-Caveat Lector-
CONSPIRACY FOR EMPIRE
Big Business, Corruption and the Politics of Imperialism in Ameri.ca,
1876-1907
LUZVIIVIINDA BARTOLOME FRANCISCO
JONATHAN SHEPARD FAST
ISBN 971-1058-01-4
FOUNDATION FOR NATIONALIST STUDIES©1985
38 Panay Ave, Quezon City
Philippines
-----
FOREWORD,
In 1898 the Americans came to our country in force and in a series of rapid
maneuvers seized state power. Filipino resistance to the American invasion
was prolonged and bitterly fought. It was a virtually suicidal struggle
sustained for ten years against an enemy armed with superior technology and
vast resources, an enemy which unleashed "depopulation campaigns" of such
unprecedented ferocity that they sent hundreds of thousands of our countrymen
to an early grave. The United States established a colony in the Philippines
which behind a more sophisticated facade remains in force even to this day.
Why did this happen? Why did the Americans come here? What was their purpose?
What was their motive? For many years, the real motives of the American
Command were kept hidden not only from the Filipino people but also from the
vast majority of the American people. Filipino nationalist writers have given
their answers to these questions based on available documents and an
anti-imperialist analytical framework. In this book, Luzviminda Bartolome
Francisco, a Filipina of peasant origins, and Jonathan Shepard Fast, an
American writer, provide us with a new analysis, using corporate records and
other primary source material, heretofore undiscovered or otherwise
unavailable.
Why has a study of this type taken so long in coming? There are three
reasons. First, to understand the real motives of the men who shaped American
policy, men such as William McKinley, Nelson Aldrich, Mark Hanna and Henry
Havemeyer, it is necessary to understand some of the intricacies of corporate
affairs and the degree to which certain corporations, e.g. the American Sugar
Refining Company, had command of the political process in America in the'
1890's. It is also necessary to understand that the members of the "Aldrich
Gang" had a powerful motive to prevent their real purpose from being
discovered. For these were not public men, despite their prominence in the
affairs of the American nation. Although they worked closely together they
were most often to be found meeting privately in each other's homes, Clubs,
and yachts, or at exclusive resorts such as the Jekyll Island Club in
Georgia, where they knew they could make their plans free from public gaze.
When they did correspond, which was infrequently, their letters often ended
with the warning to each other: "read and burn." The McKinley Papers in the
Library of Congress are the skimpiest of the American Presidential
Collections. Aldrich's Papers, were, at his demand, sealed for fifty years
after his death, and thereafter only portions were made available to the
public. The Havemeyer Papers remain unavailable despite their historic
importance to five nations.
Second, those few who were party to what Francisco and Fast call "the
conspiracy" had an overwhelmingly powerful motive to fabricate colonial
objectives which they thought would win popular support for their policies.
African workers were told that imperialism would be. to their advantage in
terms of higher wages and steady employment as industry, geared up to supply
the markets of the East. American farmers were told cotton and wheat prices
would inevitably rise as American farm products carved out markets in Asia.
Filipinos were told it was all being dome for their own good.
Third, Filipinos suffered special handicaps when it came to developing an
analysis of what had happened to their country. The greatest of these was a
highly successful system of censorship, sometimes explicit, sometimes de
facto which prohibited any independent Filipino investigation of the facts
surrounding American imperialism until decades after the event. The American
Commander in the Philippine-American War, General Arthur McArthur, remarked
in a candid moment that it Would take "ten years of bayonet treatment" to
subdue the Filipinos and another three generations of propagandizing to
eliminate from the Filipino mind consciousness of what had happened.
Even the documents of our own participation in the anti-imperialist
struggle were denied to us. Approximately 650 file cases pertaining to all
aspects of the Government of the Republic of the Philippines were seized by
the Americans at the turn of the century and removed to Washington where for
decades they remained under lock and key.
