of the 20th century and into the 21st century. So let's begin our episode on the Spanish-American War.
00:02:23
Speaker
with one of my favorite people to talk to in the historical profession, and just in general, Chris Nichols. So Chris is a historian at Ohio State University, but before we go too far into the topic and into our discussion, I want Chris to explain what he does, because this is a relatively new position for him, and what he's doing in the historical profession in general.
Chris Nichols on US Foreign Policy Ideologies
00:02:48
Speaker
because I think a lot of people who might be listening to this podcast would like to read what Chris has written recently and what will be coming out fairly soon. So, Chris, can you give us a little introduction to yourself and the kind of work you do? Sure, absolutely. That's kind of you to open it up that way. So, I am at the Ohio State University, Ray Habersky. It's trademarked.
00:03:08
Speaker
And I'm the Wayne Woodrow Hayes, Woody Hayes Chair in National Security Studies at the Merson Center for International Security Studies and a professor of history here. I basically studied the history of the role of ideas in US foreign policy and politics. That's kind of my entry point. Where I started is where we're starting today, which is on
00:03:30
Speaker
kind of debates over US interventionism, isolationism, internationalism in the late 19th century, and how the US wound up as a world power of the sort that we now think of today. So if you think that the US has an important part to play in the world and you're debating with your friends or your colleagues or your enemies or whoever, those sorts of questions, in the early 19th century, that would not have been a commonplace kind of conversation. The set of assumptions that we have in the 21st century
00:03:59
Speaker
are entirely different from the sort of assumptions in the early republic. When that changes, I argue in my book, Promise and Peril, America the Dawn of the Global Age, a whole lot of essays, a number of other kind of book projects that I've done on ideology and US foreign relations, which you kindly, Ray, have contributed to, book out last year in 2022 on rethinking American grand strategy. I argue in all those books in different ways, in my own arguments at least, not those by my colleagues.
00:04:25
Speaker
that something fundamentally and qualitatively different happened in roughly the 1890s in US debates about the US's role in the world. And that shaped the US's role in the world for decades, for the American century to come. And so I work on those kinds of topics. One of the things I'm currently researching and writing is a book on the transformation of US foreign and domestic policy in the early Cold War.
00:04:50
Speaker
And what happened to the ideas from before World War II? Where did they go about the limits of US power, for instance? Which were not just located on the left, but very often located on the right. And actually in the early Cold War, what I found is that some of the harshest critics of interventionism and Cold War internationalism were coming from the political right, from conservatives like Robert Taft.
00:05:12
Speaker
I mean, this is one of the things that makes your work so interesting, Chris, is that there's there's no period since basically the late 19th century that you that your work can't comment on, you know, that questions of intervention or when to stay out or how to get in or how to frame foreign policy in domestic terms doesn't apply. So actually, one of the things perhaps I'd like to start with is your description of how the debate about American
US's Evolving Global Role
00:05:42
Speaker
the role that America was beginning to play in the late 19th century, how domestic politics framed the options that were available to both policymakers and what the public more generally might have understood.
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah, so I think first of all, the way I understand US foreign relations is always an intersection between domestic and foreign. So if you look at literature, if you look at popular discussion today, we often bifurcate the two and that's a really problematic issue. Just to surface that, right? That's what you're saying. That's what I'm saying. But it's important for us to think that way. So the intersection of domestic and foreign
00:06:18
Speaker
You find all kinds of ways in which, for instance, think about contemporary budget debates, the debt ceiling, right? Is that a domestic or foreign policy issue? No, it's both. Absolutely, it's both. Will the US pay debts to the world? Will it default as a creditor nation for the first time ever? These are really important. So if you're thinking about the transformation of US foreign relations and domestic politics in the 1880s and 1890s, one of the things you're thinking about is you're coming out of the, the US is coming out of the Civil War.
00:06:46
Speaker
So you're having an increasingly important large role for a centralized federal government, but you still have a very small US military. The biggest branch of government, as a whole lot of folks have argued, but it's often news to say, my students, was the Postal Service. You have roughly 25,000 US troops right before 1898, and they muster and mobilize over 200,000.
00:07:08
Speaker
in the conflict. It's a huge transformation. It's a terrible mobilization. Actually, it provides lessons for World War I, which is also not a good mobilization. And finally, by World War II, the US has figured out a little bit better. A little bit better. But the real question is about domestic reform. I think one really crucial question is about justice, and another one is about race. So the vital intersection and the rise of a kind of
00:07:34
Speaker
set of Faustian bargains in the US, terrible, complicit problems wherein you get segregation of Jim Crow, come both out of the North and the South. And lots of scholarship has introduced this. And you see this also in 1898. So one of the questions about the war and whether or not the US would annex these new territories was about were the people in them racially unfit for self-government?
00:07:58
Speaker
And so Christopher Lash, a famous intellectual historian and others going back almost 75 years have been writing essays about the racism on both sides of imperialism. And that's important to take in hand, but one of the things that changes a little bit in the late 19th century in terms of race science and racialized thinking is that the old abolitionists, the old guard of Republican abolitionists,
00:08:19
Speaker
who were like the party of Lincoln in the 1860s. The new guard, the new generation are people like Teddy Roosevelt. And they're imbibing race science literally as he's going from Texas to Florida to muster his troops to the Rough Riders. Teddy, we know Teddy Roosevelt was reading something in a French volume called the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons.
00:08:41
Speaker
It's very typical of this moment. And I'm not castigating him. In fact, that's exactly the essence of the thinking of the period. So if you think about domestic and foreign, as you have a kind of solidifying color line in the US, you see the US expanding abroad and you see a set of questions about the racial fitness of other peoples and groups in Puerto Rico and Cuba and the Philippines and elsewhere. And you see also questions about justice.
