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In anticipation of America’s 250th anniversary of independence, Ink & Time is pleased to share with you sections of the Introduction to Against Empire: The Anti-Imperialist Reader.
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Patriotic Dissent is the Highest Form of Loyalty
In the summer of 1898, the United States won a war it had not planned to fight, and subsequently launched an empire that many believed it had never intended to build. When Congress declared war on Spain in April, the explicit and stated purpose was the liberation of Cuba from a brutal colonial regime.
But empires are sprawling, vulnerable things, and they are bound to unravel, just as the Spanish empire did, and so many others that had come before it also disintegrated.
On May 1, Commodore George Dewey sailed the U.S. Asiatic Squadron into Manila Bay and completely destroyed the Spanish fleet. The victory, which was absolute, presented the McKinley administration with a question that would define the next century of American life. The Philippines were now, practically speaking, available for the taking.
What should the republic do with them?
The imperialists had their answer ready. Senator Albert Beveridge, campaigning in Indiana, delivered the argument in its purest form:
"We do but what our fathers did — we but pitch the tents of liberty farther westward, farther southward — we only continue the march of the flag."
Empire was seen as destiny, and inheritance, and as the natural extension of everything the republic had always been. It was a powerful argument, but it was built on a lie. The writers featured here did some of their best work in systematically dismantling it.
In the decision to embark on the path of territorial acquisition, according to a widely circulated account, McKinley claimed he was moved by divine inspiration.
"I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight," he reportedly said, "and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance."
The guidance he received was that the United States could not return the islands to Spain, nor turn them over to commercial rivals like France or Germany, nor leave them to govern themselves, as they were, in the condescending and racist logic of the day, unprepared for self-rule.
The only option, he concluded, was "to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”
On December 10, 1898, the Treaty of Paris was signed, in which Spain formally ceded the Philippines to the United States for $20 million. The Filipinos were not consulted. On December 21, McKinley issued a proclamation of "Benevolent Assimilation," declaring that the United States would substitute "the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule." It was the language of paternalistic care, and to the millions of Filipinos who had already declared their own independence, it was a declaration of conquest.
The Filipino people had been fighting for their independence from Spain since 1896. Their revolutionary leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, had believed the United States would act as an ally and a liberator. On June 12, 1898, he declared Philippine independence.
By January 1899, the Malolos Republic had been established, complete with the first democratic constitution in Asia. The United States refused to recognize it. Tensions between the occupying American forces and the Filipino republican army erupted on February 4, 1899, when shooting broke out on the outskirts of Manila.
The conventional phase of the war lasted until November 1899, after which the vastly outgunned Filipino forces shifted to guerrilla tactics.
The American military, frustrated by an enemy that blended into the civilian population, responded with the methods of counter-insurgency that would become grimly familiar across the next century: villages suspected of harboring insurgents burned to the ground; torture employed as routine intelligence-gathering, most notoriously the "water cure," a method of simulated drowning that horrified the American public when soldiers' letters detailing the practice appeared in domestic newspapers; and "re-concentration" policies that forced hundreds of thousands of civilians into guarded zones where disease and starvation ran rampant.
It was the same re-concentration policy Spain was condemned for using in Cuba, the policy that had been used to justify American entry into the war in the first place.
[…]
Mark Twain, foremost amongst those incisive objectors in the American Anti-Imperialist League, watched this unfold with mounting fury. He proposed a fitting emblem for the new imperial republic:
"And as for a flag for the Philippine Province, it is easily managed. We can have a special one — our States do it: we can have just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones."
The men and women whose writings fill these pages were not a unified moral voice. They were a coalition of convenience, ideologically incoherent, sharing only the conviction that the United States should not become a colonial empire, because to do so would contradict the very principles upon which the nation was founded.
Their coalition included constitutional republicans like Carl Schurz and William Graham Sumner, who believed that empire violated the core logic of the Constitution that no government may rule a people without their consent.
It included economic pragmatists like Andrew Carnegie, who argued that the costs of empire would bankrupt the nation and corrupt its institutions. It included philosophical humanists like William James and Jane Addams, who saw empire as a spiritual poison that would destroy American democracy from within.
It must be stated plainly that it also included figures whose anti-imperialism was rooted in racism: labor leaders like Samuel Gompers who feared the influx of cheap non-white labor, academics like David Starr Jordan who opposed annexation on eugenic grounds.
Some of these anti-imperialists opposed empire because they believed in the universal dignity of all people; others opposed it because they did not want Filipinos in the American polity.
What united all of the writers was a singular shared text: the Declaration of Independence.
The anti-imperialists read the words "consent of the governed" and believed they still carried meaning and more importantly, collective obligation. From that conviction, they produced writing that resonates still to this day. Here is what you will find:
The Anti-Imperialist League Platform of 1899 opens the collection, with rhetoric that is more radical than you might expect.
