”Pax Americana: How and Why the USA Became the World’s Policeman.” Revised Aug. 3, 2006. First appeared as: "How U.S. Foreign Policy Became Imperial Since the 1898 Spanish American War," A Dialogue by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker on Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp., and other works. Given originally at Book Review Group, Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, June 19, 2006. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net
Summary
We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, 2002, plus related works, because: we were concerned, like all Americans, about why 9,11-200l happened, why we are in Iraq, why Muslim extremists hate us, why many believe that the U.S. and its current president are imperialistic.
Zimmermann traces U.S. foreign policy back to the 1898 Spanish American War. Until then U.S. energies went into continental expansion, Atlantic to the Pacific. With the frontier gone, needing to sell our surplus industrial/agricultural products abroad, we modernized our Navy, provoked and defeated a weakened Spain, acquired Spain's strategic Caribbean and Pacific bases, and planned a Panama Canal (opened in 1914)--our first steps toward becoming a world economic and military power.
In a three-month imperial thrust—late April to July 1898--we destroyed the Spanish fleet, acquired overseas naval bases in and responsibility for Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa, others. The resulting expansionist U.S. foreign policy led a willing winning coalition of democracies through WW I and II, Cold War, Gulf War. Then came 9-11-2002, the 2003 Iraq War, and serious U.S. difficulties.
The Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power were:
1-U.S. Navy Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan whose book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History…(1890), was "the most influential work on naval strategy ever written." In it he urged more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships for oceanic offense; strategic refueling and refitting stations in the Caribbean and Pacific; and quick Atlantic to Pacific passage through a central American canal.
2-Theodore Roosevelt who, as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Vice President, &U.S. President implemented Capt. Mahan's naval ideas and largely provoked the 1898 Spanish American War in which he was the hero of the Battle of San Juan Hill, Cuba.
3-Influential expansionist-minded Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, over 30 years on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who not only guided Roosevelt's career choices to the presidency but won by 2 votes the Senate's approval of the Treaty of Paris (1900) by which defeated Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
4-As U.S. ambassador in London and later U.S. Secretary of State, John Haygot Britain to back the U.S. in the Spanish American War and affirm U.S. control of Spain's Caribbean and Pacific territories.
5-Successful N.Y. lawyer Elihu Root as U.S. Secretary of War replaced Army rule of newly won territories with civil administrators good at nation building and implementing self rule.
End of Summary. Dialog Follows:
Betty: We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, plus supporting references.
Frank: Why this particular Warren Zimmermann book?
Betty: Because he shows that when the dynamism of U.S. westward expansion (i.e., our "Manifest Destiny") reached the Pacific, it was soon transformed into an overseas expansionist, aggressive, imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Having settled the Pacific coast, with nowhere else to go, overproduction of farm and factory products impelled us to find new markets and new resources abroad. The end of the frontier drove us to trade abroad, to build a stronger navy, to seek colonies and world power status.
Betty: With the frontier gone, the drive for trade and ascendancy abroad pushed us into the 1898 Spanish American War. That war led to our becoming a world power. That's the meaning of Zimmermann's book title. The Spanish American War was our First Great Triumph, a first step toward world hegemony based on an increasingly aggressive imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Zimmermann also implies, repeat implies, why an aggressive U.S. imperialism led to the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks, the 2003 Iraq war, U.S. unilateral military strikes; why Muslim extremists hate us; why we have lost world wide respect and are now in crisis.
Betty: Warren Zimmerman, born 1935, died 2004, was a Yale graduate, a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, England, and a U.S. diplomat for 33 years.
Frank: He was U.S. ambassador to various countries, including Yugoslavia. He then taught international diplomacy at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. His book, First Great Triumph, won several prizes.
Betty: Zimmermann's title, The First Great Triumph, is from a letter Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) wrote to his sister Corinne, June 15, 1898, on his way to fight in Cuba: "[This] is a great historical expedition,…I thrill to feel that I am part of it…. If we…succeed…and we shall succeed, we have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement."1
Frank: Theodore Roosevelt is the first of Zimmermann's…Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Roosevelt is presented as a rising dynamic Republican politician, enthusiastic for U.S. expansion abroad and determined to remake the U.S. from a third rate country to a world power.
Betty: Theodore Roosevelt and other expansionists helped provoke the Spanish American War, which made the U.S. for the first time a colonial power, controlling Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa. More later about Roosevelt.
Frank: The U.S. was expansionist-minded from its beginnings. Examples: The American Revolution was fought to win independence and to acquire all North American land we could get. We tried to take Canada several times but did not succeed.
Betty: George Washington referred to the U.S. as a "new empire," a "rising empire." He said in 1786: "there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires."2
Frank: Pres. Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, 1803. He then sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest. Why? So Americans could settle and develop its resources.
Betty: We bought Florida from Spain (1819) under Pres. James Monroe. We also formulated the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which declared the Western Hemisphere to be a U.S. sphere of influence closed to European exploitation.
Frank: Pres. James K. Polk (1795-1849) wanted the U.S. northwest boundary with Canada set at "54-40 or Fight." But Britain was too strong to tackle. The U.S. had to settle on the 49th parallel as the Canadian boundary.
Betty: By urging the Mexican War (1846-48), Pres. James K. Polk added 1.2 million square miles to the U.S.
Frank: In 1853 Pres. Millard Fillmore (1800-74) sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) to open trade with Japan, a clear case of gunboat diplomacy.
Betty: Pres. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War and jailed subversives without trial, both unconstitutional acts. The U.S. was imperial in its discrimination against African Americans, native Americans, Chinese, and others.
Frank: By 1890, after Civil War and Reconstruction, a new generation with boundless energy built roads, canals, railroads, the telegraph, the Atlantic Cable; settled the west; created factories, industries, towns, cities.
Betty: Immigrant labor poured in. Business boomed. Fortunes were made. U.S. "Manifest Destiny," which took us to the Pacific, seemed unstoppable.
Frank: The U.S., by 1890, overproduced farm and factory products. With the U.S. frontier market reduced, with European countries walled off by protective high tariffs, U.S. farmers and manufacturers were pushed economically to find foreign markets and raw materials in less developed areas.
Betty: A major shift in the center of U.S. population was noted in the 1890 Census by Wisconsin History Professor Frederick Jackson Turner. He said in his famous 1893 paper, "The Frontier in American History": the American frontier is gone, but frontier characteristics remain--rugged individualism, restless movement, upward striving for business success, profits, and dominance.
Frank: In 1896, two years before the Spanish American War, Prof. Turner said prophetically: [The frontier] "energies of expansion will…[continue in] demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries…."3
Betty: Prof. Turner and other expansionists rightly saw that increased overseas trade required stronger naval protection. A stronger U.S. navy needed strategic overseas refueling and refitting bases. Military power to protect commercial expansion abroad then meant naval power. Enhanced world power then meant colonies. We needed colonies.
Frank: To Prof. Turner's insight that U.S. rugged individualism would lead to overseas expansion was added Charles Darwin's (1809-82) evolution theory (1859). U.S. expansionists embraced Darwinian evolution. They saw struggle for survival as natural, Anglo Saxon society as superior, the U.S. as the fittest nation destined for world leadership.
Betty: Second of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power," Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), was a U. S. naval officer and historian. Mahan's 1890 book on the importance of sea power influenced naval strategists world-wide. He was the father of the modern U.S. Navy.
Frank: Mahan, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate (1859), served on antiquated U.S. Civil War warships. He later irritated navy brass by writing articles urging U.S. Navy improvements. Superiors tried to muzzle Mahan. One called Mahan derisively "a pen and ink sailor."
Betty: Mahan's model for a great navy was the British Navy. Mahan wanted more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships. He wanted better selected, brighter, well trained, highly skilled naval personnel. Instead of small ships for coastal defense he wanted large battleships for oceanic offense.
Frank: : The U.S. Navy, Mahan wrote, must be mobile, flexible, and able to pass quickly from the Atlantic to the Pacific through a central American canal. The U.S. must also have a network of strategically located refueling and refitting stations with deep ports.
Betty: A naval officer under whom Mahan once served established at Newport, R.I., the world's first Naval War College. Mahan eagerly accepted a teaching post there in 1885. He steeped himself in historical studies and became the Naval War College's acting head and later president.
Frank: Needing a lecturer on the naval history of the War of 1812, Mahan found that Theodore Roosevelt had published in 1882, at age 24, an authoritative book on that subject. In his 1887 Naval War College lectures, Roosevelt used the word "war" 62 times. Mahan and Roosevelt bonded, reinforced each other, with Mahan as Roosevelt's strategic advisor. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. President implemented Mahan's ideas.
Betty: Mahan's book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (1890), along with his later books, won rave reviews by Roosevelt and others. Mahan's books became required reading in navy departments worldwide.
Frank: Brief quotes about Mahan's importance: "The Influence of Sea Power…was Mahan's greatest achievement and probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written."4 …"The Influence of Sea Power was a work of breathtaking range: a history of diplomatic and military strategy, a survey of land as well as sea combat."5 …"[Mahan's book] shaped the imperial policies of Germany and Japan…."6
Betty: Mahan's aggressive naval strategy coincided with the insatiable drive for increased U.S. trade abroad.
Frank: Said Ohio Governor William McKinley, before his presidency: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products."7
Betty: Said Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927), a year before the Spanish American War: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."8
Frank: Said expansionist Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, third of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power: "In the interests of our commerce…we should build the [Central American] canal, and for the protection of that canal…we should control [Hawaii]…, Samoa, [and] Cuba…. [Why,] the great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth…."9
Betty: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), son of two patrician Boston families, heir to a shipping fortune, was a Harvard graduate, a Harvard history professor. Roosevelt was his student.
Frank: Henry Cabot Lodge was a U.S. congressman, then as U.S. senator and long-time chairman, of the Foreign Relations Committee, he ruled the U.S. Senate with an iron hand.
Betty: Eight years older and more jingoistic than Roosevelt, Lodge guided Roosevelt's political career right up to the White House.
Frank: During William McKinley's presidency (1897-1901), Lodge, supreme political tactician; Roosevelt, diehard political expansionist; and Mahan, promoter of aggressive naval power—were determined to advance U.S. to world power status. They sparked the Spanish American War.
Betty: Seeking a pretext for war, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War: "In strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."10
Frank: Five years before the Spanish American War (1893), U.S. owners of Hawaiian sugar plantations, fearing the Hawaiian queen's (Queen Liliuokalani, 1838-1917) liberal reforms and expecting U.S. annexation, got the U.S. Navy to help dethrone the queen.
