U.S. From 1865: Historiography Essay

Allison Brown HIST 1221 Dr. Hampton 19 February, 2023 Historiography Essay Notions of race, white supremacy, and imperialism all sit at the center of the debate regarding the United States’ entry onto the world stage, as a “superpower” or alternatively a colonial power, with expansion into Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The historical works of Painter, Williams, Kramer, and Miller all offer insights into both how and why the US placed white supremacy and racial motivations at the heart of its imperial projects. This essay will continually offer a historiographical analysis of these works and then draw conclusions on how race was a key factor in the growth of the American Empire at the turn of the century. To begin, Painter’s academic work Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (1987) more broadly discusses the history of the US during these transformative decades and how this period shaped the US’ global influence and military stature. Chapter The five, White Man’s Burden, discusses how the transformation of an “old America” to the new, expansionist order 1 through various case studies of the US empire in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines. Painter builds his argument from a myriad of sources including others’ written historical publications, the Congressional Record, and newspapers from the American Chronicle. The chapter examines American military campaigns and expansion in the three aforementioned countries by examining political theory from scholars such as Alfred Mahan who “preached the English virtues — empire, 2 military preparedness, and a big navy.” Parallel to political theory, Painter includes political discourse to compare de jure and de facto agreements and discrepancies between different political 1 Painter, Nell Irvin.Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. W.W. Norton & Co, 1987, pg. 141 2 Painter, Nell Irvin.Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. W.W. Norton & Co, 1987, pg. 142 1 parties and actors involved. Painter’s broader argument centers around the systematic shift, both abroad and domestically, the US underwent during these decades in utilizing race or the “white man’s burden” as a means for political transformation and exclusion. Key to this development is a discourse between different stakeholders in the US, “To southern Democrats, Republican espousal of imperialism implied, first, that nonwhite suffrage was wrong and second, that the white 3 supremacist order in the South, which denied was correct in its entirety.” By connecting race and white supremacy in the American South as well as imperialistic projects, Painter helps to make a historical through-line of white supremacy. Williams’ article, United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism (1980) looks inward to the US to examine how policy towards American Indians in the 19th century on the American frontier, through an attack on individual nations’ sovereignty under the rule of law, led to the consolidation of mentalities on imperialism and white supremacy for the US domestically and abroad. To build his argument, Williams utilizes a number of sources including numerous Supreme Court decisions and dissents, the work of other historians, and texts on American presidents. At the start, Williams’ work adds to the arguments of Painter, who associated US mentalities towards race domestically to the creation of an empire, “whether the nation ‘stumbled’ into empire” or established its imperial 4 stronghold another way. Not dissimilar to Painter, Williams examines the discourse occurring in Congress regarding the expansion of the US globally as well as policies towards American Indians. Often congressional debates would make comparisons between American Indians and Filipinos. These debates used vehemently racist and problematic comparisons between these populations, “nearly one-fourth of Filipinos were ‘semicivilized’ … ‘the rest of the population is as ignorant and 3 Painter, Nell Irvin.Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919. W.W. Norton & Co, 1987, pg. 162 4 Williams, Walter L. “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism.” The Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (March 1980) pg. 811 2 savage as the aboriginal Indians…” even President Roosevelt continually used language similar to Senators previous to communicate that “he saw the American position in the Philippines as exactly like the expansions over Indians, and he wrote that if whites were ‘morally bound to abandon the 5 Philippines, we were also morally bound to abandon Arizona to the Apaches.” Williams’ work, this excerpt, in particular, relates to Painter’s work in establishing the “White man’s burden” whose burden knows no bounds. At the close of his work, Williams offers that his essay “suggests a new perspective on US diplomatic history, viewed from an Indian perspective … historians might view Philippine annexation as the last episode of the 19th-century pattern of territorial acquisition and 6 direct political rule of subject peoples.” Within the context of perceptions of American diplomatic histories, in the historical journal Diplomatic History, Kramer publishes Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War (2006). Looking to a more modern period, as opposed to the previous works of Painter and Williams, Kramer begins his work in 1902 with a critical analysis of a speech given by President Roosevelt where “colonial violence [was placed] at the heart of American