00:09:03
Speaker
And so embedded in your point about domestic and foreign and how we think about this is then how do you treat those peoples and groups? What are cutting edge ways to understand what say progressive race science might be to implement in those areas as kind of confounding as that might be for our contemporary ear or listener to think about? So would that mean
00:09:23
Speaker
that it would be more or less humane for the U.S. to govern these places until they're ready to be civilized. That's one argument you see in the groups of large policy advocates who want the U.S. to take these territories and teach, quote, their little brown brothers to become better Democrats.
00:09:39
Speaker
And then you see on the other sides, similarly, anti-imperialists who argue that these peoples and groups are racially inferior and therefore should not be incorporated into the U.S., should not be ruled by the U.S. In fact, you see this, you know, in the labor left, one of the things I say in Promise and Peril and have cited numerous times and lots of scholars have too, is these, for instance, Samuel Gompers, one of the champions of labor organizing the U.S., argued against any imperial acquisitions and bringing anyone new and
00:10:06
Speaker
into the nation state, including across the borders, the immediate borders of the US, was an anti-immigrationist zealot because he believed in increasing wages and bargaining power for American-born, Native American-born, meaning Anglo-Saxon, or coded white in that period, which would look a little different later.
00:10:26
Speaker
folks.
Was the Spanish-American War Inevitable?
00:10:27
Speaker
So, you know, those are several really important intersections of what's changing in that era and how people are thinking and also how that really adds complexity to how we might map on contemporary politics or spectrum of left right to the past. So we often take a sort of a look back at things like the Spanish-American War and almost see them as inevitable, right? That their signposts have become
00:10:55
Speaker
places where we import a lot of meaning that we then take and use to interpret other things that follow. Was there anything inevitable about the Spanish-American War for the United States? Was this something that policymakers or sort of domestic thought leaders would have imagined happening when it did? Or was it something that was, they sort of stumbled upon it
00:11:24
Speaker
and took full advantage of it as best they could. So that's a great question. There are a lot of ways to unpack that. One of the things that we see in military history and diplomatic history is often
00:11:40
Speaker
a way that we teach and think about these things as a path to war. And so we can line up historical events to make a case that it looks like there's a path to war. Now, is that inevitable? Or are each of those sort of more contingent, right? Could they have turned out differently? It takes a lot of time. Something probably would have happened in some place.
00:11:56
Speaker
Yes. Would it have happened earlier? Would it have happened later? If you look at the very early scholarship coming out of the Spanish-American War, including by, say, Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who writes a brief history of it in 1899, many of those writing just in the very immediate wake said, not that it was inevitable in 1898, but what was surprising to them was that it took so long for the US to wind up knocking the Spanish out of the Caribbean and taking Cuba and Puerto Rico.
00:12:25
Speaker
And if you look at the longer history of US foreign relations with Cuba, for instance, off and on as a flashpoint, the US tried to buy Cuba from Spain. I mean, virtually every decade from the 1820s onward, for very different reasons. I mean, it's fascinating to think about that, too, in some cases.
00:12:41
Speaker
to advance slave interest in the slave power in other moments. It's quite the opposite, and there's a battle back and forth in terms of US foreign policy on those things. But I think that another way to think about it is there's also been a series of revolutions, and we need to de-center the US for a second in Cuba and in the Philippines. So there had been ongoing revolutions in Cuba against the really gross mistreatment that the Spanish leadership and Spanish military were perpetuating there.
00:13:09
Speaker
including in the mid-1890s and 1895, there's this big Cuba libre moment. This is the big one that pushes them, what we see coming really from Eastern Cuba. And what happens is the Cuban Army is one of the most in the 1890s, is one of the most integrated in world history. It's something like 60% black, 40% of the officers are black or mulatto, as would have been defined in that period.
00:13:37
Speaker
And so it's a huge movement, but they're a rag tag bunch that literally in rags, as all of the reports indicate, underfunded, under armed, under fed. So when American politicians look in 1895 at this, you can look at the congressional record and other examples of this,
00:14:00
Speaker
They see that this is not an inconsequential disturbance. It's something that is a culmination of all these different decades of the US looking to Cuba to buy it or to push the Spanish out, different kinds of diplomacy. And so in this moment, it's called the Cuban problem.
00:14:16
Speaker
And there needs to be an American solution. And so some of the other little moments are 1896 is the next year when William McKinley, the Republican is elected. You're starting to see a push in a group of Republicans, especially this younger guard, not the old abolitionists, but this new guard. They're thinking about what they then come to describe as the large policy of expansionism. They only talk about that in their own letters to each other.
00:14:38
Speaker
We import that back. But they really want to expand. They're thinking about military interventions. They're mostly thinking about the U.S. as a rising power in the way that I.R. people, political scientists, now talk about it. Not your power, right? So one of the things you find after 1898 is American policymakers saying, hey, the U.S. is now one of the seven big powers in the world, having defeated the Spanish.
00:15:00
Speaker
So part of that trajectory then is U.S. rising power, right? Could it have happened in the 1870s or 1880s? Perhaps. You know, could it happen in the early 1900s? Perhaps. So, you know, this question of inevitability gets to how we line up those contingent moments. It's 1895 that you have this big Cuba Libre moment. Their army is getting more traction. You know, it takes 18 months as the revolt grows rapidly.
00:15:23
Speaker
Bands of insurgents coalesce. They come to a force of something like 50,000. So there's only maybe 200,000 Spanish forces in Cuba. Suddenly, that's a sizable percentage there. You get the US in, and suddenly it changes the dynamics of what's going on on the ground. Do we need to worry about how the United States enters into that particular revolution? Does it matter that it's set up in a sort of a foggy event
00:15:53
Speaker
Or do we focus on that to the deficit of actually not looking at all the things that were happening before it, that we're getting the country lined up to go into it somehow, in some way? I mean, does it matter that the main is attacked in some capacity? Do we even have to talk about that?