Betty: But newly elected anti-expansionist U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) vetoed annexation.
Frank: In Howard Kinzer's new book, 2006, title: Overthrow, he tells how Hawaii was the first territory whose regime the U.S. tried to destabilize. Why? So that we could annex Hawaii, take it over.
Betty: Hawaii, , according to Kinzer, was the first of 14 instances in 110 years when the U.S. militarily or by subversion forced regime changes to assure compliance with U.S. interests. 11
Frank: Spain in 1898 was weakened by years of guerrilla-led uprisings in Cuba under Jose Martà (1853-95) and in the Philippines under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964).
Betty: Americans, sympathetic with oppressed Cubans, were angry at Spain's brutality and resulting deaths. That anger was fanned by sensational U.S. press accounts of Spanish atrocities.
Frank: Pres. McKinley, having seen suffering as a Civil War officer, hoped to avoid war. But a riot in Havana on January 12, 1898, threatened Americans living there.
Betty: Pres. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba as a show of force.
Frank: On Feb. 15, 1898, an explosion sank the Maine in Havana Bay, killing 268 U.S. sailors.
Betty: A U.S. Navy investigation in March reported that a mine explosion outside the hull sank the Maine. The U.S. jingo press headlined, without proof, that Spanish agents deliberately sunk the Maine.
Frank: Press propaganda and public pressure pushed Pres. McKinley to ask Congress to declare war.
Betty: After the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuban ports, Spain on April 24, 1898, and the U.S. the next day declared war.
Frank: Interjection: 78 years later, in 1976, a re-sifting of the evidence showed that the Maine explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion of coal dust—an accident.
Betty: Deliberate or accidental, the Maine explosion was a pretext. The real U.S. motives for the war were: to acquire more territory for more trade, more territory for refueling bases, to assure the U.S. greater status in the world, to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—for the first time--to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans.
Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippine Islands was an afterthought. With the Navy Secretary away, Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt, on Mahan's advice, sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared.
Betty: Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. The next day, May 1, in a 7-hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.
Frank: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. troops and volunteers, including Roosevelt's Rough Riders, reached Cuba.
Betty: Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, in a 4-hour sea battle the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet. A month later (Aug. 4, 1898) we took Puerto Rico.
Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead; of these 332 died in battle, the rest from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, 10% in battle, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.12&13
Betty: After the war, in the Treaty of Paris (Dec. 10, 1898), Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We acquired Midway Island earlier when we bought Alaska (1867).
Frank: Opponents, uneasy about expansion abroad, argued against making the U.S. a colonial power. They opposed our taking distant lands with brown and yellow people they thought incapable of assimilation. Acquiring colonies, opponents said, went against U.S. isolationism, against the Monroe Doctrine, against U.S. principles of self-government.
Betty: By two votes Senator Henry Cabot Lodge barely won Senate approval of the Treaty of Paris, Feb. 6, 1900.
Frank: As in Iraq in 2003, the U.S. rushed into the Spanish American War without a post war plan. To counter inevitable criticism, indecision, and mistakes, we needed backing from the world's then most powerful country, Britain.
Betty: To get British backing, Pres. McKinley chose a rare diplomat, John Hay (1838-1905) as ambassador to Britain (1897-98), fourth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power.
Frank: John Hay, after graduating from Brown University, Providence, R.I., joined his uncle's law firm. Where? In Springfield, IL., next door to lawyer-politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).
Betty: Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign manager John Nicolay (1832-1901) had been John Hay's classmate. Newly elected Pres. Lincoln took both Johns, John Nicolay and John Hay, to Washington, D.C., as his two secretaries.
Frank: There, John Hay, in 1861 at the tender age of 23, found himself living in the White House.
Betty: John Hay read Pres. Lincoln's mail, drafted replies, briefed Lincoln on press items, greeted visitors, weeded out job-seekers, and played with Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad.
Frank: He swapped funny stories with Lincoln and was at the assassinated Lincoln's deathbed.
Betty: John Hay's Lincoln connection, political skills, literary talent, wit, charm, and easy manner led him to high office.
Frank: Appointed foreign service officer (1865-70), John Hay served in Paris, Vienna, Madrid. He then was New York Tribune editorial writer (1870-74). He met and married Clara Stone (Feb. 4, 1874), and moved to her hometown, Cleveland, OH, where investment opportunities made John Hay a wealthy man.
Betty: Ohio political connections led to John Hay's appointment as assistant secretary of state (1879-81) under Ohio-born Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-93).
Frank: Besides writing a best selling novel, Hay wrote with John Nicolay the historically important Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 volumes (New York: Century, 1890).
Betty: Pres. McKinley, a good judge of talent, knew that John Hay as U.S. ambassador to Britain (1897-98) could help win Britain's support for the Spanish American War and the territories acquired.
Frank: John Hay smoothed past U.S.-British angers over the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and two serious Civil War differences. The first involved the British ship Trent, in which the U.S. was in the wrong. On Nov. 8, 1861, a U.S. warship captain illegally stopped the Trent and forcibly removed and imprisoned four Confederates seeking arms and aid abroad.
Betty: Britain's reaction to this illegal U.S. search and seizure was to send 5,000 troops to Canada, in case a U.S.-British war erupted.
Frank: Pres. Lincoln eased the crisis, told his cabinet: one war at a time, gentlemen. He disavowed the illegal seizure, released the Confederates (Dec. 1861), thus avoided a U.S.-British war right in the middle of the U.S. Civil War.
Betty: A second irritant was the MaineClaims controversy. Britain was in the wrong.
Frank: Without a navy, Confederate agents secretly bought, with British connivance, British made ships, and outfitted them with guns as Confederate war raiders.
Betty: These raiders (the first was named Alabamaa) cost many Union lives and much treasure. A Geneva international court made Britain pay the U.S. in 1871-72 a $15.5 million indemnity.
Frank: As U.S. ambassador in London and then as U.S. secretary of state, John Hay gained British backing for U.S. rule of Spain's territories. He also negotiated an "Open Door" policy (March 20, 1899) allowing U.S. trade in China without paying a high tariff.
Betty: Hay also ended an 1850 treaty (Clayton-Bulwer Treaty) for joint U.S.-British control of any future central American canal. Instead, Hay's new 1901 treaty (Hay-Pauncefote Treaty) gave the U.S. exclusive control of the proposed canal..
Frank: Interjection: in 1977, the U.S. Congress voted to return the Panama Canal to Panama. In the U.S. Senate debate over return, California's Senator S.I. Hayakawa said facetiously to opponents of return: "We stole [the Panama Canal] fair and square."
Betty: The Anglo-American alliance John Hay forged, which still exists, tipped the balance toward our late but crucial entrance into World Wars I and II. The alliance, which helped us win the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War, still exists in the current Iraq War. U.S. patriots say that the U.S.-British alliance helped keep the free world free.
Frank: Author Warren Zimmermann described John Hay this way: "As a Secretary of State [he] knew both the world and his own country. He presided over a period of [U.S.] expansion with modesty, civility, and a self-deprecating humor…."15
Betty: The U.S. Army initially administered Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. But Pres. McKinley wanted to replace Army rule with civilian administrators. He sought a Secretary of War who would supervise civil administrators good at nation building, good at leading colonial people toward self rule.
Frank: John Hay recommended Elihu Root (1845-1937), fifth of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Elihu Root proved ideal at nation-building and at finding legal solutions to difficult international problems.
Betty: McKinley said to Root by phone: I want you to be Secretary of War. Root replied: Mr. President, I don't know anything about war or the Army. I have no experience with government. McKinley said: You're a smart lawyer and you will be the first person in U.S. history charged with running colonies. I want a pragmatic problem solver, a lawyer like you.
Frank: Elihu Root served Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt as Secretary of War (1899-1904). He then succeeded John Hay as Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt (1905-09). He was also a one-term U.S. senator. Root was our then leading international lawyer.
Betty: Born in Clinton, New York, home of Hamilton College, Elihu Root graduated from Hamilton College (1864) and from New York University Law School (1867). In his twenties Root was a highly regarded corporation lawyer, by his thirties his law practice had made him rich, and in his forties one of most sought–after trial lawyers in the country.16
Frank: William Howard Taft (1857-1930), before he became U.S. president, was our first civil administrator to the Philippines. Here is how Elihu Root instructed William Howard Taft: "…the government… you are establishing is [not] designed for our satisfaction…but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands, and the measures [you] adopt… should…conform to their customs, their habits,…their prejudices."18
Betty: Elihu Root served U.S. interests and also helped make Cuba conditionally independent (May 20, 1902). In Puerto Rico he preserved Spanish civil law, used locally generated revenues locally, and obtained large U.S. grants for schools.
Frank: After Filipino nationalists fought the U.S. takeover bitterly for three years (with atrocities on both sides), Root and Taft began land reform.
Betty: They built roads and schools, helped the Philippines attain the highest literacy rate in Asia and install the first elected legislature in Asia.
Frank: Elihu Root founded two still active fact finding think tanks: 1-the Council on Foreign Relations and 2-the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Root inspired the Central American Court of Justice. Root's efforts led to the International Court of Justice in the Hague (1945).
Betty: Elihu Root, who served on many international committees and courts, won the Nobel Peace Prize (1912) for tirelessly establishing compulsory international arbitration.19 &20 Root died in 1937 at age 92.
Frank: Young, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt gave us a powerful navy and he stiffened a wavering Pres. McKinley. Roosevelt also won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier in 1905 for helping to end the Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt died of heart failure in 1919 at age 61.
Betty: Alfred Thayer Mahan, the once maligned "pen and ink" sailor, was vindicated as the grand naval strategist. He was later showered with honorary degrees in England and the U.S. Mahan died in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, when air power began to supplement sea power.
Frank: John Hay, bright, witty, noted writer, political administrator, died at age 67 in 1905, having forged a lasting U.S.-British alliance. John Hay's diplomacy and Elihu Root's governance were essential to post Spanish American War stability and eventual self rule.
Betty: Henry Cabot Lodge, supreme Republican expansionist senator, died in 1924.
Frank: The U.S., as ruthless as any European power in grabbing colonies, did better as a colonial administrator. Cuba became independent in 1902 as stated, although under conditions that assured U.S. best interests. Philippine independence was delayed until 1946, after World War II. Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state (Aug. 21, 1959). Most Puerto Ricans are still divided over possible U.S. statehood. They want to remain a commonwealth because as such they pay no U.S. income tax.
Betty: The U.S. profited, but it also built roads, schools, improved health, and advanced the economies of its former colonies.21 The bee fertilized the flowers it robbed. Frank, restate Zimmermann's main themes.