It should come as little comfort for us to discover that the American
people themselves do not know the real nature of their imperial past. The
fact that a giant, politically well-connected corporate monopoly, which by
1898 had al-ready compiled a sorry history of corporate illegality, was the
overwhelming beneficiary, in specific dollars and cents terms, of the
McKinley Government's colonial policy -is not even hinted at in any standard
American history text or reference, book to this day. Even so major a figure
as Nelson Aldrich, a man who had so much to do with the development and
planning of American Indus-trialization in the Civil War era and a man who
held supreme political power for the better part of his long political
career, has been largely ignored by most American historians.
Francisco and Fast spent eight years in the archives of New York, Washington
and London to compile the research which has resulted in this volume. I know
from my long conversations with them both that in the early years, they were,
often frustrated at their inability to locate important pieces in what was
developing into a giant jigsaw, but missing documents and torn-out pages
merely increased their determination to discover the true answers to the
questions they had posed.
This painstakingly-researched volume is a fascinating and instructive account
of economic power and how it shapes government policy. It is also an
important step forward in developing a deeper understanding of a crucial
period of Philippine history. I believe it deserves serious attention.
Renato Constantino
Quezon City
February 4, 1984
INTRODUCTION
It is a most curious and interesting fact that no other food product used by
man enters so largely into the domain of state and International politics.
Sugar has enjoyed the dubious distinction of being "mixed up with politics"
from the days of Napoleon to 'the time of the Sugar Trust.
Charles A. Crampton[1]
T.R. got up a roundrobin to the President and asked for the amateur warriors
to be sent home and leave the dirtywork to the regulars who were digging
trenches and shovelling crap and fighting malaria and dysentery and
yellowjack to make Cuba cozy for the Sugar Trust.
John R. Dos Passos[2]
Mankind's affection for the white chemicals is easily documented. Legal or
not, socially approved or not, physically harmful or not, manufacture and
consumption of aspirin, cocaine, heroin, librium/valium, monosodium glutamate
and salt have been the cause of much happiness, much-misery, much confusion
and much controversy over many, many years.
By rights another white powder crystal ought to be added to our list a
substance which, for historical reasons primarily, is perhaps the least
controversial of the above, but which, given its properties would undoubtedly
rank-as by far the most controversial of all were it to be introduced as a
new product to the world's markets today. Among the numerous health problems
which are directly attributed to this particular substance are:
1) The propensity to shorten the life-span of the user population by between
ten and nineteen years, based on evidence obtained by repeated experiments on
laboratory animals.
2) The propensity, to cause complicated glandular reactions in ap-proximately
two-per cent of the user population; reactions which require a constant and
rigidly enforced" program of daily medication and severe dietary
restrictions to avoid shock and coma.
3) The propensity to promote obesity, malnutrition and heart disease (the
leading cause of death in many advanced countries such as the United States)
based on a high statistical correlation and other convincing evidence.
4) The propensity to ravage certain cell structures of the human body after
even relatively brief usage of the chemical. Destruction of the hardest
surfaces of the body (tooth enamel) is indeed often the first indication of
the deleterious effects of consumption of the substance in question.
5) An addictive quality so profound and usage so widespread in many countries
that scientific studies of the effect, of the chemical in question on diet
and behavior have been severely hampered by the inability to amass a
sufficient number of non-users to constitute a scientifically valid control
group, i.e. entire populations get wiped out.