00:16:15
Speaker
I think we do. I mean, I think we, I'm glad we started where we did, right? So there's a series of events. It's long standing revolutions, right? You know, yes. And then also we need to talk about that foggy moment. I mean, I often, starting when I first started lecturing about US, US foreign policy, I would, I would have an aside that now has become a constant aside, which I'm now sharing with you. Because the US very often, the cost of Belli is something related to the ocean, the sea, and
00:16:39
Speaker
Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin Revolution in 1964, Vietnam. It is often argued, although not exactly accurate, that the Lusitania is the Genesis moment for World War I, the Maine in 1898.
00:16:55
Speaker
And we could keep thinking about obviously Pearl Harbor. So major conflicts, modern conflicts have this, and that's because in part vessels fly a flag of a nation. They're vulnerable. There are kind of assertions that large powers can make about access to the sea and to the ocean and to free trade. That also fits with the ways that Americans tend to think about how they should get to operate in the world.
00:17:21
Speaker
But most importantly, it allows a linguistic turn where war is forced on the US. Okay, there you go. For the defense of the Union, which has been attacked at sea, the US must go on the offensive, right? And that's almost always the way that war messages, war addresses by presidents and Congress, in fact, are articulated in 1898 and thereafter.
00:17:43
Speaker
So it does matter. It also matters that the main is sunk and there's immediate speculation in the so-called yellow press that it was the Spanish. If you look at the diary entries of the major US politicians like Henry Cabot Lodge or Teddy Roosevelt, they're pretty sure it wasn't the Spanish putting a mind on the ship.
00:18:04
Speaker
They like the idea that the press is saying that. They don't know, so they're comfortable using this fog of war kind of propagandistic element right there, which you see in the other moments as well. The US is allowed by the Spanish to send in divers. There's an arbitration about that. It's much more complicated. It wasn't just the main. If it had been just the main, the arbitration process in international law would have gone forward, and there would have been some indemnity paid by the Spanish.
00:18:32
Speaker
No, no, but part of it is the but where does that go? You know, like Pearl Harbor, you know, really catastrophic event that catalyzes American public opinion. The main isn't quite that. But it's closer to that. When you look at the press, you look at how people are thinking, because remember, the main suddenly becomes this huge thing. I mean, it's different than the Gulf of Tonkin, which seems to be much more of an internal moment for the for the government. And Johnson's administration builds a policy that had already been
00:19:01
Speaker
deeply sort of embedded or deeply invested in Vietnam into something new.
Catalysts for US Intervention
00:19:08
Speaker
But this really seems like a spark of the kind that Pearl Harbor sort of is. And it does allow a certain kind, as you said, a certain kind of language to develop around whatever is going to follow, right? So what is the language that does begin to coalesce? What comes to dominate the conversation after the main?
00:19:29
Speaker
So there's a couple things. So one thing that's going on in that moment is that there's a leaked letter to the yellow press from the Spanish ambassador to the US, Enrique de Pueblo. And it says that McKinley is a bitter to the crowd.
00:19:48
Speaker
tool, basically, of the Republicans and the establishment and he's not really strong. And these are the sorts of things that today would seem like innocuous or quaint in current politics where we, wow, the kinds of things people say in American politics now about each other is pretty terrible. But in this moment, that was seen as a real affront to the US by the Spanish by the official, you know,
00:20:10
Speaker
And so that's leaked just within a week of the main thinking. There are a couple of other of these events. But the main rhetoric around this moment, one of the things I think makes it stand out as a modern kind of conflict for the U.S. is that
00:20:27
Speaker
the historiography has suggested that actually this sensationalized journalism isn't as important as a causal element here as people used to say. If listeners have picked up a textbook that's a little bit outdated, that's often the account, right? It's a bolded intertidal, right? Yes, exactly. Yeah.
00:20:49
Speaker
this bold, you know, the press makes the war and there's undoubtedly that's part of it, right? Shaping the coverage and shaping as you noted, right? What are the questions? What's the language? But I would argue that one of the most important things is you see a bunch of senators and members of Congress go to Cuba on the ground and they look at the conditions and they see how terribly Cubans are being treated. And they see how
00:21:10
Speaker
Harsh Valeriano Weiler, known as the Butcher, the general Spanish Butcher in charge of this Ricconcentrado policy where they're basically pushing together the civilian population and essentially depriving them so that they wouldn't become part of the revolutionary group.
00:21:28
Speaker
And so these harsh, terrible conditions then amplified by the press, but you could see these accounts in the congressional record and elsewhere really do seem to be motivating American politicians in the language that they use about why the US has to be involved now. So the why now question, right? If it could have been the 1870s or the 1840s or in the future, the say 1920s, why this moment? And they go there and they look on the ground and they do these, we could see this in the primary sources, they look,
00:21:56
Speaker
at what's going on, and they say things, you know, a senator, Redfield Proctor.
00:22:00
Speaker
condemned the Rickon Santrotto policy. I actually have one of his documents here, you know, calling it, noting that there's no domestic animals and no crops on the fields. You know, the purpose of them is to keep them, all the insurgents out, and noting how just horrific these policies were. He said he couldn't really believe that this was the standard operating policy and principle of the Spanish in Cuba.
00:22:27
Speaker
So you get these folks coming back, these senators and congressmen coming back, and that's really part of lighting that spark. The main is a tripwire, you might call it, but the conditions are set already in the political discourse.
00:22:47
Speaker
it allows Congress to fully back what McKinley is asking for, right? Which is a formal declaration of war. Is that correct? Exactly. Yes. Yep. So yeah, just to roughly review for those who aren't familiar with this, you get this the Hearst publishing the
00:23:03
Speaker
Dupuis, a letter that insults McKinley in February of 1898. The main had been sent to Cuba earlier than that. The main is sunk in February 9, 1898 is when the Hearst publishes that. The main is sunk on February 15, 1898.
