Introduction
In American historiography of the Gilded Age and its geopolitics, Henry Adams has a reputation for being an imperialist. In 1965, Richard Hofstadter listed Adams alongside genuine imperialists like Theodore Roosevelt, John Hay, and Albert Beveridge in “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny.”Footnote 1 Several years later, Henry Graff claimed in American Imperialism and the Philippine Insurrection that Adams, like the generation of which he was a part, made the architect of naval power Alfred Mahan his “oracle.”Footnote 2 In 1996, John Carlos Rowe wrote that “Adams was an active participant in the crucial diplomatic negotiations that established the United States as the leading economic and political power from the end of the Spanish-American War and the annexation of the Philippines to the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905.”Footnote 3 More recently, John Orr has written that “despite awareness of the effects of Western imperialism on native cultures, he [Adams] could not divest himself of his own imperialist mindset.”Footnote 4 Although some scholars have contravened this image by depicting an Adams more sensitive to the voice of colonized people, the prevailing view is that Adams either implicitly or explicitly supported the American Empire.Footnote 5
The evidence I will marshal here will not prove that Adams was actually an anti-imperialist, but it will reveal his more complex record on this contested subject. From the late nineteenth century to the eve of World War I, the question of an American Empire divided the public mind: Imperialists, missionaries, and businessmen advocated the acquisition of new territories; professors, novelists, and progressive reformers opposed the creation of new dependencies. Henry Adams straddled these rival tendencies.
In what follows, I examine Adams’s critical response to American missionary presence in the Pacific and expansive foreign policy in Cuba, the Philippines, and China around the turn of the twentieth century. While visiting a number of Pacific Islands, Adams responded negatively to Hawaii’s Sabbatarian culture. Adams was equally disturbed by the penetration of America’s political economy throughout the Pacific, symbolized by Hay’s Open Door policy with China.
Encompassing the American religious and economic presence in the Pacific was the influence of Western civilization, which Adams held to be responsible for the depopulation of native societies. Saddened by the extermination of natives throughout the Pacific, Adams was also outraged by atrocities committed by Americans during the Spanish American War in the Philippines. His anti-imperial sentiment is as explicit as Mark Twain’s or George Hoar’s or William James’s. Although Adams did not develop a consistent body of thought on empire, he did advocate for the independence of Cuba and the American withdrawal from the Philippines. In doing so, Adams implicitly recognized the right of Cubans and Filipinos to control their own nation’s destiny. The analysis of Adams’s rhetoric will help situate him between anti-imperialists like Twain, on the one hand, and imperialists like Roosevelt, on the other. Neither a consistent critic of empire nor its full-throated supporter, Adams will emerge as a moderate, one that was too close to the sources of political power to fully develop an independent geopolitics, but far enough to doubt the superiority of a Western civilization.
Adams’s declensionist discourse of civilization placed him outside the bounds of respected opinion. When combined with the anti-civilization rhetoric of Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin (to be explored elsewhere), Adams’s writing reveals a perspective that is unique and challenging. It is unique because, as Frank Ninkovich reminds us, most American intellectuals supported empire and the civilization that buttressed it.Footnote 6 Adams’s challenge consists in his critiquing prominent features of this civilization, such as its political economy and missionary Christianity. Once fully examined, Adams’s rhetoric on empire substantially weakens the contention by scholars that he fully supported the extension of American power around the world. This article will show that Adams’s geopolitical thinking was burdened by considerable doubts regarding American economic, military, and religious powers.
Adams’s skepticism regarding empire adds nuance to the Gilded Age historiography because, to date, scholars have emphasized the voices of imperialists and/or anti-imperialists. Since Adams’s views changed according to circumstance, his writing on foreign policy has been largely overlooked because it cannot be easily slotted into either ideological camp. Absent from a body of literature, Adams was an imperialist whose reputation was built upon little more than his personal association with power brokers, implicit support for expansion, and an undisciplined rhetorical style.Footnote 7 A serious consideration of Adams’s critique of empire resets the scales, producing a thinker whose foreign policy was shaped by his time, but not determined by it. Significantly, Adams’s visit to the places where American power was operative shaped his critical conclusions. His example of an informed commentator with actual experience on the ground is a challenge to anyone wishing to understand imperial might.