nation building.”7 More broadly, Kramer argues that the Philippine-American War was a race war rationalized to the US public as one of racial superiority necessary for not only the protection of the US but against global racial combatants. Evidence for this essay range from government reports, political cartoons, the work of other historians, social histories or recordings from soldiers, political speeches, and reports from the Philippines. Kramer’s addition to historiography on the war in the Philippines addresses race and racism directly not only derived from social histories but from public and political histories as well. Kramer draws several 5 Williams, Walter L. “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism.” The Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (March 1980) pg. 823 6 Williams, Walter L. “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism.” The Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (March 1980) pg. 830 7 Kramer, Paul A. “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War.” Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (April 2006) pg. 169 3 historiographically important conclusions from these sources, all looking at the ways racial stereotypes and racism manifested violently in military occupations. One of these conclusions in the impacts of how the US soldiers’ adaptation of war as “hunting” coupled with frustrations of a lack of “marital masculinity” led to overwhelming violence in the Philippines, “All at once, a language 8 of hunting animalized Filipinos, made sense of guerrilla war.” Kramer’s work builds on that of Painter and Williams in a way that explicitly allows the author to denote the annexation of the Philippines as a racial, imperial project with the historiographical precedents of a “race-war” established in academia decades prior. Last, Miller’s work From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (2011) in Chapter 6, Building an Imperial Iconography: Race, paternalism, and the Symbols of Empire contribute a new, modern historical perspective on the historiography discussed prior. Miller’s chapter discusses how political cartoons and forms of entertainment in 1898-1899 shaped notions of race during the Spanish-American War as well as race in the American South to establish white supremacist campaigns which consolidated racial 9 ideologies necessary for the US imperial projects in the decades following. Miller refers to this process in which racial identities coupled with a tense moment in history solidified for some Americans as “Anglo-Saxonism” a term new to this paper’s historiography. By utilizing a number of primary documents, Miller constructs an argument of how Filipinos, Cubans, and African Americans were all portrayed as threats to American democracy and order to justify segregation as 10 well as US guardianship in the colonies. Miller’s work additionally builds off of the notion of the “white man’s burden” in new ways to the historiographical narrative which expands the list of 8 Kramer, Paul A. “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War.” Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (April 2006) pg. 203 9 Miller, Bonnie M. From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898.University of Massachusetts Press, 2011, pg. 190 10 Miller, Bonnie M. From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898.University of Massachusetts Press, 2011, pg. 224 4 burdens and where those burdens arise in ways that further racialized previous debates and public discourse. Miller’s argument centers around political cartoons and makes the conclusion that, “... the range of available images in the cultural repertoire and their [cartoon artists] revealing selections 11 bring to light the efforts of artists to shape a collective visual vocabulary of empire.” More broadly, Miller also makes conclusions connecting previous works of Williams and Kramer in particular with relevance to internal US matters, that this “visual vocabulary” instilled in the public a highly racial discourse which rationalized US imperialism and interventions involving race. Looking to draw conclusions regarding these historical works and how they each reveal US mentalities towards race and imperialism, each work added to the dialogue a new understanding of this history. Painter first examines the notion of the “white man’s burden” and how this mentality impacts the US overseas in annexation projects, Williams looks domestically at American Indians to consider who is “uncivilized” as a justification for racial domination, Kramer examines how colonial violence was central to the US domestic development and Miller with “Anglo-Saxonism” and the role which cultural influences instilled racial stereotypes and discontempt in the American public. Each of these historiographical understandings helps modern-day historians and readers further understand the means by which racial hierarchies were deployed both at home and abroad. These notions of race and white supremacy were critical in overseas annexation and imperial projects and domestically served as the foundation for continued, and worsened, separation of American Indians, African Americans, and racialized “others” such as immigrants or migrant workers. This foundation served as the justification for American influence at the turn of the century and would shape American racial discourses and justification for decades to come. 11 Miller, Bonnie M. From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898.University of Massachusetts Press, 2011, pg. 228 5 6