00:23:18
Speaker
Theodore Roosevelt starts issuing some orders as Assistant Secretary of the Navy on February 25th about planning for war planning. April 11th is when McKinley approves war with Spain and then you get following that things like the Teller Amendment, a series of events and replies about whether or not the US would
00:23:41
Speaker
would formally try to colonize Spain or keep it as a territory or not, which is what these amendments were about, these debates were about, which is a huge issue in the American Congress. And it's April 24, 1898, that Spain declares war on the US. So you have this process, and April 25 is the day that the US declares war on Spain. But McKinley is approving war with Spain on April 11.
00:24:02
Speaker
So you see a whole series of events from February through the end of April to get the US into the war. And not long afterward, May 1st, 1898 is the famous Battle of Manila Bay when Commodore Dewey defeats the Spanish fleet, suffers zero combat casualties, sinks the entire fleet. And you have the German and French fleets and others observing from the periphery and saying, oh my God, we had no idea.
00:24:30
Speaker
Now, Chris, leaping how many thousands of miles from Cuba to the Philippines, I understand that the United States is at war with Spain, but what was the connection? I mean, well, the obvious connection is the Spanish control of the Philippines. But what Congress had been looking at was nothing.
00:24:50
Speaker
to do with the military. Exactly right. Yes. So well, there was naval war planning that went back to at least 1896 that I've related to this. And so there were there were standing orders if the US goes to war with Spain, the US Pacific Squadron will attack Manila Bay.
00:25:06
Speaker
There's a cult of Teddy Roosevelt that argues, as I just alluded, that when he was issuing these orders to Commodore Dewey, that he was the brilliant genius behind this plan. But of course, it was the standing plan. But Roosevelt took his credit nonetheless.
00:25:22
Speaker
What's interesting about that, what's important about that if you're thinking about U.S. war making and what's going on is that the revolution the Philippines had been ongoing for over a year and wildly successful and basically the only point in the Philippines that was still held by the Spanish was the city of Manila.
00:25:42
Speaker
And then May 1st, the US defeats the Spanish fleet outside of the city of Manila. And very rapidly thereafter, it looks to Philippine insurgents, Philippine revolutionaries, some of the Democrats who are modeling their prospective government and their declaration of independence on the US and the US Constitution, like the US is going to be a savior. The US is going to come in, help them establish control, and then depart. And in fact, Congress even debates giving them independence briefly.
00:26:11
Speaker
And then the US troops famously turned their guns on the Philippine revolutionaries. So what's also worth noting here is in Cuba and in the Philippines, the revolutionaries had been at it for a while, had begun to be successful, and the US steps in. And in some ways, if you think about the broader dimensions of history is told by the victors, the US winds up taking all this credit, right? Well, it takes credit in sort of the immediate
00:26:39
Speaker
aftermath of defeating spain like it was it was the last sort of push uh against the spanish to They would they would never come back right the understanding that spain has no way of reclaiming its power in either place But I think there's been a pretty robust debate recently right fairly recently The difference is between what happens in cuba and what happens in the philippines Yes, and and and then there's a debate within
00:27:08
Speaker
What happens in the Philippines itself that the two things first of all are different from each other I mean they go differently they sort of start differently But that the way the United States begins in the Philippines is not how it ends up in the Philippines So I'm wondering so if you could speak briefly to how things conclude in Cuba and then shift to what becomes the sort of unfortunate early echo of what we know of
00:27:34
Speaker
of American fighting insurgencies for the rest of basically its history in the Philippines.
Cuba vs. Philippines: Divergent Outcomes
00:27:40
Speaker
Right. So the overview of the Cuba story is a couple of things I'd love to mention just briefly. So one, the US warren in Cuba and in Puerto Rico, aided by these revolutionaries on the ground, is important and significant and ends in roughly a month. And total US casualties are around 400. Incredible.
00:28:03
Speaker
And total US casualties in the Philippines, in the Philippine, what used to be called the Philippine Insurrection Rebellion War, that lasts through July 1902, but continues sporadically up until 1910. Total US casualties are 4,000. So 10 for more. Total Philippine casualties in that conflict are 20,000 or so. That's combatants.
00:28:31
Speaker
There are conservative estimates range from 50 to 200,000 dying of famine, as well as war dislocation and refugees status and all kinds of terrible. It's devastating in the Philippines.
00:28:44
Speaker
If you broaden out your view, too, for the Spanish, they refer to this war as the El Disastre, that the disaster that it signaled for the end of their empire was catastrophic, that it's often described, you could see this in some of the literature of the turn of the 20th century in Spanish literature, these arguments that the empire had become ruin and desolation, and this was sort of this
00:29:12
Speaker
signature moment when it showed that the Spanish Navy and military had been hollowed out such that they really couldn't fight. They really weren't a major power anymore. They had no more colonies. They didn't deserve to be a major power. It's a real reckoning point in Spanish history. Some people argue that it's the seeds of the revolution, the Civil War to come. Absolutely. An argument for getting rid of monarchy, moving towards fascism. There's a variety of different claims here that the state has given up.
00:29:41
Speaker
Another really interesting and important sort of symbolic moment is that at the end of the conflict in Cuba, the US Army, because as I mentioned, their Cuban allies were largely a ragtag group that was very multiracial that they actively disdained. They did not allow those folks into Santiago and into where they were signing the formal armistice to end the conflict.
00:30:10
Speaker
And so, though most of the Spanish troops were all over the island and they actually surrendered to the Cuban revolutionaries, in the most important sort of symbolic moment, the US does the signing. And as we know in the history of war, that's a really significant element. You don't have a seat at the table. And you can argue, you can go back, you can go to the more recent past, Fidel Castro and other Cuban revolutionaries looked back to this moment and said, you know, you stole our thunder.