In glimpsing an Adams who qualified his views regarding the American Empire, we see how someone close to Secretary of State John Hay and President Theodore Roosevelt, not to mention numerous other high-ranking political and cultural figures, could adopt a foreign policy position that is inconsistent, even contradictory. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the tendency of American historians has been to place Adams squarely on the imperialist side. Since the 1990s, scholarly writing on his geopolitics has gained greater nuance, though Adams remains uncomfortably caught in the web of power; however, his dissent remains, in the words of historian Richard Welch, “more uncertain and sporadic, more complex and diverse, than the publications of the [Anti-Imperialist] League …”Footnote 8
Central to Adams’s critique of the American Empire is his rejection of providentialism as a rationale to justify America’s war in the Philippines.Footnote 9 Here, Adams stands quite apart from imperialists like Beveridge, who was supremely confident that “[God’s] power directed Dewey in the East and delivered the Spanish fleet into our hands …”Footnote 10 Unlike the senator, Adams did not regard the temporal events of war as literal expressions of divine will. His was a more secular perspective that emphasized human agency, and the myriad of conflicting outcomes that war brings.
Adams’s secular understanding of events can be traced back to his youth. In his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, he wrote in third person: “The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers and sisters was religion real.”Footnote 11 Adams’s retrospective account of his alienation from Unitarianism did not lead him to outright atheism. Following his student days at Harvard, Adams “remained a believer,” though one with a most attenuated faith.Footnote 12 This perspective led Adams to critique Christian missionaries because they sought to resolutely transform Pacific Islanders into New England Protestants.Footnote 13
“The missionary has worked his wicked will”
The sharp growth of American missionaries and their organizations during the late nineteenth century made Christianity a pervasive, if uneven, reality in many islands throughout the Pacific. “By 1900,” writes the historian William Hutchison, “the sixteen American missionary societies of the 1860s had swelled to about ninety.”Footnote 14 Missionaries from the United States far outnumbered every other sending nation, including Britain. To a great extent, the achievement of 1.5 million Protestant converts worldwide can be attributed to this organizational growth.Footnote 15 My own work with the Papers of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions reveals the proliferation of Bibles and other religious material in Hawaii.Footnote 16 For example, a missionary official noted in 1872 that “the whole number of pages received for Books, Bibles, and portions of Scripture received into the office and printed the past year is 2,954,330 while the number of pages of the same sold and given away is 1,139,041.”Footnote 17 While missionaries were not homogeneous—evangelical Protestants differed from Mormons and especially Catholics in their devotional style and theology—Methodists stand out as the most prominent religious denomination among numerous proselytizing groups.Footnote 18
This is the religious context that awaited Henry Adams when in 1890 he sought to escape “civilization”Footnote 19 (especially Washington, DC and Boston) and the boredom that followed his recent completion of the multivolume History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison. Footnote 20 Accompanied by the artist John La Farge, Adams ventured out into the Pacific, arriving in Hawaii in late August. Although Adams was impressed with the natural beauty of Hawaii, he found its people lamentably “civilized” or Westernized, seen in their punctilious observance of the Christian Sabbath and the amount of land dedicated to the cultivation of sugar. Adams’s negative impression of Hawaii remained with him, for on October 16, 1890, he wrote to his friend John Hay from Samoa: “I am inclined to profanity when I think that religion, political economy and civilization so-called, will certainly work their atrocities here within another generation so that these islands will be as melancholy a spectacle as Hawaii is …”Footnote 21 By February of the following year, Adams complained to Hay that “in twenty or thirty years, the Americans will swoop down, and Tahiti will become another Hawaii, populated by sugar-canes and Japanese laborers.”Footnote 22 In April, Adams wrote to his friend, the geologist Clarence King, that missionaries throughout Polynesia were working their “wicked will.”Footnote 23 Even though Adams had turned his travels into what historian David Brown has called an “implicit [and explicit] rebuke of Western modernization,” part of Adams’s pessimistic observations were rooted in his deep longing for home.Footnote 24