Frank: To recap: After post-Civil War U.S. internal expansion reached the Pacific, that expansionist thrust shifted overseas toward wider world trade. To lead in world trade meant we had to reach for world power. To be a world power required naval power and strategic bases. Spain, weak, oppressive, with key bases, was ripe for plucking. We had the motive, drive, navy, and the crucial five Americans in key positions who made the U.S. a world power.
Betty: Two dates show U.S. transition from a third rate country to world power status. 1891, 7 years before the Spanish American War, Capt. Mahan estimated that the U.S. Navy was too weak to defeat the navy of Chile. Mid-1907, 16 years later, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, about to leave office, sent the Great White Fleet, 16 first class U.S. warships, around the world, with stops at major world ports.
Frank: This Great White Fleet arrived at Hampton Roads, Va., Feb. 24, 1909, greeted by Pres. Roosevelt, U.S. dignitaries, navy bands, and resounding cheers. In this, his last act as president, Roosevelt showed the world that the U.S. was a first class nation with a first class navy, and had arrived on the world stage.22
Betty: Zimmermann believed that U.S. imperialism lasted nearly 100 years, 1898 to the end of the Cold War, 1991. He believed that since 1991 we have been in transition to a new age, as yet unformed and undefined.
Frank: What new age? Here is the title of Johns Hopkins foreign policy Professor Michael Mandelbaum's new 2006 book: The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century.
Betty: If a world policeman is inevitable, wrote Michael Mandelbaum, then most countries prefer that policeman to be the U.S. Why? Because—so far-- U.S. world leadership has been more helpful than harmful; more to be trusted than Russia or Germany or France or most other countries.
Frank: U.S. expansionists say that, by leading a willing winning coalition of democracies, the U.S. kept the free world free in defeating imperial Germany in World War I, Hitler's Nazism in World War II, USSR Communism in the Cold War (1945-1991), and in defeating Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War.
Betty: Recent changes have made the U.S. as world policeman less benign, more aggressively fearsome. One change is skyrocketing political campaign costs. Big money given by big corporations forces U.S. presidents and Congress to favor corporate interests over humane concerns at home and abroad.
Frank: Another related change: the military-industrial complex which Pres. Eisenhower warned against 50 years ago. It now has awesome power.
Betty: Corporate lobbyists and their money contributions, which influence policy at home and abroad, favor corporate interests such as weapon sales, control over oil and other resources.
Frank: Also, the growing divide at home between U.S. rich and poor further strengthens U.S. corporate-dominated foreign policy. The rich-poor divide is accelerated by deliberate under funding by conservatives of federal socio-economic programs for the poorest Americans.
Betty: Tax breaks for the rich and reduced funding for the poor seemed to be the George W. Bush administration's main objective initially. Then came the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks. That catastrophe transformed President Bush, gave him a messianic mission.
Frank: He saw his future fame as David slaying terrorist Goliaths. With Congress, the courts, and the religious right in his pocket, his administration authorized unilateral military strikes, overrode checks and balances, invaded Iraq. Can we impose democracy in Iraq or elsewhere?
Betty: Mounting disenchantment (mid-2006) with the costly ongoing Iraq War, deaths, torture, and loss of U.S. prestige abroad have reduced the president's approval rating to the low 30s. Did Warren Zimmermann, who died in 2004, say anything specifically about Iraq?
Frank: Yes. He said, prophetically, June 14, 2002, nine months before the U.S. invaded Iraq: "…there is more…danger to us by a military invasion of Iraq than if we dealt with [Saddam Hussein] in some other way…. [An invasion of Iraq will]…generate more terrorism in the Middle East…. [E]ven if we win…[and]…install the government of our choice, we will have to run [Iraq] for a long time because of…unsettled ethnic problems there. So Iraq becomes…an American protectorate…that will…generate among young [Muslims] everywhere greater anti-Americanism and terrorism."23
Betty: We chose Warren Zimmermann's book wanting to understand why the U.S. is in crisis. We close with thoughts from two other historians. Historian Howard Zinn's response in April 2006 to the question: why were so many Americans so easily and so long misled by our current leaders? Howard Zinn's answer: we are unable to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. "We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."
Frank: Historian Zinn also explained that we teach politicized U.S. history. We teach that Pres. Polk went to war against Mexico because Mexicans shed American blood on American soil. Truth: we fought Mexico because Pres. Polk and the slave owning aristocracy wanted half of Mexico as U.S. slave states. We teach that Pres. McKinley invaded Cuba and the Philippines to free them from Spanish brutality. Truth: We invaded Cuba and the Philippines to benefit U.S. business and to gain strategic military locations.24
Betty: : How will history judge this administration? Highly regarded presidential historian Sean Wilentz reported a 2004 survey of 415 historians, 81% of whom voted our current administration a failure; and 12% voted our current president the worst U.S. president. Wilentz added that if that survey were done today, a higher proportion of historians would vote him our worst president.26
Frank: We have created a generation of Middle Eastern Muslims who fear and hate us. Betty, how do we get out of our present crisis?
Betty: Surely we must elect wise leaders, renew international coalitions, use arbitration, end the Iraq war fairly, assure freedom at home, restore good will abroad.
Frank: Pray U.S. voters do just that. Well, thank you, audience, for your attention.
References for Quotations
1. Zimmermann, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p.275.
2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Ibid, p. 24. 4. Ibid. p. 94. 5. Ibid.
6. Uhlig, Jr., Frank. "The Great White Fleet," American Heritage, Vol. XV, No. 2 (Feb. 1964), pp. 30-43.
7. Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. N.Y.: Perennial Classics, 1999, p. 299.
8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid p.297.
11. Kinzer, Howard. Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. NY: Times, 2006.
12. Http://www.spanamwar.com/casualties.htm
13. http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm
14. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 419.
15. Ibid., p. 455.
16. Zimmermann, Warren. Speech, April 9, 2003, Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
17. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 123.
18. Ibid. 19 and 20. Ibid., pp. 487-488.
21. Zimmermann, Warren. "Jingoes, Goo-Goos, and the Rise of America's Empire, Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.2 (Spring 1998), pp. 42-65.
22. Uhlig, op cit.
23. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 503.
24. Zinn, Howard. http://itzie83.blogspot.com/2006/04/hegemonic-nationalism.html.
25. Wilentz, Sean. Rolling Stone (April 21, 2006): http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042006J.shtml
Used for Background
"Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies," New York Times, December 2, 1914, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0927.html
Avram, Wes., Ed. Anxious About Empire; Theological Essays on the New Global Realities. Grand Rapids, MI, 2004. (13 religious leaders criticize the morality of the "Bush Doctrine"). Braun, Theodore A. Perspectives on Cuba and Its People. N.Y.: Friendship Press, National Council of Churches, 1999.
Byrd, Robert C. Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Morris, Richard B., Ed. Encyclopedia of American History. N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1953.
END of Manuscript. Comments, corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net
Addendum: 24 of Franklin and Betty J. Parker’s book titles are listed in:
http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P
For their writings in blog form, enter bfparker in google.com or in any other search engine.)
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Pax Americana: How and Why the USA Became the World’s Policeman.
”Pax Americana: How and Why the USA Became the World’s Policeman.” Revised Aug. 3, 2006. First appeared as: "How U.S. Foreign Policy Became Imperial Since the 1898 Spanish American War," A Dialogue by Franklin Parker and Betty J. Parker on Warren Zimmermann's First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 562 pp., and other works. Given originally at Book Review Group, Uplands Retirement Village, Pleasant Hill, TN, June 19, 2006. E-mail: bfparker@frontiernet.net
Summary
We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, 2002, plus related works, because: we were concerned, like all Americans, about why 9,11-200l happened, why we are in Iraq, why Muslim extremists hate us, why many believe that the U.S. and its current president are imperialistic.
Zimmermann traces U.S. foreign policy back to the 1898 Spanish American War. Until then U.S. energies went into continental expansion, Atlantic to the Pacific. With the frontier gone, needing to sell our surplus industrial/agricultural products abroad, we modernized our Navy, provoked and defeated a weakened Spain, acquired Spain's strategic Caribbean and Pacific bases, and planned a Panama Canal (opened in 1914)--our first steps toward becoming a world economic and military power.
In a three-month imperial thrust—late April to July 1898--we destroyed the Spanish fleet, acquired overseas naval bases in and responsibility for Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa, others. The resulting expansionist U.S. foreign policy led a willing winning coalition of democracies through WW I and II, Cold War, Gulf War. Then came 9-11-2002, the 2003 Iraq War, and serious U.S. difficulties.
The Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power were:
1-U.S. Navy Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan whose book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History…(1890), was "the most influential work on naval strategy ever written." In it he urged more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships for oceanic offense; strategic refueling and refitting stations in the Caribbean and Pacific; and quick Atlantic to Pacific passage through a central American canal.
2-Theodore Roosevelt who, as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Vice President, &U.S. President implemented Capt. Mahan's naval ideas and largely provoked the 1898 Spanish American War in which he was the hero of the Battle of San Juan Hill, Cuba.
3-Influential expansionist-minded Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, over 30 years on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who not only guided Roosevelt's career choices to the presidency but won by 2 votes the Senate's approval of the Treaty of Paris (1900) by which defeated Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
4-As U.S. ambassador in London and later U.S. Secretary of State, John Haygot Britain to back the U.S. in the Spanish American War and affirm U.S. control of Spain's Caribbean and Pacific territories.
5-Successful N.Y. lawyer Elihu Root as U.S. Secretary of War replaced Army rule of newly won territories with civil administrators good at nation building and implementing self rule.
End of Summary. Dialog Follows:
Betty: We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, plus supporting references.
Frank: Why this particular Warren Zimmermann book?
Betty: Because he shows that when the dynamism of U.S. westward expansion (i.e., our "Manifest Destiny") reached the Pacific, it was soon transformed into an overseas expansionist, aggressive, imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Having settled the Pacific coast, with nowhere else to go, overproduction of farm and factory products impelled us to find new markets and new resources abroad. The end of the frontier drove us to trade abroad, to build a stronger navy, to seek colonies and world power status.
Betty: With the frontier gone, the drive for trade and ascendancy abroad pushed us into the 1898 Spanish American War. That war led to our becoming a world power. That's the meaning of Zimmermann's book title. The Spanish American War was our First Great Triumph, a first step toward world hegemony based on an increasingly aggressive imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Zimmermann also implies, repeat implies, why an aggressive U.S. imperialism led to the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks, the 2003 Iraq war, U.S. unilateral military strikes; why Muslim extremists hate us; why we have lost world wide respect and are now in crisis.