00:30:35
Speaker
And largely you stole our thunder because of racism And so that's that's a big piece here. Well, I'm thinking about that what's going on there Then what's interesting in the Philippines and as a partial contrast and there's a number of ways that scholars talk about this So I'll backhand it but there's I think there's more depth here if we want to dive into it and I encourage people to think about this so the American
00:31:00
Speaker
governance strategy there is one called Benevolent Assimilation, basically, from McKinley and then Governor Taft, who becomes William Howard Taft president. And they try to pull in the old Spanish kind of elites and a kind of more white or mestizo group as the elites, including Aguinaldo, who is the Cuban revolutionary who the US winds up fighting, Emilio Aguinaldo, who arrived back, I believe it's,
00:31:27
Speaker
in 1897 on a US ship to be part of the then roiling up revolution in the Philippines. He naively thought the US would support him and was very disappointed when the US troops turned their guns on those revolutionaries. But the US tries to co-opt the kind of elites there
00:31:49
Speaker
as a governance strategy. And it's something similar actually happens in Spain with regard to the Spanish elites in Cuba. But because so many of that similar group are revolutionaries in the Philippines, who then the US is fighting, they have a hard time from 1898, the US, for 1898 to 1902 to try to bring those elites in. So you get a moment of benevolent assimilation that's kind of asserted from the top down as the US is trying to figure out what it looks like
00:32:18
Speaker
to be a colonial power, not like, you know, a better one than the British is a corrupt paraphrase of the thinking of that. No, right. I mean, so why do they turn, why does the United States decide to turn its guns against the people who had by themselves basically almost completely toppled the Spanish in the Philippines? What was the key to that? You know, I mean, on one level, it's absolutely obvious the US
00:32:47
Speaker
Well, strategically, the goal for the US has been the deep water harbor in Manila and having access to it and controlling it. Such a good prize. You can't let it go. Yes. Yeah. And as a stepping off point to trade in China, depending on where you stand in different kinds of debates about how much economics is a driver
00:33:12
Speaker
or national security as a driver here, you can make different kinds of arguments because there's a lot of evidence in this moment. It's unclear that there's a religious component that's often infused back. The US wants to Christianize these largely but not exclusively Catholic populations.
00:33:28
Speaker
So then there's some problems with Catholic churches in the US that don't quite know what to do with this, because they're for a kind of expansion of Western civilization, and now they're caught in a difficult place. So there's a number of different motivations. The immediate turnaround there is the US thinkers, the McKinley administration, the Republicans, believing that the Filipinos cannot govern themselves, and they're not ready to hand over governance to Republicans.
Governance in New Territories
00:33:58
Speaker
But it is fascinating to think about it in those terms, that the United States can make a decision about who is able to govern.
00:34:07
Speaker
And whether or not it is up to them to figure out when they're able to govern from 4,000, 5,000 miles away. Politicians who didn't know where it was on the map, absolutely didn't. McKinley even famously says he doesn't know he needs to go look at the map. So, yes. I mean, it's Paul Bremer again ringing in my ears about what the Iraqis are going to be able to do for themselves.
00:34:35
Speaker
And I mean, in the United States does so much damage in Iraq that it ends up killing probably as many people as Hussein did in his last eight years of rain or whatever, you know? Yeah. Anyway, in any case. But I think you're hitting on something really, really important. So it's worth just underscoring.
00:34:53
Speaker
US policymakers thinking they get to decide who runs different countries. That is a through line from 1898 onwards. The US was not as invested in the determinations of that earlier. Actually, there were kind of arguments in the 19th century about respecting the sovereignty of other countries, including undergoing their own civil wars. Like in the hemisphere, for instance, the US had a stake in hemispheric revolutions, obviously. That's a tough one.
00:35:20
Speaker
Right. But thought that, hey, we wouldn't have won others meddling in ours. And that was the golden rule principle. The shift in the 20th century is fascinating starting in 1898. But the other element that's really important to underscore too is that when the US policymakers are deciding these kinds of issues, it galvanizes opposition.
00:35:40
Speaker
So what you see in 1898 is that lots of Americans suddenly realize that the US shouldn't be intervening and deciding who rules other peoples, especially if the answer to that question is the US. So on this point, again, I think your book has really done, for me, it's my go-to volume when I need to try to describe to students
00:36:07
Speaker
um their tradition not not so much of pacifism but of anti-war or anti-imperialism or anti-interventionism Or or sort of like anti-stupid thinking right what obama attempted to put into place, you know during his is eight years so would you say that the people that you look at the reason why they begin to discuss together with their opposition to the spanish or the war really in the philippines primarily
00:36:34
Speaker
is because they feel the United States has made a fundamental, an intellectual shift that is dangerous for the world, for the country, for the traditions that they actually believe in in the United States.
Domestic Opposition to Imperialism
00:36:46
Speaker
What is it that they're coalescing around?
00:36:48
Speaker
Yeah, so they're coalescing around. So this is the rise of the American Anti-Imperialist League, one of the two biggest foreign policy lobby groups in US political history and the most heterogeneous in US political history. So this is a group that involves Andrew Carnegie, it involves Mark Twain, W.B. Du Bois, Jane Addams. So you're talking, you know, some of the former presidents, sitting members of Congress.
00:37:16
Speaker
Thinkers, writers, et cetera. You know, some of the greatest thinkers in U.S.
00:37:21
Speaker
intellectual life, politicians, writers, coming from across the political spectrum. And what galvanizes them first is they move really rapidly after 1898, but not quickly enough for mounting any opposition to the annexations, which happened at the very end of 1898, tribute Paris into 1899. So that's the US acquiring Puerto Rico.
00:37:47
Speaker
access to Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and with some pledges for independence and other kinds of caveats there.
00:37:55
Speaker
At 1899, moving onward, the election of 1900 pivots on some of these questions. In fact, what kind of annexation should this be? Should the US be a colonial power? And what these anti-imperialists, what these anti-interventionists are generally arguing is that the US should not, quote, rule alien peoples against their will. So whatever it is that the US is doing in controlling territory, if the people there don't want the US doing it, it shouldn't do it. And they thought we had a sense of what the people wanted. How?
