More Twisting of Imperial History

Forget the debate about whether the United States is a demonic empire today--maybe the question is whether we ever really were. Were I to accept what I was taught in history class today, I would believe that the US flirted with imperialism and then rejected it, scurrying back to a kind isolationism. “Oh, we’re going to expand… oh, we don’t like this,” my teacher said, imitating the US supposedly shying away from empire after running up against Filipino resistance at the turn of the century. He also described the US shift to being an imperial power as happening overnight, just in the course of the Spanish-American War. I pointed out that we had been meddling in Hawaii and had overthrown their government years before that. He acknowledged that point, but reiterated: “Still, I think it is overnight.” 

Not only is history taught in a vacuum relative to the present day, is it now comprised of a string of surprising and unrelated incidents without causes or effects? The US did not wake up and decide to become an imperial power one bright morning in 1898. There are precedents (Hawaii, for one) and ideologies wrapped around every action we’ve ever taken. What was the purpose of all those cause-and-effect charts we used to make, if not to teach us that understanding context is critical? When did we unlearn that?

Another aspect of this problem is to treat historical events as inevitabilities, as though whatever mysterious forces propelled our policies were inexorable and nonnegotiable. “After World War II they had to stay expanded, they had no choice,” said my teacher. This statement trails with it the idea of the US as the reluctant superpower, humbly fulfilling the hegemonic duty we didn’t ask for. In World War I “Wilson wanted to make the world safe for democracy,” but apparently we decided afterwards that “we don’t like being a world power.” However, isolationist sentiment within a country--the Anti-Imperialist League in the early twentieth century, for example--does not translate to a government policy opposed to imperialism. You’d think if it were the case that we disliked being a world power, we could have done something to remedy that horrible state. You’d think the Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary, the Washington Consensus, and our long record of intervening in other people’s affairs might imply that we actually enjoyed and took steps to entrench our world-power role. 

Also, I might make note of the fact that “making the world safe for democracy” is not an outdated or repudiated reason for making war. In Grenada, in Panama, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, isn’t that what we were supposedly trying to do?

The problems with the narrative of history we’re being taught are often insidious and so quiet, because intertwined with US-as-reluctant-superpower rhetoric are, admittedly, criticisms of US policy. Telling just enough of the story behind the curtain allows the impression that this narrative of history is not only accurate but bold or revisionist, when it’s really still quite adherent to the status quo. My teacher can mention that in the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine and Roosevelt Corollary, the US quite often invaded and occupied Latin American countries and conducted regime change, but that criticism leaves much unsaid. He named three countries we wronged with invasions or occupations--Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua--but the US has meddled with or overthrown the governments of every country in Latin America, some multiple times. Nor is this imperial behavior in that region a thing of the past--in 2009, the US was involved in supporting a coup against democratically elected president Zelaya in Honduras. 

But the subtle power of language changes the story: the US invades in Latin America to “stabilize” governments and replace ones that weren’t “in our best interests.” There are reasons to be tactful or not appear too biased when teaching history--but this isn’t teaching history. It’s blurring it. It’s creating false equivalencies and shaky but unquestioned narratives. It’s elective amnesia--but because of the military style our education system practices, we as students are required to accept and regurgitate information without measuring its levels of truth. The indoctrinators pass on their preferred state of amnesia to the next generation, and both the obliteration of history and the contextless interpretations of the present continue.

Recognizing the Legacy of US Imperialism

In many ways, the rise of US imperialism in the 1890s is as much our origin story as is the often-recounted and glorified Revolutionary War. Imperialism is a less shiny tale, less given to celebration, but in the oft-forgotten episodes of imperial violence (such as the overthrow of Hawaii, the Spanish-American War, and the brutalizing of the Philippines) are the roots of current US foreign policy and the first seeds of a mentality that would spawn so much blowback. 
 
Given the historical importance and present-day relevance, it is crucial that imperialism be taught well and thoroughly in schools. Yet my textbook calls the coup that deposed Queen Liliuokalani in Hawaii a “revolution,” and states that she “yielded her authority,” not that she was subverted, betrayed, and overthrown. My history class discusses imperialism in some kind of strange vacuum--we recognize that McKinley’s humanitarian-esque rationales for conquest are facades, and we talked about the hypocrisy of the Anti-Imperialist League’s disavowal of the Philippines war but not of the genocide of Indigenous people in the US. What we don’t talk about--what history curricula seem to have a curious amnesia for--is the legacy of imperialism. Does it not warrant shock that not only was the Philippines not granted the independence we promised during the war, but we kept possession of them until 1946? Should we not talk about how the empire has sprawled, stretched, and expanded to cover the globe? How imperial overthrows of foreign governments are by no means a thing of the past (within the last several years alone, we’ve helped depose governments in Honduras, Libya, Ukraine, just to name three off the top of my head)? How the combination of Manifest Destiny, the Turner thesis, A.T. Mahan’s push for sea power, the Monroe Doctrine/Roosevelt Corollary, and Social Darwinism congealed into the toxic stew of rationales and self-righteousness that uphold our imperial foreign policy? How our “current issues” are always worsening reprises of mistakes we’ve made before and situations that we only seem to exacerbate?

It's always struck me as ironic that despite every war-hawk battle cry that urges us to remember a time we were presumably wronged--from Remember the Maine to Remember Pearl Harbor--we are so memory-challenged when it comes to remembering the wrongs we've inflicted on others, and understanding how they might be coming back to bite us.
 
The idea that the US is an empire still receives pushback from those who want to or do believe that we are a democracy with good intentions and a healthy respect for international law, or who simply dislike the connotations of the term empire. By definition, we are an empire, intervening in affairs not directly tangent to ours and subjugating people at whim, and maintaining dramatic military reach through nearly every point of the world, thanks to our 1000 or so military bases in other people’s countries (as well as our actual remaining colonies). But we don’t learn about this in the school-sanctioned discussion of imperialism. Today my history teacher described how the US double-crossed Emilio Aguinaldo in the Philippines, promising liberation and then brutally subjugating his country. “Do you feel proud of your country?” he asked us, mildly mocking. I doubt we did. But because imperialism is relegated to a distant time period when it was the thing in vogue--come on, everyone was doing it!--it’s hard for us to understand just how proud we should not be. If we don’t condone the Philippines War, then by all means let’s extend that criticism to the modern-day fruits of the exact same policies in play back then.