What did philosopher William James, satirist Mark Twain, President Grover Cleveland, and steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie all have in common?
If you don’t know you’re missing context to understand the events of early 2026, including the torrent of soundbites coming from the WEF meeting in Davos.
They were all active members of the brief but brilliant Anti-Imperialist League, formed in 1898.
Emerging in opposition to the U.S. annexation off the Philippines following the Spanish-American war, and consisting of a diverse coalition of politicians, authors, business leaders, and social reformers, The League united around a strong conviction:
Imperialism violated the fundamental American principles of self-government, non-intervention, and that just government must derive from the "consent of the governed,” as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, George Washington's Farewell Address, and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
What began as a Boston-based protest movement quickly expanded into a national organization. Within two years, the League had grown to 30,000 members across more than 30 states, with regional branches springing up from coast to coast.
Today, imperialism sounds quaint.
Unless you live in Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, or any one of the many economic vassal states. Sovereignty has been traded for the privilege of playing upon America’s game board.
As the world waits and watches what the leading imperial power does next… This edition of Ink & Time unpacks the long forgotten movement in America called “Anti-Imperialism”…
With a view to living a richer, more informed life now, by reading the past.
Cartoon from Puck, 1898: "We can’t grudge him a light lunch while we are feasting!” and contemporary adaptation. Artist: Louis Dalrymple
What is Imperialism anyway?
In Latin, imperium means “to command.” Simply put, it is invading or imposing military, political, economic or cultural rule over foreign peoples.
According to Cornell Law School, “Imperialism can be defined as a doctrine, political strategy, practice, or state policy that consists in extending power by territorial acquisition or by extending political and economic control outward over other areas. It involves the use of military and economic power, and always aims for more expansion and collective or individual domination.”
Imperialism: A Study (1902), is an early political economic treatise by John A. Hobson, on the negative financial, economic, and moral aspects of imperialism as a nationalistic business enterprise driven by capitalist business activity.
“Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capitalism is established… in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun…”
“Imperialism is a negation of God. It does ungodly acts in the name of God.” He condemned “violent nationalism, otherwise known as imperialism,” as “a curse” and “the greatest menace to the world today.”
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
Cartoons from 1898 to 1902 satirizing the carving up of China by imperial powers of the day
Why don’t we talk about Imperialism any more?
Every few years, someone rediscovers that Mark Twain spent the last decade of his life as America's fiercest critic of empire. But remembrance is usually short-lived, and institutional powers of media and opinion don’t dwell on him for long.
In 1898, the United States seized Spain's colonies and suddenly controlled territories from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. The justification was "benevolent assimilation,” bringing civilization to people who hadn't asked for it, at gunpoint.
Today it would be called humanitarian intervention. The rhetoric hasn't really changed much.
The American Anti-Imperialist League formed that same year in Boston's Faneuil Hall, the same building where revolutionaries once plotted against British rule.
Their argument was simple: a republic founded on "consent of the governed" cannot hold overseas colonies without becoming the thing it once overthrew.
Yet, in 2026 we have normalized notions of US intervention, influence operations, and raw power projection in all corners of the world, to advance its own dominance, economic and political hegemony, even in a world rapidly moving to multipolarity.
This was not always the case: 100 years ago there was vibrant debate over the US role in the world.
Here is an excerpt from the Anti-Imperialist League Platform, 1899, on "criminal aggression" and betrayal of founding principles:
We hold that the policy known as imperialism is hostile to liberty and tends toward militarism, an evil from which it has been our glory to be free. We regret that it has become necessary in the land of Washington and Lincoln to reaffirm that all men, of whatever race or color, are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
We maintain that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. We insist that the subjugation of any people is "criminal aggression" and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government.
A self-governing state cannot accept sovereignty over an unwilling people. The United States cannot act upon the ancient heresy that might makes right…
Much as we abhor the war of "criminal aggression" in the Philippines, greatly as we regret that the blood of the Filipinos is on American hands, we more deeply resent the betrayal of American institutions at home. The real firing line is not in the suburbs of Manila. The foe is of our own household….”
The Essays Too Dangerous to Print
Twain's "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901) remains his most explosive anti-imperialist essay.
He addresses colonized peoples directly, cataloging the "Blessings of Civilization" the West presumes to offer, delivered, he notes, on the point of a bayonet. The backlash was immediate. Religious groups and newspapers questioned his patriotism.
Here is an excerpt from Twain’s, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," 1901:
Extending the Blessings of Civilization to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on the whole; and there is money in it yet, if carefully worked—but not enough, in my judgment, to make any considerable risk advisable. The People that Sit in Darkness are getting to be too scarce—too scarce and too shy. And such darkness as is now left is really of but an indifferent quality, and not dark enough for the game. The most of those People that Sit in Darkness have been furnished with more light than was good for them or profitable for us. We have been injudicious.