"We insist that the subjugation of any people is 'criminal aggression' and open disloyalty to the distinctive principles of our Government," it declares. "The real firing line is not in the suburbs of Manila. The foe is of our own household."
“If an Administration may with impunity ignore the issues upon which it was chosen, deliberately create a condition of war anywhere on the face of the globe, debauch the civil service for spoils to promote the adventure, organize a truth-suppressing censorship and demand of all citizens a suspension of judgment and their unanimous support while it chooses to continue the fighting, representative government itself is imperiled.”
Carl Schurz, a German-born refugee of the 1848 revolutions, Union Army general, and U.S. Senator, brought a weight of moral authority based on his fight for liberty across two continents. His speeches are dense, lawyerly, and relentless.
"What would the American people, what would the world, have said if Congress had resolved that the Cuban people were indeed rightfully entitled to freedom and independence, but that as to the people of other Spanish colonies we recognized no such right?”
William Graham Sumner delivers perhaps the collection's single most intellectually audacious argument in “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.” His thesis is that by adopting imperialism, America had been morally conquered by the very Old World values it claimed to oppose:
"We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of ideas and policies… The war with Spain was precipitated upon us headlong, without reflection or deliberation, and without any due formulation of public opinion. Whenever a voice was raised in behalf of deliberation and the recognized maxims of statesmanship, it was howled down in a storm of vituperation and cant."
Mark Twain needs no introduction, but his anti-imperialist writings may surprise you. They are angrier, more reckless, and more dangerous than anything in Huckleberry Finn:
“True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty; we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit's work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world.”
That passage was published in the North American Review in February 1901 and caused a national sensation. Twain was accused of treason, of giving comfort to the enemy, of betraying the soldiers in the field. Yet, he did not retract a word.
William James, the father of American pragmatism, brought a philosopher's precision to articulating the situation:
"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." And his verdict on what the country had become: "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 deliberately pushed itself into the circle of international hatreds, and joined the common pack of wolves."
Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House and future Nobel Peace Prize laureate, argued in her 1899 speech “Democracy or Militarism” that the habits of empire would corrupt domestic institutions from the ground up. She was not speaking abstractly. She had watched, in the neighborhoods of Chicago, how the glorification of war translated into everyday violence:
"During last October and November we were startled by seven murders within a radius of ten blocks. A little investigation of details and motives... made it not in the least difficult to trace the murders back to the influence of the war.
Simple people who read of carnage and bloodshed easily receive its suggestions."
Her argument that imperial violence abroad brutalizes the society that inflicts it, remains one of the most under-appreciated insights in the collection. The invitation is to reflect on domestic turbulence as not disconnected from foreign aggression.
William Vaughn Moody's “An Ode in Time of Hesitation,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1900, contrasts the noble sacrifice of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and his Black regiment at Fort Wagner with the conquest of the Philippines. Its most quoted couplet reduces empire to predatory anatomy:
"Are we the eagle nation Milton saw / Mewing its mighty youth... / Or have we but the talons and the maw?" And its closing lines carry the weight of a curse: "Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity! / For save we let the island men go free, / Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts / Will curse us from the lamentable coasts / Where walk the frustrate dead.”
Finally in Part V, the structural culmination of the collection, you will hear from the people on the receiving end of empire. Emilio Aguinaldo, writing in the North American Review in September 1899, addresses the American public directly in their own political language. His opening is a plea that doubles as an indictment:
"We Filipinos have all along believed that if the American nation at large knew exactly, as we do, what is daily happening in the Philippine Islands, they would rise en masse, and demand that this barbaric war should stop."
'Lay down your arms,' you say. Did you lay down your arms when you, too, were rebels, and the English under good King George demanded your submission? How in the name of all that is serious do you demand that we shall do what you, being rebels, refused to do?"
Apolinario Mabini, the brilliant legal mind known as the "Brain of the Revolution," writing from forced exile on Guam, confirms the predictions of the American anti-imperialists from the receiving end. Where Aguinaldo appeals to American conscience, Mabini challenges it:
"The Filipinos maintain the fight against American forces not because of hatred, but to demonstrate to the American nation that, in fighting for our liberty, we are fighting for their honor."
Some of these Filipino texts appear in English translation for the first time in this edition.
Ultimately, the empire the anti-imperialists warned against survived.
Far from being defeated in 1902, it grew, and metastasized. It shed the formal trappings of colonial administration: the governors, the garrisons, and the flag ceremonies, though it retained its territories. Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Northern Mariana Islands remain unincorporated territories until today, governed under a legal doctrine, the "Insular Cases" of 1901–1922, in which the Supreme Court held that the Constitution does not automatically follow the flag.