Betty: Warren Zimmerman, born 1935, died 2004, was a Yale graduate, a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, England, and a U.S. diplomat for 33 years.
Frank: He was U.S. ambassador to various countries, including Yugoslavia. He then taught international diplomacy at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. His book, First Great Triumph, won several prizes.
Betty: Zimmermann's title, The First Great Triumph, is from a letter Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) wrote to his sister Corinne, June 15, 1898, on his way to fight in Cuba: "[This] is a great historical expedition,…I thrill to feel that I am part of it…. If we…succeed…and we shall succeed, we have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement."1
Frank: Theodore Roosevelt is the first of Zimmermann's…Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Roosevelt is presented as a rising dynamic Republican politician, enthusiastic for U.S. expansion abroad and determined to remake the U.S. from a third rate country to a world power.
Betty: Theodore Roosevelt and other expansionists helped provoke the Spanish American War, which made the U.S. for the first time a colonial power, controlling Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa. More later about Roosevelt.
Frank: The U.S. was expansionist-minded from its beginnings. Examples: The American Revolution was fought to win independence and to acquire all North American land we could get. We tried to take Canada several times but did not succeed.
Betty: George Washington referred to the U.S. as a "new empire," a "rising empire." He said in 1786: "there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires."2
Frank: Pres. Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, 1803. He then sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest. Why? So Americans could settle and develop its resources.
Betty: We bought Florida from Spain (1819) under Pres. James Monroe. We also formulated the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which declared the Western Hemisphere to be a U.S. sphere of influence closed to European exploitation.
Frank: Pres. James K. Polk (1795-1849) wanted the U.S. northwest boundary with Canada set at "54-40 or Fight." But Britain was too strong to tackle. The U.S. had to settle on the 49th parallel as the Canadian boundary.
Betty: By urging the Mexican War (1846-48), Pres. James K. Polk added 1.2 million square miles to the U.S.
Frank: In 1853 Pres. Millard Fillmore (1800-74) sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) to open trade with Japan, a clear case of gunboat diplomacy.
Betty: Pres. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War and jailed subversives without trial, both unconstitutional acts. The U.S. was imperial in its discrimination against African Americans, native Americans, Chinese, and others.
Frank: By 1890, after Civil War and Reconstruction, a new generation with boundless energy built roads, canals, railroads, the telegraph, the Atlantic Cable; settled the west; created factories, industries, towns, cities.
Betty: Immigrant labor poured in. Business boomed. Fortunes were made. U.S. "Manifest Destiny," which took us to the Pacific, seemed unstoppable.
Frank: The U.S., by 1890, overproduced farm and factory products. With the U.S. frontier market reduced, with European countries walled off by protective high tariffs, U.S. farmers and manufacturers were pushed economically to find foreign markets and raw materials in less developed areas.
Betty: A major shift in the center of U.S. population was noted in the 1890 Census by Wisconsin History Professor Frederick Jackson Turner. He said in his famous 1893 paper, "The Frontier in American History": the American frontier is gone, but frontier characteristics remain--rugged individualism, restless movement, upward striving for business success, profits, and dominance.
Frank: In 1896, two years before the Spanish American War, Prof. Turner said prophetically: [The frontier] "energies of expansion will…[continue in] demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries…."3
Betty: Prof. Turner and other expansionists rightly saw that increased overseas trade required stronger naval protection. A stronger U.S. navy needed strategic overseas refueling and refitting bases. Military power to protect commercial expansion abroad then meant naval power. Enhanced world power then meant colonies. We needed colonies.
Frank: To Prof. Turner's insight that U.S. rugged individualism would lead to overseas expansion was added Charles Darwin's (1809-82) evolution theory (1859). U.S. expansionists embraced Darwinian evolution. They saw struggle for survival as natural, Anglo Saxon society as superior, the U.S. as the fittest nation destined for world leadership.
Betty: Second of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power," Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), was a U. S. naval officer and historian. Mahan's 1890 book on the importance of sea power influenced naval strategists world-wide. He was the father of the modern U.S. Navy.
Frank: Mahan, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate (1859), served on antiquated U.S. Civil War warships. He later irritated navy brass by writing articles urging U.S. Navy improvements. Superiors tried to muzzle Mahan. One called Mahan derisively "a pen and ink sailor."
Betty: Mahan's model for a great navy was the British Navy. Mahan wanted more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships. He wanted better selected, brighter, well trained, highly skilled naval personnel. Instead of small ships for coastal defense he wanted large battleships for oceanic offense.
Frank: : The U.S. Navy, Mahan wrote, must be mobile, flexible, and able to pass quickly from the Atlantic to the Pacific through a central American canal. The U.S. must also have a network of strategically located refueling and refitting stations with deep ports.
Betty: A naval officer under whom Mahan once served established at Newport, R.I., the world's first Naval War College. Mahan eagerly accepted a teaching post there in 1885. He steeped himself in historical studies and became the Naval War College's acting head and later president.
Frank: Needing a lecturer on the naval history of the War of 1812, Mahan found that Theodore Roosevelt had published in 1882, at age 24, an authoritative book on that subject. In his 1887 Naval War College lectures, Roosevelt used the word "war" 62 times. Mahan and Roosevelt bonded, reinforced each other, with Mahan as Roosevelt's strategic advisor. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. President implemented Mahan's ideas.
Betty: Mahan's book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (1890), along with his later books, won rave reviews by Roosevelt and others. Mahan's books became required reading in navy departments worldwide.
Frank: Brief quotes about Mahan's importance: "The Influence of Sea Power…was Mahan's greatest achievement and probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written."4 …"The Influence of Sea Power was a work of breathtaking range: a history of diplomatic and military strategy, a survey of land as well as sea combat."5 …"[Mahan's book] shaped the imperial policies of Germany and Japan…."6
Betty: Mahan's aggressive naval strategy coincided with the insatiable drive for increased U.S. trade abroad.
Frank: Said Ohio Governor William McKinley, before his presidency: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products."7
Betty: Said Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927), a year before the Spanish American War: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."8
Frank: Said expansionist Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, third of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power: "In the interests of our commerce…we should build the [Central American] canal, and for the protection of that canal…we should control [Hawaii]…, Samoa, [and] Cuba…. [Why,] the great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth…."9
Betty: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), son of two patrician Boston families, heir to a shipping fortune, was a Harvard graduate, a Harvard history professor. Roosevelt was his student.
Frank: Henry Cabot Lodge was a U.S. congressman, then as U.S. senator and long-time chairman, of the Foreign Relations Committee, he ruled the U.S. Senate with an iron hand.
Betty: Eight years older and more jingoistic than Roosevelt, Lodge guided Roosevelt's political career right up to the White House.
Frank: During William McKinley's presidency (1897-1901), Lodge, supreme political tactician; Roosevelt, diehard political expansionist; and Mahan, promoter of aggressive naval power—were determined to advance U.S. to world power status. They sparked the Spanish American War.
Betty: Seeking a pretext for war, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War: "In strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."10
Frank: Five years before the Spanish American War (1893), U.S. owners of Hawaiian sugar plantations, fearing the Hawaiian queen's (Queen Liliuokalani, 1838-1917) liberal reforms and expecting U.S. annexation, got the U.S. Navy to help dethrone the queen.
Betty: But newly elected anti-expansionist U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) vetoed annexation.
Frank: In Howard Kinzer's new book, 2006, title: Overthrow, he tells how Hawaii was the first territory whose regime the U.S. tried to destabilize. Why? So that we could annex Hawaii, take it over.
Betty: Hawaii, , according to Kinzer, was the first of 14 instances in 110 years when the U.S. militarily or by subversion forced regime changes to assure compliance with U.S. interests. 11
Frank: Spain in 1898 was weakened by years of guerrilla-led uprisings in Cuba under Jose Martà (1853-95) and in the Philippines under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964).
Betty: Americans, sympathetic with oppressed Cubans, were angry at Spain's brutality and resulting deaths. That anger was fanned by sensational U.S. press accounts of Spanish atrocities.
Frank: Pres. McKinley, having seen suffering as a Civil War officer, hoped to avoid war. But a riot in Havana on January 12, 1898, threatened Americans living there.
Betty: Pres. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba as a show of force.
Frank: On Feb. 15, 1898, an explosion sank the Maine in Havana Bay, killing 268 U.S. sailors.
Betty: A U.S. Navy investigation in March reported that a mine explosion outside the hull sank the Maine. The U.S. jingo press headlined, without proof, that Spanish agents deliberately sunk the Maine.
Frank: Press propaganda and public pressure pushed Pres. McKinley to ask Congress to declare war.
Betty: After the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuban ports, Spain on April 24, 1898, and the U.S. the next day declared war.
Frank: Interjection: 78 years later, in 1976, a re-sifting of the evidence showed that the Maine explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion of coal dust—an accident.
Betty: Deliberate or accidental, the Maine explosion was a pretext. The real U.S. motives for the war were: to acquire more territory for more trade, more territory for refueling bases, to assure the U.S. greater status in the world, to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—for the first time--to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans.
Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippine Islands was an afterthought. With the Navy Secretary away, Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt, on Mahan's advice, sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared.
Betty: Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. The next day, May 1, in a 7-hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.
Frank: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. troops and volunteers, including Roosevelt's Rough Riders, reached Cuba.
Betty: Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, in a 4-hour sea battle the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet. A month later (Aug. 4, 1898) we took Puerto Rico.
Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead; of these 332 died in battle, the rest from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, 10% in battle, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.12&13
Betty: After the war, in the Treaty of Paris (Dec. 10, 1898), Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We acquired Midway Island earlier when we bought Alaska (1867).
Frank: Opponents, uneasy about expansion abroad, argued against making the U.S. a colonial power. They opposed our taking distant lands with brown and yellow people they thought incapable of assimilation. Acquiring colonies, opponents said, went against U.S. isolationism, against the Monroe Doctrine, against U.S. principles of self-government.
Betty: By two votes Senator Henry Cabot Lodge barely won Senate approval of the Treaty of Paris, Feb. 6, 1900.
Frank: As in Iraq in 2003, the U.S. rushed into the Spanish American War without a post war plan. To counter inevitable criticism, indecision, and mistakes, we needed backing from the world's then most powerful country, Britain.
Betty: To get British backing, Pres. McKinley chose a rare diplomat, John Hay (1838-1905) as ambassador to Britain (1897-98), fourth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power.