We are, of course, talking about sugar, the first drug given to baby, the
drug children clamor for most, the drug teenagers abuse the most, the only
drug available by the bowlful in public places. The drug which is laced into
every conceivable packaged and processed food and drink, ostensibly to
"improve flavor," but possibly to meet a physical (and psychological) craving
so powerful that even given unlimited access, per capita consumption of the
chemical regularly exceeds 100 pounds per annum, or from a slightly different
perspective, so powerful that over 20% of caloric intake on average (up to
50% in children) across the population consists of the nutritionally
worthless ("empty calories") substance. Or, by yet another perspective a drug
so powerful and of such widespread appeal (addiction?) that "everyone likes
it." Replace "like" with "need" and it becomes clearer why eminent
researchers such as John Yudkin, Professor of Physiology at London
University's Department of Nutrition and Dietetics complain of difficulty in
finding a few hundred people in the entire British Isles (population 55
million) who do not ingest sugar as a normal and regular part of the diet, in
order to verify and corroborate studies on sugar's effect on the mind. This
experience has prompted Prof. Yudkin to state:
If only a fraction of what Is already known about the effects of sugar were
to be revealed In relation to any other material used as a food additive,
that material would promptly be banned.[3]
Sugar is so popular that it has surpassed all others in the rapidity with
which it has spread across the globe, resulting in a fifty-fold increase in
world consumption over the past 150 years, No other foodstuff of any kind has
come close to matching those figures. Moreover, sugar is a commodity the
history of which must be bracketed with some of mankind's worst forms of
exploitation. The equation of sugar and slavery, for example, has been
steeped into four hundred years of Caribbean history, By the early nineteenth
century more than half of the world's sugar was the product of slave labor.
Even after the abolition of slavery, the "vital requirement" (in the words of
one sugar economist) for the successful production of sugar was (and
continues to be) abundant cheap labor.[4]
How did the substance sugar get to achieve so important a position in our
lives? The reasons, are mostly historical and mostly accidental, but the
curious might be tempted to inquire into the background of such an obviously
potent force in society as the sugar manufacturers and ask who they were,
what they wanted, and just how they fit into the scheme of things, so to
speak. This his-tory, or more precisely, an aspect of this history, is what
this book is about.
This book is also about the burst of American imperial expansion which
occurred in the late nineteenth century and which has long troubled
historians who have studied the period. The seizure of colonies such as the
Philippines and Puerto Rico, the acquisition of Hawaii and other Pacific
islands and the assumption of neo-colonial control over Cuba (all in the
space of less than a year), were such a sharp departure from America's
rhetorically anti-imperialist and objectively anti-colonialist traditions
that historians have had persistent difficulty in discovering and analyzing
the root causes for the policy of colonial expansion.
Ironically, common opinion on the matter today closely approximates the
ideological orthodoxy prevalent in the U.S. at the turn of the century. Put
at its most simplistic form, it argues that America's imperial venture was
but a momentary "aberration" from an anti-colonial tradition. This
aberration, it is argued, was the dual creation of a jingoist "yellow" press
and a popular sense of altruism for the plight of the Cuban rebels, then
struggling to free themselves from the hegemony of decadent Spain. At the
time of events American officials carefully emphasized the alleged
"accidental" aspects of the situation which led to war with Spain. President
William McKinley, for example, was fond of repeating his own view: "the
fortunes of war" he said, had "thrown upon this nation an unsought trust ...
a moral as well as a material responsibility toward these millions whom we
have freed from an oppressive yoke.”[5] With the passage of eighty years this
strikes the modern reader as overblown to say the least, but the issue
remains as to what degree the "fortunes of war" were responsible for the
events in 1898.
'McKinley's facile accounting of events has not, of course, gone
unchallenged, and varying theories and interpretations have been advanced
over the years suggesting alternative explanations. One of the earliest of
such efforts was based on the theory of "Manifest Destiny" and was given its
most accurate expression in the work of historian Frederick Jackson Turner.
Turner theorized that peculiarly American "traits" such as "inquisitiveness,"
"pragmatism," and "inventiveness" were stimulated by the rigors of frontier
life. With the settling of the West and the closing of the frontier, it was
(in his words) "manifest" that these same traits would lead Americans to hop
oceans in order to continue their mission civIlisatrice.[6]
Although McKinley's notion of an "unsought trust" would appear to be in
direct contradiction with Turner's determinist views, American expansionists
were early and enthusiastic supporters of what became known as the "Turner
Thesis." Although hardly read today, Turner's postulations have achieved a
remarkable durability in spite of the highly subjective nature of his ideas
and the extremely questionable selection of evidence he forwarded to support
them."