While it is true that the proliferation of missions and Bibles does not necessarily equal imperialism—where indigenous forms of culture are wiped out by invading Westerners—these religious conduits were regarded by critics of empire as mutually reinforcing.Footnote 25 Adams’s disdain for missionaries in Polynesia stemmed from the fact that they were bent on changing the religion and culture of native people.Footnote 26 Convinced, however, that these efforts failed to produce many genuine conversions in Samoa, Adams wrote consolingly to Anna Cabot Mills Lodge that a pagan Samoa was still very much alive.Footnote 27 Nevertheless, there were aspects of native culture that he believed were in danger of extinction. From Tautira on March 2, 1891, Adams wrote to Hay: “Taitian [sic] native society has gone to pieces like everything else. Foreign influence corrupted the dance till it had to be entirely abolished …. The natives … had forgotten all their dances except the indecency, and could no longer perform the movements.”Footnote 28 In the Pacific Islands, the “foreign influence” responsible for the virtual extinction of native dances was missionaries. Historian Niel Gunson has written that Islander dancing was judged “of a lascivious kind … conducive to sexual licence [sic]”Footnote 29—and dance was only one cultural form that struggled to survive. “In the islands,” notes Gunson, “few indigenous art forms were to survive the impact of Christianity.”Footnote 30 For Adams, who was fond of native culture in practically all of its forms, missionaries were, in the words of historian Andrew Preston, “advance agents of American imperialism.”Footnote 31
“My Cubans have won their fight”Footnote 32
Three years after Adams visited the Pacific Islands, he sought to escape the chill of Washington winters and enjoy some relaxation by traveling to Cuba in 1894. The following year, the decades-old struggle against Spain had spread throughout the island, drawing men into an increasingly sophisticated army. “What began as scattered insurgent bands,” writes historian Louis Peréz, “developed into an army of 50,000 officers and men organized into six army corps, distributed into twelve divisions and eighty-five regiments of infantry and cavalry.”Footnote 33 Adams claimed that Cuba was “‘on the verge of social and political dissolution.’”Footnote 34 Following these events closely, the House of Representatives and the Senate released a joint resolution on January 29, 1896: “Resolved, that the President is hereby requested to interpose his friendly offices with the Spanish Government for the recognition of the Independence of Cuba.”Footnote 35 Adams, who is believed by some to have worked behind the scenes on the resolution, favored its conclusion.
As the war intensified with the destruction of sugar mills and the brutal reconcentrado tactics of General Valeriano Weyler, calls for American intervention grew louder. The definitive answer came in April 1898, when Congress granted President McKinley authorization to go to war.
On May 1, a U.S. fleet commanded by Commodore George Dewey sailed into the Manila harbor on the order of Theodore Roosevelt, the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and annihilated the antiquated Spanish Pacific fleet. This staggering loss crippled the Spanish effort to retain Cuba, where American forces were overcoming inadequate arms, disorganization, and tropical diseases.Footnote 36 On May 26, Adams revealed his complex geopolitical vision in a letter to Hay:
I want peace, and am willing to concede much. For instance, I would propose an armistice based on liberal terms like these: Spain recognizes the independence of Cuba …. And the entire withdrawal of her military and naval occupation …. The United States shall withdraw her forces from the Philippines, on condition of retaining a harbor of convenient use for a coaling station. In consideration of these concessions, the United States shall not exact a war indemnity …. But they ought to imply of necessity the annexation of Hawaii and the purchase of St. Thomas. These are essentials in a settlement that abandons the idea of conquest.Footnote 37
That Adams was in favor of Cuban independence and wanted the United States to withdraw from the Philippines reveals his distance from imperialists like Roosevelt, who claimed at one point that “‘it is for the good of the world that the English-speaking race … should hold as much of the world’s surface as possible.’”Footnote 38 A further indication of the difference in ideology can be found in a letter that Adams wrote to the statistician Worthington Chauncey Ford on November 26, 1898: “My modest, inherited vision contemplated no more in my life-time than the establishment of our economical supremacy and consequent political influence over the two Americas.”Footnote 39 Roosevelt, whose order had effectively begun the war in the Philippines, was pursuing a much more expansive conception of empire than Adams.
