In an essay
titled “Expansion and Peace” originally published on December 21, 1899,
Theodore Roosevelt offered this defense of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines:
the expansion of
a civilized nation has invariably meant the growth of the area in which peace
is normal throughout the world. The same
will be true of the Philippines. If the
men who have counseled national degradation, national dishonor, by urging us to
leave the Philippines and put the Aguinaldan oligarchy in control of those
islands, could have their way, we should merely turn them over to rapine and
bloodshed until some stronger, manlier power stepped in to do the task we had
shown ourselves fearful of performing.
But, as it is, this country will keep the islands and will establish
therein a stable and orderly government, so that one more fair spot of the
world’s surface shall have been snatched from the forces of darkness. Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the
cause of peace.
It is worth
noting here how Roosevelt uses Enlightenment rhetoric and imagery. U.S. expansion, he argues, is an enlightening
prospect that promises to “snatch” portions of the world’s surface “from the
forces of darkness.” Empire, in this
mode, is literally a matter of enlightening.
But in this, as in other representative passages of Roosevelt’s epic
prose, he is ultimately less concerned with the enlightenment of those who live
in darkness on far away islands than he is with those among his fellow
countrymen who, due to either moral depravity or intellectual obtuseness,
simply refuse or are incapable of seeing the radiant light of American
imperialism. In the passage at hand, he
depicts American anti-imperialists as men who have counseled “national
degradation” and “national dishonor”.
In his famous
essay of 1899, “The Strenuous Life”, he depicts the anti-imperialists in
similarly unflattering terms:
The timid man,
the lazy man, the man who distrusts his country, the over-civilized man, who
has lost the great fighting, masterful virtues, the ignorant man, and the man
of dull mind, whose soul is incapable of feeling the mighty lift that thrills
‘stern men with empires in their brains’ –all these, of course, shrink from seeing
us build a navy and an army adequate to our needs; shrink from seeing us do our
share of the world’s work, by bringing order out of chaos in the great, fair
tropic islands from which the valor of our soldiers and sailors has driven the
Spanish flag. These are the men who fear
the strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth
leading.
With this
rhetoric of courageous and strenuous effort, Roosevelt seeks to construct a
modern heroic type: the imperial civilizer; but this would-be modern hero
actually reverts back to pre-modern forms of heroism celebrated centuries
before by Spanish imperial apologists who conceived of their own empire in the
Americas as the divinely sanctioned and heroic work of self-sacrificing saints
and crusading conquistadors. By means of
such heroic rhetoric, Roosevelt sought, not unlike the Spaniards several centuries
before him, to elevate the adventurer and even the criminal to the status of an
absolute moral conscience. This totalizing and absolutist conception of the
imperial hero is tainted, no doubt, with the universalism of Enlightenment
moral and political thought. But
Roosevelt’s heroes of American imperialism are not modern-day Prometheans who
dare to steal the light of the gods in order to improve the lot of mankind with
their modern science and technological know-how; they are rather pre-modern
heroes, bent on imposing the tyrannical spirit of their “strenuous way of life”
on those unfortunate enough to come face to face with them in a struggle to
retain their own freedom.
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