The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it—they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization. More—they have begun to examine them. This is not well. The Blessings of Civilization are all right, and a good commercial property; there could not be a better, in a dim light. In the right kind of a light, and at a proper distance, with the goods a little out of focus, they furnish this desirable exhibit to the Gentlemen who Sit in Darkness:
LOVE, JUSTICE, GENTLENESS, CHRISTIANITY, PROTECTION TO THE WEAK, TEMPERANCE, LAW AND ORDER, LIBERTY, EQUALITY, HONORABLE DEALING, MERCY, EDUCATION, —and so on.
There. Is it good? Sir, it is pie. It will bring into camp any idiot that sits in darkness anywhere. But not if we adulterate it. It is proper to be emphatic upon that point. This brand is strictly for Export—apparently. Apparently. Privately and confidentially, it is nothing of the kind. Privately and confidentially, it is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and attractive, displaying the special patterns of our Civilization which we reserve for Home Consumption, while inside the bale is the Actual Thing that the Customer Sitting in Darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty. That Actual Thing is, indeed, Civilization, but it is only for Export. Is there a difference between the two brands? In some of the details, yes.”
His most haunting work, "The War Prayer," imagined a congregation praying for victory while an angel speaks the unspoken half: the wish for slaughter, starvation, ruin. Twain's family begged him not to publish. He didn't.
"Only dead men can tell the truth in this world," he said. It appeared in 1923, thirteen years after his death.
Here is an excerpt from Twain’s "The War Prayer”:
It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism … on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun … nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory which stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener. …
An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. … he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. …then in a deep voice he said:
“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” … I am commissioned of God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently….
“O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it — for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
A Chorus of Dissent
Twain wasn't alone.
Carl Schurz was a German-American revolutionary and an American statesman, journalist, and reformer. He warned that once America stepped onto the "inclined plane" of colonialism, it would be dragged forward, "no longer masters of our own will.”
Here is an excerpt from "American Imperialism," by Carl Schurz, 1899:
If we [adopt a colonial system], we shall transform the government of the people, for the people, and by the people, for which Abraham Lincoln lived, into a government of one part of the people, the strong, over another part, the weak. Such an abandonment of a fundamental principle as a permanent policy may at first seem to bear only upon more or less distant dependencies, but it can hardly fail in its ultimate effects to disturb the rule of the same principle in the conduct of democratic government at home. And I warn the American people that a democracy cannot so deny its faith as to the vital conditions of its being—it cannot long play the king over subject populations without creating within itself ways of thinking and habits of action most dangerous to its own vitality. . . .
The steel magnate Andrew Carnegie was a primary financier of the League and famously offered to pay the U.S. government $20 million to buy the Philippines' independence..
In "Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways" and "Americanism versus Imperialism," Carnegie argued that the U.S. lacked the military power to defend distant colonies and that maintaining them would require a massive, costly militarization that would drain the national treasury.
Here is an excerpt from Andrew Carnegie "Americanism versus Imperialism":
In the January number of the REVIEW, I dealt with the danger of foreign wars and entanglements, as one of several brave reasons against departing from the past policy of the Republic, which has kept it solid and compact upon its own continent, to undertake the subjection and government of subject races in the tropics.
I now propose to consider one of the reasons given for such departure-the only one remaining which retains much vitality, for the two other reasons once so prominent have already faded away and now are scarcely ever urged. These were "commercial expansion" in peace and "increased power" in war.
The President killed the first when compelled by Great Britain to give the " open door" as the price for her support; for to give the " open door" to the nearer foreigner meant the "closed door" to the products of the soil and mines of his own country. There never was and never can be any trade worth quarreling about in the Philippines; but what little there is or can be he has given away. When the country saw Dewey's fleet provisioned from Australia, instead of from our own agricultural land, the claim of possible expansion of American commerce there fell to the ground.
The second claim, that the Republic as a war power would be strengthened, held the field even for a shorter period than that of commercial expansion, for it was obvious that distant possessions would only give to our enemies, during war, vulnerable points of attack which had hitherto been wanting. As one solid mass, without outlying possessions, the Republic is practically unassailable. Should she keep the Philippines, any one of the great naval powers has her at its mercy. Hence Admiral Sampson warned us but a few days ago that "our risks of and dangers from war had already increased a hundred per cent. and that we needed to double our navy."
The President has just asked that our army also be doubled. Thus the claims of "Commercial Expansion" in peace and of "Greater Power" in war have bled to death of themselves.