“I blame no one for opposing imperialism; I am no Napoleon myself”Footnote 40
By 1900, the American War in the Philippines had reached a new, more destructive, stage. Filipinos now practiced guerrilla warfare, and Americans inflicted reprisals far out of proportion to their losses.Footnote 41 One American soldier who fought in Marinduque proudly reported to his home paper that “‘we burned every house, destroyed every carabao and other animals, all rice and other food.’”Footnote 42 This was no accident since General Jacob H. Smith directed subordinates to “‘kill and burn’” and turn the interior of Samar into a “‘howling wilderness.’”Footnote 43 Historian Glenn May has written that in the four months of Smith’s command, “Americans destroyed thousands of homes, tons of food, hundreds of cattle, and much additional property.”Footnote 44
Upon learning of atrocities in the Philippines, anti-imperialists like William James thundered: “‘God damn the US for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles.’”Footnote 45 Speaking to his colleagues, George Hoar, a prominent anti-imperialist Republican senator from Massachusetts, was equally apoplectic with rage: “‘You [America] have devastated provinces,’” he began. “‘You have slain uncounted thousands of peoples you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps …. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water cure.’”Footnote 46 More measured but no less outraged was E.L. Godkin: He declared that the war in the Philippines was the “‘most savage which was ever known in the history of our republic.’”Footnote 47 If not the “most savage,” it was savage enough. Richard Welch has documented dozens of cases of atrocities, including murder of prisoners, murder of civilians, rape, administration of the so-called water cure, and other forms of torture.Footnote 48
One of the most enduring critiques of the war was registered by the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League, Mark Twain, in “To a Person Sitting in Darkness.” Although the piece began as a criticism of the missionary William Scott Ament for collecting indemnities from Chinese subjects following the Boxer uprising, it became a flashpoint in the larger debate over imperialism in China, South Africa, and the Philippines.Footnote 49 Employing his sharp wit, Twain asked:
Shall we? That is, shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest? …. Would it not be prudent to get our Civilization-tools together, and see how much stock is left on hand in the way of Glass Beads and Theology, and Maxim Guns and Hymn Books, … and balance the books, and arrive at the profit and loss, so that we may intelligently decide whether to continue the business or sell out the property and start a new Civilization Scheme on the proceeds?Footnote 50
Although Twain conceded that the extension of “Civilization” had proved commercially beneficial to America, he did not believe that the entire effort was worthwhile, especially considering the loss of moral standing that the war entailed.Footnote 51
Less well-known but no less effective a critic was the playwright, George Ade. His play, The Sultan of Sulu, and Stories of Benevolent Assimilation, mocked America’s effort to try and assimilate Filipinos into American culture. In this last work, Ade showed the arbitrary quality of many American habits and cultural conventions through the defiance of the Filipino Kakyak family, who resist the advice and wisdom of the American, Washington Connor. Here, the empire’s civilization comes across as ridiculous—not the supremely superior construct that many contemporaries held it to be.Footnote 52
Although the vast majority of Protestant ministers and missionaries supported empire and the American War in the Philippines, religious critics joined their voices to the anti-imperialist chorus.Footnote 53 In the Ministers’ Meeting of Protest Against the Atrocities in the Philippines, the Reverend Francis H. Rowley declared:
Our army is engaged in reducing to subjection a people who sought no quarrel with us[,] … a people fighting to defend what they hold to be their inalienable rights, and to resist a foreign foe. As we burn their villages and shoot down their struggling inhabitants, or shock the civilized world with our inhumanities, we assure them that we are seeking their larger good, and tell them that it is in the name of a nobler civilization than they have known.Footnote 54
