That is an version of Time-Journey Thursdays, a journey by The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the current. Join right here.
Precisely 39 years after Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” was first printed in The Atlantic, Mark Twain scratched out a brand new model. “Battle Hymn,” which Twain thought-about “lovely and elegant,” was in want of revision. In 1901, the USA was getting into the third yr of a battle to determine colonial rule within the Philippines, and Howe’s rousing imaginative and prescient of a sacred nationwide wrestle didn’t fairly match the second. “Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword,” Twain started. “He’s looking for the hoardings the place the stranger’s wealth is saved.” The remainder of the verses deal in comparable substitutions: a bandit gospel for a fiery gospel; as a substitute of reality and God, lust and greed go marching on.
Twain’s satire labored as a result of it uncovered the hypocrisies of America’s first embrace of an abroad empire on the flip of the twentieth century. Advocates of intervention spoke confidently of spreading democracy; Twain and different anti-imperialists answered by holding these professed beliefs up towards the anti-democratic actuality of conquest and violence. This sample of argument would persist by the Iraq Struggle. The guiding questions had been all the time round what we actually believed we had been doing in different international locations—spreading democracy, or just exploiting individuals and advancing our pursuits? With this weekend’s ouster of Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, America has crossed into a brand new period, during which leaders not hassle with the pretense.
Twain and the anti-imperialists had been processing what appeared like a profound flip in American historical past. Prior conquest of North America was the actual starting of American imperialism, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 anticipated advances within the Pacific. However the Spanish-American Struggle of 1898—what the Atlantic editor Walter Hines Web page deemed “a essential act of surgical procedure for the well being of civilization”—commenced a brand new section of abroad empire. The USA made Cuba one thing of a protectorate, formally annexed Hawaii, and added Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as a part of the Spanish-American Struggle peace treaty.
For the champions of empire, 1898 offered a type of deliverance. People would take their rightful place on the worldwide stage alongside the Europeans, bringing democracy, civilization, commerce, and Christianity with them. White American males, thought to have turn into feminized and overcivilized by home comforts, might redeem themselves within the technique of occupying their new colonial possessions. American employees of every kind can be rescued from what many believed to be the hazards of extreme manufacturing, with prepared markets for his or her items past American borders. God “has marked us as his chosen individuals, henceforth to steer within the regeneration of the world,” Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana boasted. “We’re trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace.”
The truth on the bottom didn’t match the rhetoric, significantly within the Philippines. Bought for $20 million from Spain within the peace proceedings, the archipelago promised entry to the Chinese language market—and a laboratory for a benevolent idea of American empire. “If we will profit these distant peoples,” President William McKinley had requested, “who will object?” However his promise that “our priceless ideas bear no change beneath a tropical solar” didn’t survive the Pacific crossing. American forces labored to crush one thing they knew effectively—a well-liked rebellion towards colonial rule. The strategies the military employed had been brutal, together with a water torture and rounding suspected rural insurgents into focus camps—a tactic practiced by the Spanish in Cuba that had helped impress American assist for battle there.
Twain was horrified by the violence, however he was significantly enraged concerning the redemptive rhetoric that cloaked it. “Now we have gone there to overcome, to not redeem,” he advised a reporter in 1900. His many subsequent printed writings opposing American imperialism (in addition to his model of the “Battle Hymn,” which he didn’t publish however was discovered written right into a ebook he owned) had been works of bitter satire highlighting the disconnect between the fact of conquest and the language of redemption. In “To the Particular person Sitting in Darkness,” Twain extracted what he referred to as “the Precise Factor”—battle, violence, greed exploitation—from the “exterior cowl” of the “Blessings of Civilization.” The USA had turn into “but one other Civilized Energy, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in a single hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife within the different.”
The anti-imperialist motion that Twain joined was a motley gathering of each ethical idealists and virulent racists who scorned even affiliation with nonwhite individuals, a lot much less their elevation. However insofar as Twain’s satire labored, it did so as a result of it presumed that American beliefs mattered—and that their violation did too. Even those that had been much less involved concerning the violence or the destiny of nonwhite individuals might be aware the disconnect between America as an anticolonial nation working towards colonialism. Through the 1900 presidential election, Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan responded to Republican censure of his anti-imperial stance with the suggestion that they prolong their censure to Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.
Neither Twain nor Jennings Bryan stopped the drift towards abroad intervention that had begun in 1898. Theodore Roosevelt, elevated to the vice presidency by the spectacle of his well-known cost up San Juan Hill in Cuba, would tender an much more forceful expression of American energy after he grew to become president. Such expressions would solely develop by the rest of the century. However even essentially the most strident interventionists felt compelled to mood their justifications with the language of anti-imperialism. “We don’t search empires,” Protection Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mentioned a number of months into the second Iraq Struggle. “We’re not imperialistic. We by no means have been.”
President Trump and his administration have upended this American custom of claiming, nonetheless hypocritically, that overseas intervention isn’t about energy or revenue. Within the days since Maduro’s seize, the president has repeatedly bragged about being “in cost” of Venezuela, and steered that the U.S. would possibly run the nation for years. He has overtly defined that his precedence is taking management of the nation’s oil enterprise to make the U.S. wealthier (a plan that’s not economically sound, as my colleague Jonathan Chait factors out). Earlier this week, the State Division’s social-media account shared a submit studying “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE,” whereas Consultant Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, repeated the boast in a tv interview on Wednesday: “We’re the dominant predator drive within the Western hemisphere.”
The absence of urgency to empower the democratic opposition, and even to pay lip service to the aim of restoring liberal democracy inside the nation, marks a brand new type of American intervention overseas. To this administration, the present of drive is an efficient in itself—no pandering to beliefs required. With America’s objectives so clearly laid out, it’s not clear what good satire would possibly do, or how a lot use Mark Twain may be now. The administration’s posturing means that even the oil may be irrelevant. Essentially the most precious useful resource has maybe already been extracted: the spectacle of energy itself.