The renowned Harvard philosopher and psychologist William James was a founding member who provided a moral and psychological framework for the opposition. He dismissed American exceptionalism as "idle dream, pure Fourth of July fancy," insisting every nation contains both "angelic impulses and predatory lusts.”
Here is an excerpt from James’ "The Philippine Question," 1903:
We used to believe then that we were of a different clay from other nations, that there was something deep in the American heart that answered to our happy birth, free from that hereditary burden which the nations of Europe bear, and which obliges them to grow by preying on their neighbors. Idle dream! pure Fourth of July fancy, scattered in five minutes by the first temptation.
In every national soul there lie potentialities of the most barefaced piracy, and our own American soul is no exception to the rule. Angelic impulses and predatory lusts divide our heart exactly as they divide the hearts of other countries. It is good to rid ourselves of cant and humbug, and to know the truth about ourselves. Political virtue does not follow geographical divisions. It follows the eternal division inside of each country between the more animal and the more intellectual kind of men, between the tory and the liberal tendencies, the jingoism and animal instinct that would run things by main force and brute possession, and the critical conscience that believes in educational methods and in rational rules of right.…
The country has once for all regurgitated the Declaration of Independence and the Farewell Address, and it won’t swallow again immediately what it is so happy to have vomited up. It has come to a hiatus. It has deliberately pushed itself into the circle of international hatreds, and joined the common pack of wolves. It relishes the attitude. We have thrown off our swaddling clothes, it thinks, and attained our majority. We are objects of fear to other lands.
Social reformer, Jane Addams connected overseas militarism to inequality at home, warning against "protecting the weak" as pretext for conquest.
Here is an excerpt from Jane Addams’ "Democracy or Militarism”:
We must also remember that peace has come to mean a larger thing. It is no longer merely absence of war, but the unfolding of life processes which are making for a common development. Peace is not merely something to hold congresses about and to discuss as an abstract dogma. It has come to be a rising tide of moral feeling, which is slowly engulfing all pride of conquest and making war impossible.
Under this new conception of peace it is perhaps natural that the first men to formulate it and give it international meaning should have been workingmen, who have always realized, however feebly and vaguely they may have expressed it, that it is they who in all ages have borne the heaviest burden of privation and suffering imposed on the world by the military spirit.…
The appeal to the fighting instinct does not end in mere warfare, but arouses these brutal instincts latent in every human being. The countries with the large standing armies are likewise the countries with, national hospitals for the treatment of diseases which should never exist, of large asylums for the care of children which should never have been born. These institutions, as well as the barracks, again increase the taxation, which rests, in the last analysis, upon producers, and, at the same time, withdraws so much of their product from the beneficient development of their national life. No one urges peaceful association with more fervor than the workingman. Organization is his only hope, but it must be kept distinct from militarism, which can never be made a democratic instrument.
Let us not make the mistake of confusing moral issues sometimes involved in warfare with warfare itself. Let us not glorify the brutality. The same strenuous endeavor, the same heroic self-sacrifice, the same fine courage and readiness to meet death, may be displayed without the accompaniment of killing our fellow men. With all Kipling's insight he has, over and over, failed to distinguish between war and imperialism on the one hand and the advance of civilization on the other.
Why the League Failed and why it Matters Now
The League failed politically. The Philippines remained American territory until 1946. But their arguments reverberate through every subsequent intervention justified by benevolence: Vietnam, Iraq, Palestine, Venezuela… Greenland?
Multiple factors explain the League's inability to steer America to a different course:
Bryan's decision to support Treaty of Paris ratification, planning to use imperialism as a campaign issue rather than blocking annexation, proved disastrous. The improving economy by 1900 undermined populist appeals and made imperial adventures seem more affordable.
The League's inability to consistently oppose both imperialism and racism weakened its moral authority.
The coalition's diversity prevented unified strategic action once the initial crisis passed. "Yellow journalism" and pro-imperialist propaganda proved more effective at shaping public opinion than the League's intellectual arguments.
Once the Philippines were annexed and American lives had been invested in the war, reversing course became politically impossible.
And quite simply, the economic benefits to be derived were just too compelling.
Read our post on Jack London's The Iron Heel, and you'll recognize the pattern: dissent suppressed, uncomfortable truths buried, then rediscovered decades or even centuries later.
Outside academic circles, these writings are barely known. That's a loss and a liability.
Even though they diagnosed a sickness that keeps recurring and is more relevant today than ever: the belief that empire can be moral, the deranged assumptions that violence civilizes, and that "consent of the governed" is a selective truth to be applied selectively.
Twain was correct. Some truths are easier to hear from dead men.
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