To a certain extent, the anti-imperialist critique resonated with Adams. To his close friend and romantic interest, Elizabeth Cameron, he wrote on November 29, 1898: “The anti-imperialists are perfectly right in what they see and fear, but one can’t grow young again by merely refusing to walk.”Footnote 55 Adams was not endorsing American assimilationist designs or defending American atrocities; he only recognized that a certain momentum had developed after America’s victory in the Caribbean, which made it very difficult for the United States to put on the breaks. In Adams’s words: “… the country is big, and our energies are vast, and, sooner or later, to the East we must go, for a situation is always stronger than man’s will.”Footnote 56 After the defeat of the Spanish in Cuba, Adams called for American withdrawal, not the occupation of the island, even less a separate war in the Philippines. On December 4, 1898, Adams wrote to Cameron with evident exasperation that “the Philippines are not, or were not, in my scheme, but the President [McKinley] has taken all and more than all I wanted, and has stuffed in the Philippines on top.”Footnote 57 Hence, Adams shared with anti-imperialists their loathing for the war in the Philippines, but he could not quite adopt their platform.Footnote 58 To Cameron on January 22, 1899, he wrote: “We all dread and abominate the war, but cannot escape it …. If [George] Hoar had suggested any trace of a path to escape, I would jump for it.”Footnote 59
“War is always a blunder, necessarily stupid, and usually avoidable”Footnote 60
Although Adams could not find a way out of the imperial quagmire, there is no question where his sympathies lie. Repeatedly in his letters he refers to the war in the Philippines as “madness,” complains about the “cruel despotism” the United States is inflicting upon the islands, and is viscerally moved by reports of American atrocities: “I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare in the Philippines …”Footnote 61 It should not surprise therefore that on February 1, 1900, he wrote to his brother Brooks: “I incline now to anti-imperialism, and very strongly to anti-militarism …. I incline to abandon China, [the] Philippines and everything else.”Footnote 62
Adams’s mention of China makes sense in light of America’s overarching ambition in the Pacific. Historian Thomas McCormick has written that “Hawaii, 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 for an integrated trade route which could help realize America’s overriding ambition in the Pacific—the penetration and ultimate domination of the fabled China market.”Footnote 63 It is a short step from seeing the acquisition of the Philippines being driven largely by the desire for an expansion in trade with China to regarding the war itself in this light. In Republic or Empire, Daniel B. Schirmer argues that the war in the Philippines was prosecuted in order to stimulate the American economy.Footnote 64 Adams would have agreed. He lamented to Cameron that the war was being fought “in order to give them [“Malays”] the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways …”Footnote 65
Adams’s views of foreign policy have absorbed and perplexed historians for a long time. In 1915, William Roscoe Thayer asserted that Adams had shaped, albeit indirectly, the foreign policy thinking of Secretary of State John Hay (1898–1905).Footnote 66 Although some historians continue to discern the hand of Adams in Hay’s policies, it makes more sense to see their respective views as independent and running parallel to each other, rather than as causally related, one way or the other.Footnote 67 Nevertheless, by meeting with foreign envoys and passing on these conversations to Hay, Adams enjoyed what David Contosta calls an “insider’s view of American foreign policy.”Footnote 68 This is apparent in Hay’s famous Open Door policy (1899) in China, which emphasized freedom of commercial enterprise for American merchants. After the Boxers and imperial troops attacked missionaries and converts, besieged foreign legations, and cut the railroad between Peking and the coast, Adams wrote to Hay in June from Paris: “‘Your open door is already off its hinges.’”Footnote 69
“I am a pessimist—dark and deep …”