Frank: John Hay, after graduating from Brown University, Providence, R.I., joined his uncle's law firm. Where? In Springfield, IL., next door to lawyer-politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).
Betty: Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign manager John Nicolay (1832-1901) had been John Hay's classmate. Newly elected Pres. Lincoln took both Johns, John Nicolay and John Hay, to Washington, D.C., as his two secretaries.
Frank: There, John Hay, in 1861 at the tender age of 23, found himself living in the White House.
Betty: John Hay read Pres. Lincoln's mail, drafted replies, briefed Lincoln on press items, greeted visitors, weeded out job-seekers, and played with Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad.
Frank: He swapped funny stories with Lincoln and was at the assassinated Lincoln's deathbed.
Betty: John Hay's Lincoln connection, political skills, literary talent, wit, charm, and easy manner led him to high office.
Frank: Appointed foreign service officer (1865-70), John Hay served in Paris, Vienna, Madrid. He then was New York Tribune editorial writer (1870-74). He met and married Clara Stone (Feb. 4, 1874), and moved to her hometown, Cleveland, OH, where investment opportunities made John Hay a wealthy man.
Betty: Ohio political connections led to John Hay's appointment as assistant secretary of state (1879-81) under Ohio-born Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-93).
Frank: Besides writing a best selling novel, Hay wrote with John Nicolay the historically important Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 volumes (New York: Century, 1890).
Betty: Pres. McKinley, a good judge of talent, knew that John Hay as U.S. ambassador to Britain (1897-98) could help win Britain's support for the Spanish American War and the territories acquired.
Frank: John Hay smoothed past U.S.-British angers over the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and two serious Civil War differences. The first involved the British ship Trent, in which the U.S. was in the wrong. On Nov. 8, 1861, a U.S. warship captain illegally stopped the Trent and forcibly removed and imprisoned four Confederates seeking arms and aid abroad.
Betty: Britain's reaction to this illegal U.S. search and seizure was to send 5,000 troops to Canada, in case a U.S.-British war erupted.
Frank: Pres. Lincoln eased the crisis, told his cabinet: one war at a time, gentlemen. He disavowed the illegal seizure, released the Confederates (Dec. 1861), thus avoided a U.S.-British war right in the middle of the U.S. Civil War.
Betty: A second irritant was the MaineClaims controversy. Britain was in the wrong.
Frank: Without a navy, Confederate agents secretly bought, with British connivance, British made ships, and outfitted them with guns as Confederate war raiders.
Betty: These raiders (the first was named Alabamaa) cost many Union lives and much treasure. A Geneva international court made Britain pay the U.S. in 1871-72 a $15.5 million indemnity.
Frank: As U.S. ambassador in London and then as U.S. secretary of state, John Hay gained British backing for U.S. rule of Spain's territories. He also negotiated an "Open Door" policy (March 20, 1899) allowing U.S. trade in China without paying a high tariff.
Betty: Hay also ended an 1850 treaty (Clayton-Bulwer Treaty) for joint U.S.-British control of any future central American canal. Instead, Hay's new 1901 treaty (Hay-Pauncefote Treaty) gave the U.S. exclusive control of the proposed canal..
Frank: Interjection: in 1977, the U.S. Congress voted to return the Panama Canal to Panama. In the U.S. Senate debate over return, California's Senator S.I. Hayakawa said facetiously to opponents of return: "We stole [the Panama Canal] fair and square."
Betty: The Anglo-American alliance John Hay forged, which still exists, tipped the balance toward our late but crucial entrance into World Wars I and II. The alliance, which helped us win the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War, still exists in the current Iraq War. U.S. patriots say that the U.S.-British alliance helped keep the free world free.
Frank: Author Warren Zimmermann described John Hay this way: "As a Secretary of State [he] knew both the world and his own country. He presided over a period of [U.S.] expansion with modesty, civility, and a self-deprecating humor…."15
Betty: The U.S. Army initially administered Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. But Pres. McKinley wanted to replace Army rule with civilian administrators. He sought a Secretary of War who would supervise civil administrators good at nation building, good at leading colonial people toward self rule.
Frank: John Hay recommended Elihu Root (1845-1937), fifth of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Elihu Root proved ideal at nation-building and at finding legal solutions to difficult international problems.
Betty: McKinley said to Root by phone: I want you to be Secretary of War. Root replied: Mr. President, I don't know anything about war or the Army. I have no experience with government. McKinley said: You're a smart lawyer and you will be the first person in U.S. history charged with running colonies. I want a pragmatic problem solver, a lawyer like you.
Frank: Elihu Root served Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt as Secretary of War (1899-1904). He then succeeded John Hay as Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt (1905-09). He was also a one-term U.S. senator. Root was our then leading international lawyer.
Betty: Born in Clinton, New York, home of Hamilton College, Elihu Root graduated from Hamilton College (1864) and from New York University Law School (1867). In his twenties Root was a highly regarded corporation lawyer, by his thirties his law practice had made him rich, and in his forties one of most sought–after trial lawyers in the country.16
Frank: William Howard Taft (1857-1930), before he became U.S. president, was our first civil administrator to the Philippines. Here is how Elihu Root instructed William Howard Taft: "…the government… you are establishing is [not] designed for our satisfaction…but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands, and the measures [you] adopt… should…conform to their customs, their habits,…their prejudices."18
Betty: Elihu Root served U.S. interests and also helped make Cuba conditionally independent (May 20, 1902). In Puerto Rico he preserved Spanish civil law, used locally generated revenues locally, and obtained large U.S. grants for schools.
Frank: After Filipino nationalists fought the U.S. takeover bitterly for three years (with atrocities on both sides), Root and Taft began land reform.
Betty: They built roads and schools, helped the Philippines attain the highest literacy rate in Asia and install the first elected legislature in Asia.
Frank: Elihu Root founded two still active fact finding think tanks: 1-the Council on Foreign Relations and 2-the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Root inspired the Central American Court of Justice. Root's efforts led to the International Court of Justice in the Hague (1945).
Betty: Elihu Root, who served on many international committees and courts, won the Nobel Peace Prize (1912) for tirelessly establishing compulsory international arbitration.19 &20 Root died in 1937 at age 92.
Frank: Young, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt gave us a powerful navy and he stiffened a wavering Pres. McKinley. Roosevelt also won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier in 1905 for helping to end the Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt died of heart failure in 1919 at age 61.
Betty: Alfred Thayer Mahan, the once maligned "pen and ink" sailor, was vindicated as the grand naval strategist. He was later showered with honorary degrees in England and the U.S. Mahan died in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, when air power began to supplement sea power.
Frank: John Hay, bright, witty, noted writer, political administrator, died at age 67 in 1905, having forged a lasting U.S.-British alliance. John Hay's diplomacy and Elihu Root's governance were essential to post Spanish American War stability and eventual self rule.
Betty: Henry Cabot Lodge, supreme Republican expansionist senator, died in 1924.
Frank: The U.S., as ruthless as any European power in grabbing colonies, did better as a colonial administrator. Cuba became independent in 1902 as stated, although under conditions that assured U.S. best interests. Philippine independence was delayed until 1946, after World War II. Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state (Aug. 21, 1959). Most Puerto Ricans are still divided over possible U.S. statehood. They want to remain a commonwealth because as such they pay no U.S. income tax.
Betty: The U.S. profited, but it also built roads, schools, improved health, and advanced the economies of its former colonies.21 The bee fertilized the flowers it robbed. Frank, restate Zimmermann's main themes.
Frank: To recap: After post-Civil War U.S. internal expansion reached the Pacific, that expansionist thrust shifted overseas toward wider world trade. To lead in world trade meant we had to reach for world power. To be a world power required naval power and strategic bases. Spain, weak, oppressive, with key bases, was ripe for plucking. We had the motive, drive, navy, and the crucial five Americans in key positions who made the U.S. a world power.
Betty: Two dates show U.S. transition from a third rate country to world power status. 1891, 7 years before the Spanish American War, Capt. Mahan estimated that the U.S. Navy was too weak to defeat the navy of Chile. Mid-1907, 16 years later, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, about to leave office, sent the Great White Fleet, 16 first class U.S. warships, around the world, with stops at major world ports.
Frank: This Great White Fleet arrived at Hampton Roads, Va., Feb. 24, 1909, greeted by Pres. Roosevelt, U.S. dignitaries, navy bands, and resounding cheers. In this, his last act as president, Roosevelt showed the world that the U.S. was a first class nation with a first class navy, and had arrived on the world stage.22
Betty: Zimmermann believed that U.S. imperialism lasted nearly 100 years, 1898 to the end of the Cold War, 1991. He believed that since 1991 we have been in transition to a new age, as yet unformed and undefined.
Frank: What new age? Here is the title of Johns Hopkins foreign policy Professor Michael Mandelbaum's new 2006 book: The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century.
Betty: If a world policeman is inevitable, wrote Michael Mandelbaum, then most countries prefer that policeman to be the U.S. Why? Because—so far-- U.S. world leadership has been more helpful than harmful; more to be trusted than Russia or Germany or France or most other countries.
Frank: U.S. expansionists say that, by leading a willing winning coalition of democracies, the U.S. kept the free world free in defeating imperial Germany in World War I, Hitler's Nazism in World War II, USSR Communism in the Cold War (1945-1991), and in defeating Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War.
Betty: Recent changes have made the U.S. as world policeman less benign, more aggressively fearsome. One change is skyrocketing political campaign costs. Big money given by big corporations forces U.S. presidents and Congress to favor corporate interests over humane concerns at home and abroad.
Frank: Another related change: the military-industrial complex which Pres. Eisenhower warned against 50 years ago. It now has awesome power.
Betty: Corporate lobbyists and their money contributions, which influence policy at home and abroad, favor corporate interests such as weapon sales, control over oil and other resources.
Frank: Also, the growing divide at home between U.S. rich and poor further strengthens U.S. corporate-dominated foreign policy. The rich-poor divide is accelerated by deliberate under funding by conservatives of federal socio-economic programs for the poorest Americans.
Betty: Tax breaks for the rich and reduced funding for the poor seemed to be the George W. Bush administration's main objective initially. Then came the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks. That catastrophe transformed President Bush, gave him a messianic mission.
Frank: He saw his future fame as David slaying terrorist Goliaths. With Congress, the courts, and the religious right in his pocket, his administration authorized unilateral military strikes, overrode checks and balances, invaded Iraq. Can we impose democracy in Iraq or elsewhere?