00:38:25
Speaker
So in terms of the Philippines, Aguinaldo and the revolutionaries had done a very good job of getting out their message. In 1900, it's one of the few times that a revolutionary leader currently engaged in a conflict, in a revolution against the US, Emilio Aguinaldo is able to endorse William Jennings Bryan for the presidency. And it's hopeful that he would be able to secure a more rapid armistice.
00:38:54
Speaker
So the message is getting out. And Americans are going to and from the Philippines. Lots of letters are coming back from soldiers, for instance. One of the examples here, this is embedded in a lot of my comments, but I'll just surface it so people can really understand. The kinds of things that are happening there, US troops in the Philippines use the N word repeatedly against Filipinos. They developed the term Gugu, which becomes the word
00:39:22
Speaker
which gets involved in how Americans derive the Vietnamese. The racism is palpable in this moment, and particularly because there's large numbers of African Americans mustering to fight. You've got Buffalo soldiers, but you've also got these groups that are known as immune troops. There was this thinking in the era that people of color had more immunity to tropical diseases, and so there were more Black troops in the Philippines than you would expect.
00:39:48
Speaker
And these troops are being propagandized by the revolutionaries. They're saying, look how you're being treated. Again, it's a segregated army. They're being paid less, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, they see their fellow men in arms espousing all this racist rhetoric, which in the US, very much they're familiar with, right? The worst elements of that.
00:40:11
Speaker
So that kind of stuff is coming back too. There are a few high profile moments that kind of mirror what is to come in Vietnam of US soldiers turning sides and joining the revolutionaries. And so in the Anti-Imperialist League, they publicized this relentlessly. So they've got these tracks, these broadsides, they print lots of them, mostly emanating from Boston, Massachusetts, but they're all over the place in the US.
00:40:37
Speaker
So there is a lot of knowledge about what's going on there. As the war moves on, we haven't talked about the atrocities. American soldiers say that they learned the so-called water cure, right? That is waterboarding from Filipinos to get information. And you can actually see photos in US field army manuals of American troops learning how to waterboard, though it wasn't officially sanctioned.
00:41:02
Speaker
There were strategies of widespread recrimination and sort of reprisal techniques against small villages, including killing everyone in all kinds of things that again mirrored the sorts of atrocities that we see.
00:41:17
Speaker
in Vietnam. So there's a lot that's going wrong in this conflict. And the more that's publicized, the more you see people like Mark Twain writing eviscerating kinds of essays about, you know, he's this famous essay to the American sitting in darkness, to the person sitting in darkness, illuminating the kinds of ways in which
00:41:37
Speaker
U.S. ideals don't match the reality. The U.S. is falling flat, not just falling flat, that in fact, he said something like, you know, the U.S. the Stars and Stripes should be painted over black and it should be a skull and crossbones. You know, the U.S. is out there murdering for these ideals. For what?
00:41:55
Speaker
And the other thing that I emphasize in the book that's worth noting is arguably the most famous, most important US philosopher, William James, finds his political voice in 1898 and 1899. Until then, he really didn't do politics. He did philosophy and psychology and religion.
00:42:10
Speaker
And now he does. And why? Because he sees the U.S. doing these horrible things abroad in the name of civilization and these seemingly noble kinds of ideas. And in fact, they're falling flat on and doing these horrible, terrible actions that don't accord with American ideals. Or he would say, you know, you can measure an idea by its cash value, right? Or pragmatism, you know. And these ideas, they're cashing out terribly.
00:42:37
Speaker
patriotism is turning into oppression and putting down insurrections through further atrocities for what? So all of which is to say they're rallying around this, not ruling people against their will, but there are a number of different permutations. There's some economic arguments that come out of this moment, what will benefit the US best? So one of the things I love to emphasize about this in my teaching and in Promise in Peril and some other articles and arguments that I make,
00:43:04
Speaker
is that there's a great political cartoon in 1898. I encourage listeners to look at it. Civilization begins at home. It's easy to Google. And it's an image of William McKinley looking at this map avariciously. The US is going to acquire the Philippines. And then behind him, you can see what domestic society looks like, getting back to your earlier point.
00:43:23
Speaker
And it's lynching, and it's poverty. And he's turned his back on that. The Republican Party turned his back on that. And in the name of civilization abroad, barbarism is dominating at home. If listeners have not already started to go to Amazon to get promise in peril, because it basically is the foundation for everything that we talk about and bore from the early 20th century to today.
00:43:52
Speaker
You know, this this podcast should should confirm that.
Modern Parallels in Foreign Policy
00:43:55
Speaker
All right. So Chris, I do want because we're getting a little bit short on time. I actually wanted to ask you some stuff about the present war between Russia and Ukraine, in part because I think one of the things that historians like you do, and particularly in your new position at the Ohio State, is to do the sort of contextualizing that historians are really good at when it comes to contemporary issues, which can seem
00:44:22
Speaker
either hopelessly confusing or so completely pedantic. It's clear that there's a lesson to be learned, and if you don't learn it, you're a dumbass or something like that. But in this case, the United States is
00:44:39
Speaker
It's fairly deeply invested in sending material and aid in whatever form to the Ukrainians. But they've seen the country and its allies in Europe seem to be incredibly invested in doing something to Russia. I'm not even quite clear what that is other than to say that Russia cannot simply invade Ukraine and get away with it.
00:44:59
Speaker
But how would you use the sort of stuff that you've been writing on recently, especially this grand strategy to think in terms of what what is it that the United States wants to get out of its involvement with Ukraine? Because I think we have a fairly clear idea what Russia and Ukraine want. But what is it that the United States wants?
00:45:19
Speaker
Yeah. So let's try to connect where we were in the Spanish-American War to that question. So one way of thinking about why this is a modern conflict in 1898, an intervention, and how it changes the US mindset is in terms of national security is about spheres of influence.