In criticizing Hay’s policy, Adams was also distancing himself from the political economy that supported empire and the missionary work of Christianity that often justified it. These were intricately related threads, and Adams treated them as the rationale for opposing civilization. While calling it a civilizational ideology may be formalizing it too much, there are enough hints in his writings to suggest an inchoate idea of civilization.Footnote 70 In the South Seas, Adams’s conception of civilization comes through in relation to the demographic devastation experienced by Pacific Islanders. In his book on Tahiti, Adams wrote that “the virulent diseases which had been developed among the struggling masses of Asia and Europe found a rich field of destruction when they were brought to the South Seas …. For this, perhaps, the foreigners were not wholly responsible, although their civilization was …”Footnote 71 Of course, Adams did not believe that Western Civilization was literally killing Pacific Islanders (though he did, in another place, use the word “atrocities” to describe what civilization had wrought). Technically, it was the pathogens introduced by Westerners that were “extinguishing the natives.” In Hawaii, for example, the precipitous decline of the native population had begun with the arrival of Captain James Cook in the late eighteenth century. From that point, estimates David Stannard, a population of 800,000 dropped to 130,000 in 1830. By 1885, it had ebbed to 44,000.Footnote 72 According to Adams, this decline corresponded with the incursion of missionary Christianity in Hawaii and the drastic transformation of its land to suit sugar interests.Footnote 73
As the above makes clear, Adams’s conception of civilization was declensionist. Often, Adams’s perception that civilization was harming natives or disfiguring their culture led him to judge it as being in decline. For example, in a letter to Cameron from Tahiti, written on February 6, 1891, Adams admitted that his first impressions were “very delicately mixed,” but went on to lament that “rum is the only amusement which civilization and religion have left them, and they drink-drink-drink, more and more every year, while cultivation declines, the plantations go to ruin, and disease undermines the race.”Footnote 74 Adams’s declensionist proclivity has not always been taken for what it is, a sign of pessimism. Harold Dean Cater dismissed Adams’s pessimism as “not entirely authentic, for usually it was a pose that served to hide his true feelings.”Footnote 75 My own sense is that for all of Adams’s sardonic writerly style, his pessimism concerning civilization can be trusted. To his confidante Cameron, Adams wrote from Paris on July 16, 1905: “I am a pessimist—dark and deep—who always expects the worst, and is never surprised when it comes.”Footnote 76 Most likely, Adams’s pessimism stemmed from his deep reading of human history. Such reading led him to critique his civilization and the “conquest” of people from other cultures.
Most dramatically, Adams believed that the “multiplicity” of modern life was, in the words of David Contosta, “dragging all Western Civilization toward decay and death.”Footnote 77 A prominent characteristic of modernity, multiplicity was made up of matter, depended on reason, and produced chaos. Multiplicity’s foil was “unity,” sometimes identified with mind, simplicity, order, and morality.Footnote 78 Such a divided conceptual horizon presumably led Adams to relatively “primitive” places like Polynesia. It was here that he could observe unity’s traits in bold relief. It was also here where his outlook could reflect back whom he was not, and could not hope to become.Footnote 79 There was also disappointment in recognizing that islands like Tahiti did not present the idyllic moral counterpoint to the West that he hoped to find. Once he arrived at this mental cul-de-sac, Adams blamed the carriers of multiplicity: “What can the European-Aryan race have done to become the low-bred wretches they are!” he exclaimed from Papeete. “Their manners are what they themselves call vulgar, and their minds are more vulgar than their manners. I have never seen a vulgar Polynesian, though some of them come dangerously near it, from associating with Europeans and Americans.”Footnote 80 According to Adams, civilization had extended its tentacles into the far reaches of the Pacific, and through its varied messengers—missionaries, traders, soldiers, beachcombers—introduced multiplicity, one of modernity’s toxins.
