\n<\/p>\n
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through <\/em>The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.<\/em><\/p>\n Exactly 39 years after Julia Ward Howe\u2019s \u201cBattle Hymn of the Republic\u201d was first published in The Atlantic, Mark Twain scratched out a new version. \u201cBattle Hymn,\u201d which Twain considered \u201cbeautiful and sublime,\u201d was in need of revision. In 1901, the United States was entering the third year of a war to establish colonial rule in the Philippines, and Howe\u2019s rousing vision of a sacred national struggle didn\u2019t quite fit the moment. \u201cMine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword,\u201d Twain began. \u201cHe is searching out the hoardings where the stranger\u2019s wealth is stored.\u201d The rest of the verses deal in similar substitutions: a bandit gospel for a fiery gospel; instead of truth and God, lust and greed go marching on.<\/p>\n Twain\u2019s satire worked because it exposed the hypocrisies of America\u2019s first embrace of an overseas empire at the turn of the 20th century. Advocates of intervention spoke confidently of spreading democracy; Twain and other anti-imperialists answered by holding those professed ideals up against the anti-democratic reality of conquest and violence. This pattern of argument would persist through the Iraq War. The guiding questions were always around what we really believed we were doing in other countries\u2014spreading democracy, or simply exploiting people and advancing our interests? With this weekend\u2019s ouster of Nicol\u00e1s Maduro from Venezuela, America has crossed into a new era, in which leaders no longer bother with the pretense.<\/p>\n Twain and the anti-imperialists were processing what seemed like a profound turn in American history. Prior conquest of North America was the real beginning of American imperialism, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 anticipated advances in the Pacific. But the Spanish-American War of 1898\u2014what the Atlantic editor Walter Hines Page deemed \u201ca necessary act of surgery for the health of civilization\u201d\u2014commenced a new phase of overseas empire. The United States made Cuba something of a protectorate, formally annexed Hawaii, and added Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as part of the Spanish-American War peace treaty.<\/p>\n For the champions of empire, 1898 presented a kind of deliverance. Americans would take their rightful place on the global stage alongside the Europeans, bringing democracy, civilization, commerce, and Christianity with them. White American men, thought to have become feminized and overcivilized by domestic comforts, could redeem themselves in the process of occupying their new colonial possessions. American workers of all kinds would be rescued from what many believed to be the dangers of excessive production, with ready markets for their goods beyond American borders. God \u201chas marked us as his chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world,\u201d Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana boasted. \u201cWe are trustees of the world\u2019s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.\u201d<\/p>\n The reality on the ground did not match the rhetoric, particularly in the Philippines. Purchased for $20 million from Spain in the peace proceedings, the archipelago promised access to the Chinese market\u2014and a laboratory for a benevolent theory of American empire. \u201cIf we can benefit those remote peoples,\u201d President William McKinley had asked, \u201cwho will object?\u201d But his promise that \u201cour priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun\u201d did not survive the Pacific crossing. American forces worked to crush something they knew well\u2014a popular uprising against colonial rule. The methods the army employed were brutal, including a water torture and rounding suspected rural insurgents into concentration camps\u2014a tactic practiced by the Spanish in Cuba that had helped galvanize American support for war there.<\/p>\n Twain was horrified by the violence, but he was particularly enraged about the redemptive rhetoric that cloaked it. \u201cWe have gone there to conquer, not to redeem,\u201d he told a reporter in 1900. His many subsequent published writings opposing American imperialism (as well as his version of the \u201cBattle Hymn,\u201d which he did not publish but was found written into a book he owned) were works of bitter satire highlighting the disconnect between the reality of conquest and the language of redemption. In \u201cTo the Person Sitting in Darkness,\u201d Twain extracted what he called \u201cthe Actual Thing\u201d\u2014war, violence, greed exploitation\u2014from the \u201coutside cover\u201d of the \u201cBlessings of Civilization.\u201d The United States had become \u201cyet another Civilized Power, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other.\u201d<\/p>\n The anti-imperialist movement that Twain joined was a motley gathering of both moral idealists and virulent racists who scorned even association with nonwhite people, much less their elevation. But insofar as Twain\u2019s satire worked, it did so because it presumed that American ideals mattered\u2014and that their violation did too. Even those who were less concerned about the violence or the fate of nonwhite people could note the disconnect between America as an anticolonial nation practicing colonialism. During the 1900 presidential election, Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan responded to Republican censure of his anti-imperial stance with the suggestion that they extend their censure to Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.<\/p>\n Neither Twain nor Jennings Bryan stopped the drift toward overseas intervention that had begun in 1898. Theodore Roosevelt, elevated to the vice presidency by the spectacle of his famous charge up San Juan Hill in Cuba, would tender an even more forceful expression of American power after he became president. Such expressions would only grow through the remainder of the century. But even the most strident interventionists felt compelled to temper their justifications with the language of anti-imperialism. \u201cWe don\u2019t seek empires,\u201d Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said a few months into the second Iraq War. \u201cWe\u2019re not imperialistic. We never have been.\u201d<\/p>\n President Trump and his administration have upended this American tradition of claiming, however hypocritically, that foreign intervention is not about power or profit. In the days since Maduro\u2019s capture, the president has repeatedly bragged about being \u201cin charge\u201d of Venezuela, and suggested that the U.S. might run the country for years. He has openly explained that his priority is taking control of the country\u2019s oil business to make the U.S. wealthier (a plan that\u2019s not economically sound, as my colleague Jonathan Chait points out). Earlier this week, the State Department\u2019s social-media account shared a post reading \u201cTHIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE,\u201d while Representative Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, repeated the boast in a television interview on Wednesday: \u201cWe are the dominant predator force in the Western hemisphere.\u201d<\/p>\n The absence of urgency to empower the democratic opposition, or even to pay lip service to the goal of restoring liberal democracy within the country, marks a new form of American intervention abroad. To this administration, the show of force is a good in itself\u2014no pandering to ideals required. With America\u2019s goals so clearly laid out, it\u2019s not clear what good satire might do, or how much use Mark Twain might be now. The administration\u2019s posturing suggests that even the oil might be beside the point. The most valuable resource has perhaps already been extracted: the spectacle of power itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic\u2019s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. Exactly 39 years after Julia Ward Howe\u2019s \u201cBattle Hymn of the Republic\u201d was first published in The Atlantic, Mark Twain scratched out a new version. \u201cBattle Hymn,\u201d which Twain considered \u201cbeautiful and sublime,\u201d was in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40956,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[473,546,442,8728],"class_list":{"0":"post-40955","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-american","9":"tag-days","10":"tag-early","11":"tag-imperialism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40955","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40955"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40955\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}