Betty: Mounting disenchantment (mid-2006) with the costly ongoing Iraq War, deaths, torture, and loss of U.S. prestige abroad have reduced the president's approval rating to the low 30s. Did Warren Zimmermann, who died in 2004, say anything specifically about Iraq?
Frank: Yes. He said, prophetically, June 14, 2002, nine months before the U.S. invaded Iraq: "…there is more…danger to us by a military invasion of Iraq than if we dealt with [Saddam Hussein] in some other way…. [An invasion of Iraq will]…generate more terrorism in the Middle East…. [E]ven if we win…[and]…install the government of our choice, we will have to run [Iraq] for a long time because of…unsettled ethnic problems there. So Iraq becomes…an American protectorate…that will…generate among young [Muslims] everywhere greater anti-Americanism and terrorism."23
Betty: We chose Warren Zimmermann's book wanting to understand why the U.S. is in crisis. We close with thoughts from two other historians. Historian Howard Zinn's response in April 2006 to the question: why were so many Americans so easily and so long misled by our current leaders? Howard Zinn's answer: we are unable to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. "We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."
Frank: Historian Zinn also explained that we teach politicized U.S. history. We teach that Pres. Polk went to war against Mexico because Mexicans shed American blood on American soil. Truth: we fought Mexico because Pres. Polk and the slave owning aristocracy wanted half of Mexico as U.S. slave states. We teach that Pres. McKinley invaded Cuba and the Philippines to free them from Spanish brutality. Truth: We invaded Cuba and the Philippines to benefit U.S. business and to gain strategic military locations.24
Betty: : How will history judge this administration? Highly regarded presidential historian Sean Wilentz reported a 2004 survey of 415 historians, 81% of whom voted our current administration a failure; and 12% voted our current president the worst U.S. president. Wilentz added that if that survey were done today, a higher proportion of historians would vote him our worst president.26
Frank: We have created a generation of Middle Eastern Muslims who fear and hate us. Betty, how do we get out of our present crisis?
Betty: Surely we must elect wise leaders, renew international coalitions, use arbitration, end the Iraq war fairly, assure freedom at home, restore good will abroad.
Frank: Pray U.S. voters do just that. Well, thank you, audience, for your attention.
References for Quotations
1. Zimmermann, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p.275.
2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Ibid, p. 24. 4. Ibid. p. 94. 5. Ibid.
6. Uhlig, Jr., Frank. "The Great White Fleet," American Heritage, Vol. XV, No. 2 (Feb. 1964), pp. 30-43.
7. Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. N.Y.: Perennial Classics, 1999, p. 299.
8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid p.297.
11. Kinzer, Howard. Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. NY: Times, 2006.
12. Http://www.spanamwar.com/casualties.htm
13. http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm
14. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 419.
15. Ibid., p. 455.
16. Zimmermann, Warren. Speech, April 9, 2003, Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
17. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 123.
18. Ibid. 19 and 20. Ibid., pp. 487-488.
21. Zimmermann, Warren. "Jingoes, Goo-Goos, and the Rise of America's Empire, Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.2 (Spring 1998), pp. 42-65.
22. Uhlig, op cit.
23. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 503.
24. Zinn, Howard. http://itzie83.blogspot.com/2006/04/hegemonic-nationalism.html.
25. Wilentz, Sean. Rolling Stone (April 21, 2006): http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042006J.shtml
Used for Background
"Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies," New York Times, December 2, 1914, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0927.html
Avram, Wes., Ed. Anxious About Empire; Theological Essays on the New Global Realities. Grand Rapids, MI, 2004. (13 religious leaders criticize the morality of the "Bush Doctrine"). Braun, Theodore A. Perspectives on Cuba and Its People. N.Y.: Friendship Press, National Council of Churches, 1999.
Byrd, Robert C. Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Morris, Richard B., Ed. Encyclopedia of American History. N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1953.
END of Manuscript. Comments, corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net
Addendum: 24 of Franklin and Betty J. Parker’s book titles are listed in:
http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P
For their writings in blog form, enter bfparker in google.com or in any other search engine.)
Summary
We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, 2002, plus related works, because: we were concerned, like all Americans, about why 9,11-200l happened, why we are in Iraq, why Muslim extremists hate us, why many believe that the U.S. and its current president are imperialistic.
Zimmermann traces U.S. foreign policy back to the 1898 Spanish American War. Until then U.S. energies went into continental expansion, Atlantic to the Pacific. With the frontier gone, needing to sell our surplus industrial/agricultural products abroad, we modernized our Navy, provoked and defeated a weakened Spain, acquired Spain's strategic Caribbean and Pacific bases, and planned a Panama Canal (opened in 1914)--our first steps toward becoming a world economic and military power.
In a three-month imperial thrust—late April to July 1898--we destroyed the Spanish fleet, acquired overseas naval bases in and responsibility for Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa, others. The resulting expansionist U.S. foreign policy led a willing winning coalition of democracies through WW I and II, Cold War, Gulf War. Then came 9-11-2002, the 2003 Iraq War, and serious U.S. difficulties.
The Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power were:
1-U.S. Navy Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan whose book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History…(1890), was "the most influential work on naval strategy ever written." In it he urged more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships for oceanic offense; strategic refueling and refitting stations in the Caribbean and Pacific; and quick Atlantic to Pacific passage through a central American canal.
2-Theodore Roosevelt who, as Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy, U.S. Vice President, &U.S. President implemented Capt. Mahan's naval ideas and largely provoked the 1898 Spanish American War in which he was the hero of the Battle of San Juan Hill, Cuba.
3-Influential expansionist-minded Republican Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, over 30 years on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who not only guided Roosevelt's career choices to the presidency but won by 2 votes the Senate's approval of the Treaty of Paris (1900) by which defeated Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
4-As U.S. ambassador in London and later U.S. Secretary of State, John Haygot Britain to back the U.S. in the Spanish American War and affirm U.S. control of Spain's Caribbean and Pacific territories.
5-Successful N.Y. lawyer Elihu Root as U.S. Secretary of War replaced Army rule of newly won territories with civil administrators good at nation building and implementing self rule.
End of Summary. Dialog Follows:
Betty: We chose to focus on Warren Zimmermann's The First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power, plus supporting references.
Frank: Why this particular Warren Zimmermann book?
Betty: Because he shows that when the dynamism of U.S. westward expansion (i.e., our "Manifest Destiny") reached the Pacific, it was soon transformed into an overseas expansionist, aggressive, imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Having settled the Pacific coast, with nowhere else to go, overproduction of farm and factory products impelled us to find new markets and new resources abroad. The end of the frontier drove us to trade abroad, to build a stronger navy, to seek colonies and world power status.
Betty: With the frontier gone, the drive for trade and ascendancy abroad pushed us into the 1898 Spanish American War. That war led to our becoming a world power. That's the meaning of Zimmermann's book title. The Spanish American War was our First Great Triumph, a first step toward world hegemony based on an increasingly aggressive imperial U.S. foreign policy.
Frank: Zimmermann also implies, repeat implies, why an aggressive U.S. imperialism led to the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks, the 2003 Iraq war, U.S. unilateral military strikes; why Muslim extremists hate us; why we have lost world wide respect and are now in crisis.
Betty: Warren Zimmerman, born 1935, died 2004, was a Yale graduate, a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, England, and a U.S. diplomat for 33 years.
Frank: He was U.S. ambassador to various countries, including Yugoslavia. He then taught international diplomacy at Columbia University and Johns Hopkins University. His book, First Great Triumph, won several prizes.
Betty: Zimmermann's title, The First Great Triumph, is from a letter Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) wrote to his sister Corinne, June 15, 1898, on his way to fight in Cuba: "[This] is a great historical expedition,…I thrill to feel that I am part of it…. If we…succeed…and we shall succeed, we have scored the first great triumph in what will be a world movement."1
Frank: Theodore Roosevelt is the first of Zimmermann's…Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Roosevelt is presented as a rising dynamic Republican politician, enthusiastic for U.S. expansion abroad and determined to remake the U.S. from a third rate country to a world power.
Betty: Theodore Roosevelt and other expansionists helped provoke the Spanish American War, which made the U.S. for the first time a colonial power, controlling Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Wake Island, Hawaii, Samoa. More later about Roosevelt.
Frank: The U.S. was expansionist-minded from its beginnings. Examples: The American Revolution was fought to win independence and to acquire all North American land we could get. We tried to take Canada several times but did not succeed.
Betty: George Washington referred to the U.S. as a "new empire," a "rising empire." He said in 1786: "there will assuredly come a day when this country will have some weight in the scale of Empires."2
Frank: Pres. Thomas Jefferson bought the Louisiana Purchase from France, 1803. He then sent Lewis and Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest. Why? So Americans could settle and develop its resources.
Betty: We bought Florida from Spain (1819) under Pres. James Monroe. We also formulated the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which declared the Western Hemisphere to be a U.S. sphere of influence closed to European exploitation.
Frank: Pres. James K. Polk (1795-1849) wanted the U.S. northwest boundary with Canada set at "54-40 or Fight." But Britain was too strong to tackle. The U.S. had to settle on the 49th parallel as the Canadian boundary.
Betty: By urging the Mexican War (1846-48), Pres. James K. Polk added 1.2 million square miles to the U.S.
Frank: In 1853 Pres. Millard Fillmore (1800-74) sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry (1794-1858) to open trade with Japan, a clear case of gunboat diplomacy.
Betty: Pres. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War and jailed subversives without trial, both unconstitutional acts. The U.S. was imperial in its discrimination against African Americans, native Americans, Chinese, and others.
Frank: By 1890, after Civil War and Reconstruction, a new generation with boundless energy built roads, canals, railroads, the telegraph, the Atlantic Cable; settled the west; created factories, industries, towns, cities.
Betty: Immigrant labor poured in. Business boomed. Fortunes were made. U.S. "Manifest Destiny," which took us to the Pacific, seemed unstoppable.
Frank: The U.S., by 1890, overproduced farm and factory products. With the U.S. frontier market reduced, with European countries walled off by protective high tariffs, U.S. farmers and manufacturers were pushed economically to find foreign markets and raw materials in less developed areas.
Betty: A major shift in the center of U.S. population was noted in the 1890 Census by Wisconsin History Professor Frederick Jackson Turner. He said in his famous 1893 paper, "The Frontier in American History": the American frontier is gone, but frontier characteristics remain--rugged individualism, restless movement, upward striving for business success, profits, and dominance.