Turner's metaphysical approach did not satisfy everyone, even when it was
first advanced. An undercurrent of opinion, poorly articulated at the time of
events, equated American imperialism with American capitalism, and sought
explanations by investigations in this direction. In later years, inquiries
of this nature became more systematic, notably with the publication in 1936
of Julius W. Pratt's Expansionists of 1898. 8 Pratt set about to determine
whether economic motives played a significant part in the expansionist
policies pursued at the turn of the century, and to this end investigated
business sentiment as reflected in Wall Street and, trade publications prior
to and during the Spanish-American war. On the basis of this evidence, Pratt
concluded (correctly in our view) that major sectors of capital, especially'
in the East, were at best indifferent to and in some cases actively hostile
to the prospect of war at the close of 1897. The Cuban situation, Pratt
discovered, was generally viewed by business as a threat to a return to full
prosperity after four years of economic depression. Indeed, at times Will
Street came under outspoken attack due to a perceived lack of sympathy for
Cuba's fate. On the strength of his investigation Pratt concluded, "the only
important business interests (other than the business of sensational
journalism) which clamored for intervention in Cuba were those directly or
indirectly concerned in the Cuban sugar industry."
The 'splendid little war" with Spain ended on equable terms insofar as
American businessmen were concerned. The conflict also proved unwarranted.
After the war, according to Pratt, business sentiment was much more favorably
disposed toward the acquisition of the Philippines, especially when it was
presented as a springboard for the economic penetration of China. For modern
historians, understandably reluctant to accept McKinley's disingenuous
statements at face value and who foe similar reasons find difficulty in
accepting Turner's theories. As the final word on the matter, the China
Thesis did indeed appear to offer a reasonable explanation for the course of
events.
This theme has been taken up by a number of writers, historian Thomas
McCormick giving perhaps fullest expression to the view that China held the
key to imperial motivation. He wrote in 1963: "Hawaii, Wake, Guam and the
Philippines were not taken principally for their own economic worth ... They
were obtained, instead largely in an eclectic effort to construct a system of
coaling, cable and naval stations into an integrated trade route which could
facilitate realization of America's one overriding ambition in the Pacific —
the penetration and ultimately, the domination of the fabled China market.""
Interestingly, McKinley's "unsought trust" was by now transmogrified by
historical perspective into McCormick's "overriding ambition." Nevertheless,
the China Thesis fits rather* neatly into the picture; one could accept
aspects of McKinley's apologia at face value and still conclude that economic
and commercial considerations were also factors contributing to the
development of colonial policy.
The sequence of events in such an evaluation assumes great importance. To
accept the view (implied in McCormick and in numerous other works) that
American policy was motivated by altruistic concern prior to and during U.S.
participation in the war in Cuba, and that commercial and economic factors
came to be major considerations only afterward, is crucial in determining
one's views as to the whole nature of American imperialism as it existed at
the turn of the century. Acceptance of the now widely held view that American
economic motivation in 1898 was no more than a belated effort to secure such
commercial advantages as the de facto postwar situation presented,
necessarily implies a benign view of the American imperialist phenomenon.
Our, inquiry into this question was prompted by a certain feeling of unease
at what has become the orthodox interpretation of motive surrounding the 1898
war. This orthodoxy is now somewhat difficult to encapsulate as it has come
to include elements of McKinley, Turner, Pratt, et al, the China Thesis,
jingoism, New York newspaper circulation wars, the supposed need for overseas
markets for American manufactured goods, the influence of the Protestant
Mission Board, Alfred Mahan's "Big Navy" advocates, and Teddy Roosevelt's
desire to cut a swath through history. There are sufficient grains of truth
in each of the above so that In toto a plausible explanation is not only
possible but positively fascinating.
Investigation, however, uncovers contradictions which are difficult if not
impossible to reconcile. Rarely in this schema for example, is the dramatic
chain of events which saw America incorporate a farflung island empire
related to the internal political and economic configurations such as existed
in the U.S. at the' time. What were, in fact, the specific needs of American
capitalism vis a vis empire? Which sectors of the, American economy favored
colonialism and which opposed it and why? What were the priorities of the
McKinley Administration, taking office in 1897 after the most bitterly
contested presidential election since the Civil War? How did the tariff and
the silver question — burning domestic political issues of the decade —
relate to the sudden enthusiasm for empire?