As the Court put it in Downes v. Bidwell (1901), these territories were "foreign in a domestic sense." A masterpiece of imperial euphemism, yet it remains operative law. The 3.6 million inhabitants of those territories still cannot vote for the president who governs them.
[…]
Still, the primary mechanisms of American imperial control shifted. What emerged after 1945 was something new in the history of empires: a system of global dominance that operated primarily through institutions, financial instruments, military alliances, foreign political manipulation, and the coercive mechanisms of the market, rather than through the direct administration of territory.
[…]
Control now extends into the digital realm. The infrastructure of the modern global economy is overwhelmingly American: the cloud computing, the undersea cables, the advanced semiconductor supply chains, the artificial intelligence models that mediate commerce, communication, and governance. Three American corporations control more than 60 percent of the global cloud infrastructure market.
The White House, through Executive Order, has explicitly framed artificial intelligence not merely as a commercial sector but as a strategic domain in which the United States must preserve "technological dominance." What some scholars have called "digital colonialism" operates much like classical colonialism: extracting raw material (data) from populations worldwide, processing it in American-owned facilities, and selling the manufactured services back to a world kept in a state of permanent dependency.
The cultural dimension of this dominance serves as its invisible, yet perhaps most pervasive, soft infrastructure. American popular culture, Hollywood cinema, global technology platforms, and carefully exported lifestyle aspirations exercise an extraordinary gravitational pull on the world's populations. A vast global industry of entertainment and distraction, what might be called an empire of desire, operates largely independently of direct military or economic pressure… Control operates not through the threat of violence, but through the capture of the imagination.
Reasonable people disagree about whether all of this constitutes an empire or merely an exceptionally powerful state. But the question the anti-imperialists asked in 1899 cuts through the theoretical debate:
Does power require the consent of those it governs?
[…]
More than opposing a single war, the anti-imperialists identified a structure whereby empire generates resistance it is unable to overcome, requires deception to sustain public support, and incurs costs that exceed what its designers and proponents have promised. It has been repeated in Vietnam, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan.
During the Vietnam War, the New Left rediscovered Twain's anti-imperialist writings, recognizing the grim parallels of a distant war in Southeast Asia and an American public told that victory was always just around the corner. In the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, proponents of intervention explicitly cited the Philippine-American War as a successful model for imperial policing and regime change.
The League's Platform warned that if an administration could "deliberately create a condition of war anywhere on the face of the globe" and "demand of all citizens a suspension of judgment," then "representative government itself is imperiled."
[…]
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is an opportunity to do something more than celebrate familiar notions of American power.
True patriots will consider if the principles in that document still carry meaning and recall the obligation of the governed to hold power to account.
William James, writing in 1903, delivered the verdict on his own generation: "Idle dream! pure Fourth of July fancy, scattered in five minutes by the first temptation."
The question for this generation is whether the Declaration of Independence remains a living commitment to its values or if it has become simply a decorative text, trotted out for anniversaries and ignored in practice.
The writers in this book believed it was a living commitment, and they were willing to pay the price of saying so.
They were called traitors. They were accused of giving comfort to the enemy. They lost publishing contracts and political careers. They willingly paid the price because they believed the alternative of silence was a greater betrayal.
Their arguments were never adequately answered; they were merely overruled.
Read them, and decide for yourself whether the overruling was justified, or whether patriotic dissent still stands the test of time.
Here is a preview of some of the 36 writings included in the anthology:
The March of the Flag by Albert Beveridge, 1898
Platform of the American Anti-Imperialist League, 1899
The Issue of Imperialism by Carl Shurz, 1899
The Conquest of the United States by Spain by Graham Sumner, 1899
Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways by Andrew Carnegie, 1898
Imperialism and the Tracks of Our Forefathers by Charles Francis Adams, 1898
Republic or Empire? The Philippine Question by William Jennings Bryan, 1899
To the Person Sitting in Darkness by Mark Twain, 1901
The Philippine Tangle by William James, 1899
Democracy or Militarism by Jane Addams, 1899
Imperialism: Its Dangers and Wrongs by Samuel Gompers, 1899
The Present Outlook for the Dark Races of Mankind by W.E.B. Du Bois, 1900
Imperial Democracy (selections) by David Starr Jordan, 1899
Patriotism and the New Internationalism (selections) by Lucia Ames Mead, 1906
"The White Man's Burden" by Too-qua-stee [DeWitt Clinton Duncan], 1899
An Ode in Time of Hesitation by William Vaughn Moody, 1900
Editha by William Dean Howells, 1905
Swords and Plowshares (selections) by Ernest Howard Crosby, 1902
Case Against the United States by Emilio Aguinaldo, 1899
The True Mission of the Philippine Revolution by Apolinario Mabini, 1899
Women of the Philippines by Clemencia López, 1902
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