00:45:35
Speaker
So, the US is now putting its money where its mouth is, you might say, in waging a war in the Caribbean to push out a colonial power who it says is oppressing people on the ground against their will. And in various ways, Cuba gets a semi-independent government and the US has the right in their constitution to intervene, being glorious.
00:45:57
Speaker
colonial, racist, all kinds of problems. But you can see the rationale there. US has a sphere of influence, a duty, a right to protect, you might say, and a kind of modern UN rights kind of sensibility, and operationalizes that in conflict. And then instantiates that in the peace treaties and in US law to follow.
00:46:18
Speaker
So thinking forward then, how does that logic play out? Is the US gains more power in the world system?
US Support to Ukraine: Historical Context
00:46:23
Speaker
What are other ways of aiding a conflict or aiding belligerence short of war becomes a huge question in the 20th century. Is the US a de facto combatant in World War I because it's sending so much more aid and so much more finances to Britain and France and acquiescing to the blockade by the British Navy?
00:46:44
Speaker
That's William Jennings Bryan's argument in 1914, 1915, and he resigns as Secretary of State because he says the U.S. is not actually a neutral. It's not neutral, right? Yes. So, as you think through these moments, then what is this moment? The U.S. is obviously not neutral against Russia, right? But the U.S. is unwilling and unable to declare war.
00:47:01
Speaker
NATO has not declared war. It is not invoking any articles because Ukraine is not a signatory and is not part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, but it is sending all kinds of NATO, the US member nations EU, sending all kinds of support. So, you know, age short of war is happening. There are American trainers on the ground.
00:47:21
Speaker
So that's another piece. They're often a tripwire to conflict. If you think through other moments, the more trainers and the more mechanics, the more other kinds of forces you have on the ground, you need to protect them, which means then you need more combat troops. This happens with embassies too. You can think about this in other places, they become vulnerability spots. In the 1990s, there's bombings in a number of places by Al-Qaeda, which are precursors to what happens
00:47:49
Speaker
including one in the Gulf, right? The coal. The US is coal. So you have US ships, you got US embassies. So thinking through aid and large presence can then trigger larger kinds of conflict through vulnerability. That's something the Biden administration is trying to figure out to triangulate how vulnerable should the US be in that sense.
00:48:10
Speaker
that it might then get embroiled in something further. So what does the US want out of this kind of thing? Well, one level, which is obvious here, I think is ideological, which also tracks with what we're talking about. The US is making a case for free peoples, for democracy, right? Or for freedom and against oppression. So if you go back to the kind of rationales for getting involved in Cuba or getting involved in the Philippines, it was to get rid of these Spanish oppressors who had no right and were doing things against the will of the people on the ground.
00:48:38
Speaker
Absolutely. That same kind of logic maps on here. And that's what the Biden administration has been projecting. Absolutely. In a very Reagan-esque or even, you know, Eisenhower, Truman-esque kind of way, saying the U.S. is, and what I mean by that is, you know, Truman Doctrine in 1947 is to support free peoples. You know, it's a first U.S. pledge after World War II to do that kind of thing, basically fighting communist aggression.
00:49:03
Speaker
And it's the same kind of language we hear against Russia today from the Biden administration. So on that level, it's about depicting this as a conflict between democracy and autocracy or authoritarianism or dictatorship, which can be an issue, of course. Here we are talking about the US role in the hemisphere where the US notably backed lots of terrible dictators throughout Central and South America in the 20th century, nominally as a way of
00:49:33
Speaker
creating a bulwark against communism, but often these dictators were as bad as any option on the table of a communist leader. So there's that piece, but I think a broader question here is for the 21st century, national security questions and sphere of influences, what nations will get to impact the shape of the international system in the future?
00:49:58
Speaker
Are there groups or nation states or configurations of the two that can stop
00:50:06
Speaker
aggressor nations from trampling on the sovereignty of smaller powers. This is a classic international relations question that generally in IR theory revolves around who's the hegemonic power or what are the major organizations and institutions and structures to stop that. But if you look at this current conflict, absent the US, how would Ukraine be doing?
00:50:29
Speaker
absent, you know, NATO and European allies, how would Ukraine be doing? They'd be suing for peace. Yeah. First of all, they did great defending right away, right? Right. They surprised virtually every observer around the world to some extent in their abilities. They protected Kiev and Harkov. Yeah. Yep.
00:50:45
Speaker
But over time, longitudinally, they simply did not have the resources to fight this war, even to a stalemate, as we see today. So the open questions about what nations and what configurations of nations can help to stop aggressor nations in the world system is a really interesting and open one. And one thing that's fascinating about that set of questions today is that we've got in the US a kind of far left
00:51:09
Speaker
that is very skeptical of those institutions and those kinds of commitments, even though it's very ethical in its orientation towards how peoples and groups should be treated, but it's very laissez-faire. So going back to that point I made earlier, if you think about the early 19th century, American policymakers and citizens were really laissez-faire about not meddling in other people's and groups' business. That was a standard operating principle for the US, because it was a weak power, fundamentally. But ideologically, as a commitment, the US was more the city on the hill than the Crusader state.
00:51:39
Speaker
20th century, more a crusader state kind of model. Where are we now? Where are we in the 2020s? That's a very good question, right? So what are we? I mean, I guess this is we're about to go into the spring campaign that the Ukrainians will launch. We know it's coming. They've built out built up in a massive amount of material to do this. I think their hope is to push the Russians hard enough that whatever bargaining table is set up, they have a fairly good position, they have some leverage. Where will the United States sit
00:52:10
Speaker
you know, in that situation. I mean, there's no way that the United States is going to sustain support for this conflict for more than another year, I would imagine, at this level, for sure. And it's going to affect the election of 2024 in fundamental ways. So, you know, thinking that the United States wants to support free peoples, they want to support the idea of democracy, you want to push back against autocracy, you want to push back against invasions like this, that would happen anywhere.