On a more personal level, we hear much of the role of Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge,
considered by many to have been a leading architect of the "Large Policy" of
colonial expansion. But Lodge was very much a junior member of the Senate in
1898, and we find that his power did not begin to approach that of Nelson
Aldrich, Chairman of the Finance Committee, Chairman of the Republican
Steering Committee, and acknowledged "Political Manager of the Republican
Party." Related to the Rockefellers, by marriage of his daughter, Aldrich was
a multimillionaire in his own right, a fortune he accumulated as business
partner of Sugar Trust magnate Henry Havemeyer. Aldrich and his friends had a
direct and demonstrable stake in the colonial experiment but rarely has his
interest in the matter been analyzed.
Sometimes the sequence of events itself is puzzling. In June 1898, for
example, when McKinley sent to the Senate a treaty for the annexation of
Hawaii, he urged ratification on the ground that incorporation of the islands
was necessary to support Dewey's squadron, then at anchor in Manila Bay. Why?
Why was the same treaty submitted quite unexpectedly exactly a year earlier,
in the middle of an acrimonious tariff debate over the sugar schedule, and
before there was any thought of protecting an American fleet in Manila? More
significantly perhaps, why was McKinley seemingly determined to force a war
upon Spain, even after the latter had capitulated to the sum of American
demands? Demands which were in fact so onerous that American diplomats, who
had earlier predicted that Spain would never meet them, were surprised and
delighted when ' she did. Years after the war, Stewart Woodford, McKinley's
Minister to Spain, was still angry enough to make the following remarks:
When I sent that last cable to McKinley I thought I should wake up the next
morning" to find myself acclaimed all over the United States for having
achieved the greatest diplomatic victory In our history — the surrender of
the proud Castilian nation. I heard only that the President would lay the
matter before Congress — without a word of personal congratulation. The next
thing I knew he went before Congress, failed to tell it all that I had
accomplished, and practically asked for the declaration of hostilities.
McKinley claimed in his public pronouncements that he arrived at the
conclusion that the U.S. must ultimately retain the Philippines in November,
1898. How does this reconcile with the Administration's contingency plans to
seize the Archipelago more than a year earlier, many months prior to the
advent of the Spanish-American War? Why the Philippines as opposed to targets
closer to the Cuban war zone than the Pacific colony, 10,000 miles distant?
Of what special importance was the Philippines that its conquest required the
ultimate commitment of nearly one quarter of a million U.S. troops in a long
and bitter war against the indigenous people who were literally decimated in
the process?,
Regarding China, several puzzling questions arise. If the American business
community was as interested in penetrating the fabled China market as has
been supposed, why was it necessary for McKinley to expend ceaseless energy
to convince businessmen of this supposedly self-evident fact? How do we
analyze the subsequent failure of American business to participate in any
significant way in the Chinese economy?" What conclusions can be drawn from
juxtaposing the lack of commercial interest in China with the enormous and
continuing flow of American investment in Cuba at the same time? How do we
evaluate the acrimonious debates in Congress over U.S. "commercial relations"
(i.e. the sugar tariff) with the new possessions, debates which bitterly
split the Republican Party for more than six years, a split that became so
severe that in one particular election dozens of GOP congressmen found
themselves denied renomination by their own party?
Such questions, as the reader will appreciate, are easier to raise than
answer. Insofar as answers can be found it seems to us they must be sought
not by treating American foreign policy of the period as an isolated
phenomenon, an aberration, or an accidental roll of the celestial dice.
Rather, the imperialist movement must, in our view, be firmly fixed within
the context of domestic U.S. political and economic realities. What follows,
then, is in effort to examine the interrelationship between policy
formulation, domestic political and economic concerns, and the corporate
requirements of the Sugar Trust — the theme of this work.
