7 - Racism and Empire: A Perspective on a New Era of American History

Summary

The notion that the emergence of American imperialism in the 1890s was an aberrant, temporary phenomenon has had some influence in the historical literature. It is expressed, for example, in Julius W. Pratt's study of the expansionists of 1898 and implied in Richard Hofstadter’s emphasis on the psychic, even benevolent, factors leading to acquisition of colonies. (Hofstadter suggested that the Spanish-American War originated “not in imperialist ambition but in popular humanitarianism.”) Samuel Flagg Bemis writes that imperialism “was never deep-rooted in the character of the people” and indeed found that the American experience was one of “an imperialism against imperialism.” The historian Rubin Francis Weston observes that American imperialism lacked “vigor and persistence.”

Imperialism's abiding significance in American history is confirmed by the evidence that our colonial adventures spurred the fuller flowering of racism that has endured ever since the 1890s and still threatens us with disaster. Well known, of course, are the racist writings of the publicists Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, filled with dehumanization of blacks and strident pleas for exclusion of immigrants in the interest of preserving the supposed Anglo-Saxon character of the American population.

Theodore Roosevelt, key architect of the Spanish-American War, wrote in 1901 that “what has taken us thirty generations to achieve, we cannot expect to see another race accomplish out of hand,” especiallywhen non-Caucasians allegedly were behind where whites were at the start of those thirty generations. Perhaps central to Roosevelt's view was his rejection of the thesis that the color question was essentially one of class, one of the few against the many. Race conflict, he insisted, was deep and fundamental.