Frank: In 1896, two years before the Spanish American War, Prof. Turner said prophetically: [The frontier] "energies of expansion will…[continue in] demands for a vigorous foreign policy, for an inter-oceanic canal, for a revival of our power upon the seas, and for the extension of American influence to outlying islands and adjoining countries…."3
Betty: Prof. Turner and other expansionists rightly saw that increased overseas trade required stronger naval protection. A stronger U.S. navy needed strategic overseas refueling and refitting bases. Military power to protect commercial expansion abroad then meant naval power. Enhanced world power then meant colonies. We needed colonies.
Frank: To Prof. Turner's insight that U.S. rugged individualism would lead to overseas expansion was added Charles Darwin's (1809-82) evolution theory (1859). U.S. expansionists embraced Darwinian evolution. They saw struggle for survival as natural, Anglo Saxon society as superior, the U.S. as the fittest nation destined for world leadership.
Betty: Second of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power," Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914), was a U. S. naval officer and historian. Mahan's 1890 book on the importance of sea power influenced naval strategists world-wide. He was the father of the modern U.S. Navy.
Frank: Mahan, a U.S. Naval Academy graduate (1859), served on antiquated U.S. Civil War warships. He later irritated navy brass by writing articles urging U.S. Navy improvements. Superiors tried to muzzle Mahan. One called Mahan derisively "a pen and ink sailor."
Betty: Mahan's model for a great navy was the British Navy. Mahan wanted more, larger, better gunned, steam-driven, steel hull ships. He wanted better selected, brighter, well trained, highly skilled naval personnel. Instead of small ships for coastal defense he wanted large battleships for oceanic offense.
Frank: : The U.S. Navy, Mahan wrote, must be mobile, flexible, and able to pass quickly from the Atlantic to the Pacific through a central American canal. The U.S. must also have a network of strategically located refueling and refitting stations with deep ports.
Betty: A naval officer under whom Mahan once served established at Newport, R.I., the world's first Naval War College. Mahan eagerly accepted a teaching post there in 1885. He steeped himself in historical studies and became the Naval War College's acting head and later president.
Frank: Needing a lecturer on the naval history of the War of 1812, Mahan found that Theodore Roosevelt had published in 1882, at age 24, an authoritative book on that subject. In his 1887 Naval War College lectures, Roosevelt used the word "war" 62 times. Mahan and Roosevelt bonded, reinforced each other, with Mahan as Roosevelt's strategic advisor. Roosevelt as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and as U.S. President implemented Mahan's ideas.
Betty: Mahan's book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (1890), along with his later books, won rave reviews by Roosevelt and others. Mahan's books became required reading in navy departments worldwide.
Frank: Brief quotes about Mahan's importance: "The Influence of Sea Power…was Mahan's greatest achievement and probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written."4 …"The Influence of Sea Power was a work of breathtaking range: a history of diplomatic and military strategy, a survey of land as well as sea combat."5 …"[Mahan's book] shaped the imperial policies of Germany and Japan…."6
Betty: Mahan's aggressive naval strategy coincided with the insatiable drive for increased U.S. trade abroad.
Frank: Said Ohio Governor William McKinley, before his presidency: "We want a foreign market for our surplus products."7
Betty: Said Indiana Senator Albert J. Beveridge (1862-1927), a year before the Spanish American War: "American factories are making more than the American people can use; American soil is producing more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours."8
Frank: Said expansionist Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, third of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power: "In the interests of our commerce…we should build the [Central American] canal, and for the protection of that canal…we should control [Hawaii]…, Samoa, [and] Cuba…. [Why,] the great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth…."9
Betty: Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (1850-1924), son of two patrician Boston families, heir to a shipping fortune, was a Harvard graduate, a Harvard history professor. Roosevelt was his student.
Frank: Henry Cabot Lodge was a U.S. congressman, then as U.S. senator and long-time chairman, of the Foreign Relations Committee, he ruled the U.S. Senate with an iron hand.
Betty: Eight years older and more jingoistic than Roosevelt, Lodge guided Roosevelt's political career right up to the White House.
Frank: During William McKinley's presidency (1897-1901), Lodge, supreme political tactician; Roosevelt, diehard political expansionist; and Mahan, promoter of aggressive naval power—were determined to advance U.S. to world power status. They sparked the Spanish American War.
Betty: Seeking a pretext for war, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1897, a year before the Spanish American War: "In strict confidence…I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."10
Frank: Five years before the Spanish American War (1893), U.S. owners of Hawaiian sugar plantations, fearing the Hawaiian queen's (Queen Liliuokalani, 1838-1917) liberal reforms and expecting U.S. annexation, got the U.S. Navy to help dethrone the queen.
Betty: But newly elected anti-expansionist U.S. Pres. Grover Cleveland (1837-1908) vetoed annexation.
Frank: In Howard Kinzer's new book, 2006, title: Overthrow, he tells how Hawaii was the first territory whose regime the U.S. tried to destabilize. Why? So that we could annex Hawaii, take it over.
Betty: Hawaii, , according to Kinzer, was the first of 14 instances in 110 years when the U.S. militarily or by subversion forced regime changes to assure compliance with U.S. interests. 11
Frank: Spain in 1898 was weakened by years of guerrilla-led uprisings in Cuba under Jose Martà (1853-95) and in the Philippines under Emilio Aguinaldo (1869-1964).
Betty: Americans, sympathetic with oppressed Cubans, were angry at Spain's brutality and resulting deaths. That anger was fanned by sensational U.S. press accounts of Spanish atrocities.
Frank: Pres. McKinley, having seen suffering as a Civil War officer, hoped to avoid war. But a riot in Havana on January 12, 1898, threatened Americans living there.
Betty: Pres. McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Cuba as a show of force.
Frank: On Feb. 15, 1898, an explosion sank the Maine in Havana Bay, killing 268 U.S. sailors.
Betty: A U.S. Navy investigation in March reported that a mine explosion outside the hull sank the Maine. The U.S. jingo press headlined, without proof, that Spanish agents deliberately sunk the Maine.
Frank: Press propaganda and public pressure pushed Pres. McKinley to ask Congress to declare war.
Betty: After the U.S. Navy blockaded Cuban ports, Spain on April 24, 1898, and the U.S. the next day declared war.
Frank: Interjection: 78 years later, in 1976, a re-sifting of the evidence showed that the Maine explosion was caused by spontaneous combustion of coal dust—an accident.
Betty: Deliberate or accidental, the Maine explosion was a pretext. The real U.S. motives for the war were: to acquire more territory for more trade, more territory for refueling bases, to assure the U.S. greater status in the world, to protect the proposed Panama Canal, and—for the first time--to restore human rights to oppressed Cubans.
Frank: Cuba was the initial focus. The Philippine Islands was an afterthought. With the Navy Secretary away, Assistant Navy Secretary Roosevelt, on Mahan's advice, sent Commodore George Dewey's (1837-1917) Asiatic fleet to Hong Kong before war was declared.
Betty: Roosevelt instructed Dewey: when war is declared, rush to Manila and attack the Spanish fleet. Dewey's fleet reached Manila Bay late April 30. The next day, May 1, in a 7-hour battle Dewey destroyed the Spanish ships.
Frank: In Cuba a U.S. Navy squadron blockaded the remaining Spanish fleet. U.S. troops and volunteers, including Roosevelt's Rough Riders, reached Cuba.
Betty: Lt. Col. Theodore Roosevelt, with spare glasses sewn into his new Brooks Brothers uniform, led the fight up San Juan Hill. On July 3, in a 4-hour sea battle the U.S. destroyed the Spanish fleet. A month later (Aug. 4, 1898) we took Puerto Rico.
Frank: Total U.S. casualties: 3,289 dead; of these 332 died in battle, the rest from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases. Spanish casualties: about 60,000 dead, 10% in battle, 90% from malaria, dysentery, and other diseases.12&13
Betty: After the war, in the Treaty of Paris (Dec. 10, 1898), Spain ceded to the U.S. the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam. In the Pacific we annexed Wake Island (July 4, 1898) and Hawaii (July 7, 1898). We acquired Midway Island earlier when we bought Alaska (1867).
Frank: Opponents, uneasy about expansion abroad, argued against making the U.S. a colonial power. They opposed our taking distant lands with brown and yellow people they thought incapable of assimilation. Acquiring colonies, opponents said, went against U.S. isolationism, against the Monroe Doctrine, against U.S. principles of self-government.
Betty: By two votes Senator Henry Cabot Lodge barely won Senate approval of the Treaty of Paris, Feb. 6, 1900.
Frank: As in Iraq in 2003, the U.S. rushed into the Spanish American War without a post war plan. To counter inevitable criticism, indecision, and mistakes, we needed backing from the world's then most powerful country, Britain.
Betty: To get British backing, Pres. McKinley chose a rare diplomat, John Hay (1838-1905) as ambassador to Britain (1897-98), fourth of Zimmermann's …Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power.
Frank: John Hay, after graduating from Brown University, Providence, R.I., joined his uncle's law firm. Where? In Springfield, IL., next door to lawyer-politician Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865).
Betty: Lincoln's 1860 presidential campaign manager John Nicolay (1832-1901) had been John Hay's classmate. Newly elected Pres. Lincoln took both Johns, John Nicolay and John Hay, to Washington, D.C., as his two secretaries.
Frank: There, John Hay, in 1861 at the tender age of 23, found himself living in the White House.
Betty: John Hay read Pres. Lincoln's mail, drafted replies, briefed Lincoln on press items, greeted visitors, weeded out job-seekers, and played with Lincoln's sons Willie and Tad.
Frank: He swapped funny stories with Lincoln and was at the assassinated Lincoln's deathbed.
Betty: John Hay's Lincoln connection, political skills, literary talent, wit, charm, and easy manner led him to high office.
Frank: Appointed foreign service officer (1865-70), John Hay served in Paris, Vienna, Madrid. He then was New York Tribune editorial writer (1870-74). He met and married Clara Stone (Feb. 4, 1874), and moved to her hometown, Cleveland, OH, where investment opportunities made John Hay a wealthy man.
Betty: Ohio political connections led to John Hay's appointment as assistant secretary of state (1879-81) under Ohio-born Pres. Rutherford B. Hayes (1822-93).
Frank: Besides writing a best selling novel, Hay wrote with John Nicolay the historically important Abraham Lincoln: A History, 10 volumes (New York: Century, 1890).
Betty: Pres. McKinley, a good judge of talent, knew that John Hay as U.S. ambassador to Britain (1897-98) could help win Britain's support for the Spanish American War and the territories acquired.
Frank: John Hay smoothed past U.S.-British angers over the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and two serious Civil War differences. The first involved the British ship Trent, in which the U.S. was in the wrong. On Nov. 8, 1861, a U.S. warship captain illegally stopped the Trent and forcibly removed and imprisoned four Confederates seeking arms and aid abroad.