00:52:38
Speaker
including maybe Taiwan or something like that. But all those principles are wrapped up in the American ability to place material in the hands of somebody else and hope that they score the kind of victory that affirms those principles, which I'm not sure how likely that actually is, where we have the Pope.
00:53:01
Speaker
who is like, this war is awful, it's going to continue to be awful, it needs to end. It's never going to get better. That's his point. People will continue to die, and Russia can continue this on for as long as it wants to, really. It can continue to bomb cities for however it has supplies to do so.
00:53:21
Speaker
I think there's a couple elements of what you just said. One is the US doesn't need to only supply material. The US is training using its different kinds of capital, the fact that the US has such a capable military that can assist. But there's a leadership role, there's a rhetorical role. What I was trying to
00:53:44
Speaker
chart there was thinking about some of those other American leaders that Biden fancies himself like. And here FDR would be the primary example. And a four freedoms model for how he thinks the US should be operating the world. Advancing those principles, freedom of expression, freedom from want, freedom from fear. A set of freedoms that the US can stand for at home and abroad. And that's the other piece of the question here.
00:54:12
Speaker
US domestic politics, some of the FBI recently said, the CIA recently said some of the worst threats to American democracy are at home. The US's politics itself, even on questions like Ukraine, are riven. Even if you look at public opinion polling,
00:54:33
Speaker
The remarkably few people like Russia, many support Ukraine, but if you think about the hyper politicized environment we're in now, you know, one of the reasons you find a hard time thinking the US can sustain its commitment is I think because, right, because
00:54:49
Speaker
of the politicking of things like Ukraine, saying, hey, creating the false equivalency in this domestic foreign context of if you're giving another $50 billion to Ukraine in terms of, you know, war aid, material aid, this sort of thing, why are you not doing a $50 billion tax cut or $50 billion for school? Education, whatever. Whatever, yeah, vouchers, depending on which. And you just kind of, you just characterize the right and the left.
00:55:14
Speaker
basically, who are questioning commitments in Ukraine. That's exactly it. We should be- That is exactly it. Yeah. Either giving people money back or supporting- And not buying into that broader ideological framework, I think. In that sense, it's a little like 1898 as well. Seeing what's going forward, then the questions are about what should the US's role be? How much should the US be committed to that? Is the US actually doing the things at home that it's espousing abroad? That parallel is a
00:55:42
Speaker
poor one at best, but there are some illuminating components there. Some of the strands are similar.
Implications of Supporting Ukraine
00:55:48
Speaker
I think, too, the US needs to, we all need to fess up to the fact that, look, Ukraine is not a great democracy. If you look at the kind of indicators that political scientists use, it's a poor democracy. It's a fairly corrupt country. It's not spectacular on democratic grounds, but the US is declining by those same indicators, too.
00:56:07
Speaker
Ben and glass, people in glass houses shouldn't cast stones kind of situation here, right? But more to the point, so supporting an imperfect democracy against terrible aggression seems reasonable if you don't build up that democracy to something that it isn't.
00:56:24
Speaker
And you know, I think there's a lot of false expectations about how the rhetoric operates related to the US's role here at you know that are Really important in your deceptively simple question. What does the US get out of it? I think longer-term things the US can get out of a successful conclusion to this and who knows what that looks like Not Russian occupation of all of Ukraine. Let's start with that is you know a
00:56:50
Speaker
enhanced position on the world stage that was much lost in the Trump years. The US is not so much a leader, but a partner. That would be a real move forward. Recognizing the US is not the hegemonic power it was, say, in the 90s and the unipolar moment, but is capable of acting in concert with lots of other countries to help people, right, for the good. There are no occupation forces in this conflict. There's just material aid, training aid, rhetorical support, all that kind of thing.
00:57:20
Speaker
Another element here would be not having the potential economic cataclysm that was on the table. Remember in February 2022, late pandemic, the war in Ukraine really tanked markets. People were very worried, getting the wheat supplies out.
00:57:41
Speaker
It's easy to forget some of that a year plus later. So helping resume a kind of reasonable international system that also penalizes Russia. This was your other question. How do you keep bad actors in the international system from doing more and worse? Well, short of war again, which nobody wants,
00:58:00
Speaker
you have to figure out those systems. Obviously, there's a lot of loopholes in the sanctions that Russia is getting, has figured out and lots of plenty of nations are supporting, but it is very clearly taking a toll on Russia. All the reporting suggests that, everybody I know in the security studies world suggests that the Russian elites have never been more shaken in the Putin years than they are today.
00:58:23
Speaker
and that they cannot rely on Putin to take care of them, necessarily. Yes, and that there is no immediate escape hatch. This is a path-determined moment for Russia now, having gone this far, and that makes them fearful because of the sanctions, the way the international communities come together.
00:58:43
Speaker
I think another thing that could be a positive outcome here, and I don't want to be too Pollyanna-ish or even especially positive, but if you look at this configuration that was a warning between China and Russia just a few years ago, a kind of so-called special relationship that they were developing, this has really created a fissure there. Absolutely. And the question of if China will become a
00:59:06
Speaker
better actor in the world stage. I'm not going to say anything more transcendent than that. We're China to be pushing, let's go to the neoliberal kind of order questions, right? Rules-based order. We're China to be more of a signatory, do a little bit better on human rights at home, do a little bit better on human rights abroad, protect small sovereign countries for their own reasons, perhaps economic, perhaps for self-aggrandizement. That would be a useful outcome.
00:59:38
Speaker
Chris Nichols, thanks. This is great. I think that we're going to have other opportunities maybe to talk about stuff in the future. But I really appreciate this. This is one of the best summaries and discussions of the Spanish-American War that I've ever been part of. So thanks, man. Wow, thanks so much. Great chatting with you.