To a great extent, Adams’s critical assessment of civilization placed him on the fringes of public opinion. Indeed, at the turn of the twentieth century, it was common for cultural custodians to boast of the superior nature of American civilization.Footnote 81 Such hubris led many to see the American presence in the Philippines as a boon to civilization. The editors of Chicago’s Times-Herald, for instance, proclaimed: “‘We are … the trustees of civilization and peace throughout the [Philippine] islands.’”Footnote 82 Such a congratulatory outlook led Admiral Stephen B. Luce of the U.S. Naval War College to believe that wars were sent in part to spread civilization.Footnote 83 Beveridge declared that it was imperative that the United States “‘save that soil [of the Philippines] for liberty and civilization.’”Footnote 84
One may very well ask to what purpose was civilization in the Philippines going to be put? According to historian Matthew Jacobson, civilization was essentially an economic concept.Footnote 85 In “The Wealth of the Philippines,” John Alden Adams enthused that “nowhere else … is there so rich a storehouse of undeveloped wealth, waiting to yield its treasures to the grasp of the strong hand of modern enterprise”—and “modern enterprise” was intimately bound to conceptions of civility and civilization.Footnote 86 William Howard Taft, the first President of the pro-business Philippine Commission and later Civil Governor, put it concisely: “‘Nothing will civilize them [Filipinos] so much as the introduction of American enterprise and capital …’”Footnote 87 Speaking at the Lake Mohonk Conference in 1907, the ethnologist William A. Jones declared that “the wonderful stories that were related as to their [the Philippines’] amazing riches unquestionably served to arouse the commercial spirit and to excite the cupidity of a considerable element of our American citizenship, so that it is safe to affirm that what we call ‘Commercialism’ was largely responsible for the acquisition of the Philippines.”Footnote 88 Even though the economic productivity of the Philippines lagged behind the dreams of its early boosters, there is little doubt concerning the strong economic motives for their acquisition.Footnote 89
Conclusion
In sum, Adams did not consider the penetration of America’s political economy into the Pacific Islands as contributing to their overall good. Indeed, he was disgusted with sugar plantations because they occupied far too much land in Hawaii and ruined the natural beauty of the islands.Footnote 90 He also understood that a plantation economy was exploitive of workers and literally endangered their lives. Adams’s writings from the early 1890s reveal a recurrent dread that any of the Pacific Islands would become like Hawaii in this respect. He also trenchantly criticized the American War in the Philippines for its commercial orientation, and went on to lampoon John Hay’s Open Door policy when Chinese Boxers reduced it to tatters. True, Adams conceded the annexation of Hawaii in 1898, but mainly because imperialists were calling for war in the Caribbean and the Philippines, and salivating for the conquest of new territory.
Neither did Adams advocate for the war in the Philippines nor for the annexation of the islands. With the war still raging, he wrote to Hay from Paris on November 2, 1901: “I wish we were out of the Philippines. That is a false start in a wrong direction, which I never wanted, and have always feared.”Footnote 91 And yet Adams did argue for the retention of a coaling station in the Philippines, which was regarded by many as a necessary node in a long chain of possessions running from the Caribbean, through the isthmus of Panama, and across the broad Pacific to China. Adams’s position on the Philippines is weakened further by his openness to something like Cuba’s Platt Amendment: Political and economic control of the Philippines—without war.Footnote 92
Foundational to America’s political economy and rationale for empire and war was Western Civilization, which Adams critiqued most sharply. Associated closely with missionary Christianity, Adams condemned Westerners for changing native societies and introducing debilitating pathogens.
For all of Adams’s complexity, historians suggest he was not all that unusual for his time. William Leuchtenburg argues that after 1898, progressives supported imperialism about as enthusiastically as republicans.Footnote 93 “The evidence demonstrates,” writes Eric Love, “that the line between imperialist and anti-imperialist was blurry more often than not and it could shift, wildly and unpredictably, from person to person, incident to incident, and even within the same person …”Footnote 94 It is this protean quality that is a prominent characteristic of Adams’s geopolitics. While there may not be a principle that consistently guided Adams’s thinking on empire, his pessimistic turn of mind leaves a rather deep impression on readers of the high cost of America’s involvement in foreign lands.
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank the following readers, whose comments and questions helped me clarify my thoughts and substantially revise this article: James Turner, Tom Spencer, Nathaniel Warne, Bernal Cortés, Hank Blunk.
