Lesson 27: Empire, Race and the Anti-Imperial Tradition in American History
🎧 Audio narration for this lesson is coming soon.
The United States expanded across the North American continent through purchase, treaty, war and settlement. After the war with Spain in 1898 it also acquired overseas possessions, most controversially the Philippines. The decision to annex the Philippines produced a sustained domestic debate and the formation of the American Anti-Imperialist League.
The Anti-Imperialist League
The League was organised in 1898 (formalised later that year) to oppose annexation of the Philippines. Its membership included former president Grover Cleveland, industrialist Andrew Carnegie, writer Mark Twain, labour leader Samuel Gompers, and others. Arguments ranged from constitutional and republican principle (that government must rest on the consent of the governed) to racial, economic and strategic objections. The Philippine–American War that followed annexation was costly in lives and became a subject of congressional investigation and public controversy.
Standard archival collections of the League’s papers and contemporary publications document both the organisation’s activities and the diversity of motives among its members.
Selected references
- Beisner, Robert L. Twelve against Empire: The Anti-Imperialists, 1898–1900. McGraw-Hill, 1968 (classic study).
- Anti-Imperialist League records (University of Michigan Special Collections and other repositories).
- Tompkins, E. Berkeley. Anti-Imperialism in the United States: The Great Debate, 1890–1920. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970.
- Primary statements and pamphlets of the League (reprinted in various documentary collections of the period).
What was the central constitutional argument of many Anti-Imperialists?
That holding colonies without the consent of the governed violated the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Further Learning
Open Culture and edX list multiple free U.S. history and American empire / foreign-policy lecture series from Yale, Stanford and others. See Open Culture History.