Stephen Kinzer on the racist roots of American imperialism

The first wave of American "regime change" operations, which lasted from 1893 to 1911, was propelled largely by the search for resources, markets, and commercial opportunities.  Not all of the early imperialists, however, were the tools of big business.  Roosevelt, Lodge, and Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan were moved by what they considered to be the transcendent imperatives of history.  Expanding, they believed, was simply what great nations did.  In their minds, promoting commerce and defending national security fused into what one historian has called "an aggressive national egoism and a romantic attachment to national power."  They considered themselves nothing less than instruments of destiny and Providence.

The missionary instinct was already deeply ingrained in the American psyche.  From the time John Winthrop proclaimed his dream of building a "city upon the hill" to which the world would look for inspiration, Americans have considered themselves a special people.  At the end of the nineteenth century, many came to believe they had a duty to civilize needy savages and rescue exploited masses from oppression.  Rudyard Kipling encouraged their missionary spirit with a famous poem published in McClure's Magazine as the debate over annexing the Philippines began.

Take up the White Man's burden

Send forth the best ye breed,

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild,

Your new-caught sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child

Americans have a profoundly compassionate side.  Many not only appreciate the freedom and prosperity with which they have been blessed but fervently wish to share their good fortune with others.  Time and again, they have proved willing to support foreign interventions that are presented as missions to rescue less fortunate people.

When President McKinley said he was going to war in Cuba to stop "oppression at our very doors," Americans cheered.  They did so again a decade later, when the Taft administration declared that it was deposing the government of Nicaragua in order to impose "republican institutions" and promote "real patriotism."  Since then, every time the United States has set out to overthrow a foreign government, its leaders have insisted that they are acting not to expand American power but to help people who are suffering.

This paternalism was often mixed with racism.  Many Americans considered Latin Americans and Pacific islanders to be "colored" natives in need of guidance from whites.  In a nation whose black population was systematically repressed, and where racial prejudice was widespread, this view helped many people accept the need for the United States to dominate foreign countries.

Speeches justifying American expansionism on the grounds of the white race's presumed superiority were staples of political discourse in the 1890s.  Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana described expansion as part of a natural process, "the disappearance of debased civilizations and decaying races before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of man."  Representative Charles Cochrane of Mississippi spoke of "the onward march of the indomitable race that founded this Republic" and predicted "the conquest of the world by the Aryan races."  When he finished his speech, the House burst into applause.

~ Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, pp. 83-84