The sugar industry, more especially the machinations of the American Sugar
Refining Company, appear to us to be a much neglected factor in the study of
the history of this period. Sugar was by far the most "political" of all the
major commodities of the day. As one sugar economist of the period lamented:
"Taxes, tariff duties, drawback duties, bounties, export bounties — these
with their concomitants, trusts, syndicates and cartels — are what have upset
and bedeviled the natural order of things."" The very complexity of the sugar
industry is, we feel, an important reason why chroniclers of the period have
tended to overlook its importance. Teddy Roosevelt's histrionics and the New
York newspaper war between Hearst's Journal and Pulitzer's World are but two
aspects of the era which are intrinsically more interesting than "taxes,
tariff duties, drawback duties . . ." and so forth. But as the reader will
appreciate, the latter are the bricks and mortar of empire. We take the
opportunity now to warn readers that they will be subjected to a fairly close
study 0 the nature of the sugar industry and of the tariff debates of the
period. For this we do not apologize, under the assumption that if
imperialism is indeed the highest stage of capitalism, we have an obligation
to attempt to understand it in dollars and cents terms. Where possible, we
have consigned esoterica to footnotes.
A number of people had their hands on this manuscript and they deserve
mention here for their comments and suggestions. Our appreciation and thanks
go to Jim Richardson, Anne Hansen, Melanie Beresford, jasmine Rose Innes,
'Eric Hobsbawm, Victor Kiernan and the late Malcolm Caldwell, all of whom
performed a service all writers legitimately value.
Renato Constantino had the patience to see this manuscript through from the
beginning. By his encouragement he is largely responsible for the fact that
this book now exists. Letizia Constantino did the proofs and weeded out more
typos, tortured syntax' and nonsensical Americanisms than she deserves to
have had to put up with. Our daughter Lenora, now an adult, was not yet a
teen-ager when work on this project commenced We apologize for the missing
links we inevitably created in her life, and we appreciate the forebearance
and good humor she manifested throughout.
Luzviminda Bartolome Francisco
Jonathan Shepard Fast
April 1983
Mendocino County, California
Footnotes:
1. From Charles A. Crampton, "Sugar and the New Colonies," The Forum, Vol.
32, Nov., 1901, R. 283.
2. John R. Dos Passos, U.S.A., (Boston, 1930), R. 128. Dos Passos, given his
father's connections, was in a position to know whereof he spoke.
3. See John Yudkin, Pure White and Deadly: The Problem of sugar (London,
1972). See also, William Dufty, Sugar Blues (New York, 1975).
4. W. R. Aykroyd, Sweet Malefactor. Sugar, slavery and Human SocietY
(London, 1967), p.23.
5. McKinley's Message to Congress, Dec, 3, 1900, in 56:2 Cong. Record Feb.
26, 1967), R. 3022.
6. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier In American Histoty (N.Y., 1921),
R. 37.
7. For a useful critique see George W. Pierson, "The Frontier and American
institutions: A Criticism of the Turner Theory," in George R. Taylor (ed.),
The Turner Thesis (Boston, 1956).
8. See Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898 (Baltimore, 1936).
9. Ibid., R. 252.
10. Thomas McCormick, "Insular Imperialism and the Open Door: China Market
and the Spanish-American War," PacIfic Historical Review, Vol. 32, May, 1963,
pp. 155-69.
11. Quoted In Oswald G. Villard, Fighting Years (N.Y., 1939), R . 136-7.
12. By 1904 the U.S. was exporting an insignificant $12.8m worth of goods to
China, representing less than one per cent of total U.S. exports. "Foreign
Commerce and Navigation of the U.S.," 58:3 House Doc 13, Vol. 1, 1905, pp.
140-1. As late at 1914, U.S. trade with China accounted for less than one per
cent of total U.S. foreign trade. Harold U. Faulkner, American Economic
History (N.Y., 1960), R. 570.,
13. Byron W. Holt, "The World's Sugar Problem," 57:1 Senate Doc. 437, 1902,
R. 2.
pps. i-xii
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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