Betty: Britain's reaction to this illegal U.S. search and seizure was to send 5,000 troops to Canada, in case a U.S.-British war erupted.
Frank: Pres. Lincoln eased the crisis, told his cabinet: one war at a time, gentlemen. He disavowed the illegal seizure, released the Confederates (Dec. 1861), thus avoided a U.S.-British war right in the middle of the U.S. Civil War.
Betty: A second irritant was the MaineClaims controversy. Britain was in the wrong.
Frank: Without a navy, Confederate agents secretly bought, with British connivance, British made ships, and outfitted them with guns as Confederate war raiders.
Betty: These raiders (the first was named Alabamaa) cost many Union lives and much treasure. A Geneva international court made Britain pay the U.S. in 1871-72 a $15.5 million indemnity.
Frank: As U.S. ambassador in London and then as U.S. secretary of state, John Hay gained British backing for U.S. rule of Spain's territories. He also negotiated an "Open Door" policy (March 20, 1899) allowing U.S. trade in China without paying a high tariff.
Betty: Hay also ended an 1850 treaty (Clayton-Bulwer Treaty) for joint U.S.-British control of any future central American canal. Instead, Hay's new 1901 treaty (Hay-Pauncefote Treaty) gave the U.S. exclusive control of the proposed canal..
Frank: Interjection: in 1977, the U.S. Congress voted to return the Panama Canal to Panama. In the U.S. Senate debate over return, California's Senator S.I. Hayakawa said facetiously to opponents of return: "We stole [the Panama Canal] fair and square."
Betty: The Anglo-American alliance John Hay forged, which still exists, tipped the balance toward our late but crucial entrance into World Wars I and II. The alliance, which helped us win the Cold War and the 1991 Gulf War, still exists in the current Iraq War. U.S. patriots say that the U.S.-British alliance helped keep the free world free.
Frank: Author Warren Zimmermann described John Hay this way: "As a Secretary of State [he] knew both the world and his own country. He presided over a period of [U.S.] expansion with modesty, civility, and a self-deprecating humor…."15
Betty: The U.S. Army initially administered Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. But Pres. McKinley wanted to replace Army rule with civilian administrators. He sought a Secretary of War who would supervise civil administrators good at nation building, good at leading colonial people toward self rule.
Frank: John Hay recommended Elihu Root (1845-1937), fifth of Zimmermann's Five Americans [Who] Made Their Country a World Power. Elihu Root proved ideal at nation-building and at finding legal solutions to difficult international problems.
Betty: McKinley said to Root by phone: I want you to be Secretary of War. Root replied: Mr. President, I don't know anything about war or the Army. I have no experience with government. McKinley said: You're a smart lawyer and you will be the first person in U.S. history charged with running colonies. I want a pragmatic problem solver, a lawyer like you.
Frank: Elihu Root served Presidents McKinley and Roosevelt as Secretary of War (1899-1904). He then succeeded John Hay as Secretary of State under Theodore Roosevelt (1905-09). He was also a one-term U.S. senator. Root was our then leading international lawyer.
Betty: Born in Clinton, New York, home of Hamilton College, Elihu Root graduated from Hamilton College (1864) and from New York University Law School (1867). In his twenties Root was a highly regarded corporation lawyer, by his thirties his law practice had made him rich, and in his forties one of most sought–after trial lawyers in the country.16
Frank: William Howard Taft (1857-1930), before he became U.S. president, was our first civil administrator to the Philippines. Here is how Elihu Root instructed William Howard Taft: "…the government… you are establishing is [not] designed for our satisfaction…but for the happiness, peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands, and the measures [you] adopt… should…conform to their customs, their habits,…their prejudices."18
Betty: Elihu Root served U.S. interests and also helped make Cuba conditionally independent (May 20, 1902). In Puerto Rico he preserved Spanish civil law, used locally generated revenues locally, and obtained large U.S. grants for schools.
Frank: After Filipino nationalists fought the U.S. takeover bitterly for three years (with atrocities on both sides), Root and Taft began land reform.
Betty: They built roads and schools, helped the Philippines attain the highest literacy rate in Asia and install the first elected legislature in Asia.
Frank: Elihu Root founded two still active fact finding think tanks: 1-the Council on Foreign Relations and 2-the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Root inspired the Central American Court of Justice. Root's efforts led to the International Court of Justice in the Hague (1945).
Betty: Elihu Root, who served on many international committees and courts, won the Nobel Peace Prize (1912) for tirelessly establishing compulsory international arbitration.19 &20 Root died in 1937 at age 92.
Frank: Young, hawkish Theodore Roosevelt gave us a powerful navy and he stiffened a wavering Pres. McKinley. Roosevelt also won the Nobel Peace Prize earlier in 1905 for helping to end the Russo-Japanese War. Roosevelt died of heart failure in 1919 at age 61.
Betty: Alfred Thayer Mahan, the once maligned "pen and ink" sailor, was vindicated as the grand naval strategist. He was later showered with honorary degrees in England and the U.S. Mahan died in 1914, at the beginning of World War I, when air power began to supplement sea power.
Frank: John Hay, bright, witty, noted writer, political administrator, died at age 67 in 1905, having forged a lasting U.S.-British alliance. John Hay's diplomacy and Elihu Root's governance were essential to post Spanish American War stability and eventual self rule.
Betty: Henry Cabot Lodge, supreme Republican expansionist senator, died in 1924.
Frank: The U.S., as ruthless as any European power in grabbing colonies, did better as a colonial administrator. Cuba became independent in 1902 as stated, although under conditions that assured U.S. best interests. Philippine independence was delayed until 1946, after World War II. Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state (Aug. 21, 1959). Most Puerto Ricans are still divided over possible U.S. statehood. They want to remain a commonwealth because as such they pay no U.S. income tax.
Betty: The U.S. profited, but it also built roads, schools, improved health, and advanced the economies of its former colonies.21 The bee fertilized the flowers it robbed. Frank, restate Zimmermann's main themes.
Frank: To recap: After post-Civil War U.S. internal expansion reached the Pacific, that expansionist thrust shifted overseas toward wider world trade. To lead in world trade meant we had to reach for world power. To be a world power required naval power and strategic bases. Spain, weak, oppressive, with key bases, was ripe for plucking. We had the motive, drive, navy, and the crucial five Americans in key positions who made the U.S. a world power.
Betty: Two dates show U.S. transition from a third rate country to world power status. 1891, 7 years before the Spanish American War, Capt. Mahan estimated that the U.S. Navy was too weak to defeat the navy of Chile. Mid-1907, 16 years later, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt, about to leave office, sent the Great White Fleet, 16 first class U.S. warships, around the world, with stops at major world ports.
Frank: This Great White Fleet arrived at Hampton Roads, Va., Feb. 24, 1909, greeted by Pres. Roosevelt, U.S. dignitaries, navy bands, and resounding cheers. In this, his last act as president, Roosevelt showed the world that the U.S. was a first class nation with a first class navy, and had arrived on the world stage.22
Betty: Zimmermann believed that U.S. imperialism lasted nearly 100 years, 1898 to the end of the Cold War, 1991. He believed that since 1991 we have been in transition to a new age, as yet unformed and undefined.
Frank: What new age? Here is the title of Johns Hopkins foreign policy Professor Michael Mandelbaum's new 2006 book: The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World's Government in the 21st Century.
Betty: If a world policeman is inevitable, wrote Michael Mandelbaum, then most countries prefer that policeman to be the U.S. Why? Because—so far-- U.S. world leadership has been more helpful than harmful; more to be trusted than Russia or Germany or France or most other countries.
Frank: U.S. expansionists say that, by leading a willing winning coalition of democracies, the U.S. kept the free world free in defeating imperial Germany in World War I, Hitler's Nazism in World War II, USSR Communism in the Cold War (1945-1991), and in defeating Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in the Gulf War.
Betty: Recent changes have made the U.S. as world policeman less benign, more aggressively fearsome. One change is skyrocketing political campaign costs. Big money given by big corporations forces U.S. presidents and Congress to favor corporate interests over humane concerns at home and abroad.
Frank: Another related change: the military-industrial complex which Pres. Eisenhower warned against 50 years ago. It now has awesome power.
Betty: Corporate lobbyists and their money contributions, which influence policy at home and abroad, favor corporate interests such as weapon sales, control over oil and other resources.
Frank: Also, the growing divide at home between U.S. rich and poor further strengthens U.S. corporate-dominated foreign policy. The rich-poor divide is accelerated by deliberate under funding by conservatives of federal socio-economic programs for the poorest Americans.
Betty: Tax breaks for the rich and reduced funding for the poor seemed to be the George W. Bush administration's main objective initially. Then came the 9-11-2001 terrorist attacks. That catastrophe transformed President Bush, gave him a messianic mission.
Frank: He saw his future fame as David slaying terrorist Goliaths. With Congress, the courts, and the religious right in his pocket, his administration authorized unilateral military strikes, overrode checks and balances, invaded Iraq. Can we impose democracy in Iraq or elsewhere?
Betty: Mounting disenchantment (mid-2006) with the costly ongoing Iraq War, deaths, torture, and loss of U.S. prestige abroad have reduced the president's approval rating to the low 30s. Did Warren Zimmermann, who died in 2004, say anything specifically about Iraq?
Frank: Yes. He said, prophetically, June 14, 2002, nine months before the U.S. invaded Iraq: "…there is more…danger to us by a military invasion of Iraq than if we dealt with [Saddam Hussein] in some other way…. [An invasion of Iraq will]…generate more terrorism in the Middle East…. [E]ven if we win…[and]…install the government of our choice, we will have to run [Iraq] for a long time because of…unsettled ethnic problems there. So Iraq becomes…an American protectorate…that will…generate among young [Muslims] everywhere greater anti-Americanism and terrorism."23
Betty: We chose Warren Zimmermann's book wanting to understand why the U.S. is in crisis. We close with thoughts from two other historians. Historian Howard Zinn's response in April 2006 to the question: why were so many Americans so easily and so long misled by our current leaders? Howard Zinn's answer: we are unable to think outside the boundaries of nationalism. "We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior."
Frank: Historian Zinn also explained that we teach politicized U.S. history. We teach that Pres. Polk went to war against Mexico because Mexicans shed American blood on American soil. Truth: we fought Mexico because Pres. Polk and the slave owning aristocracy wanted half of Mexico as U.S. slave states. We teach that Pres. McKinley invaded Cuba and the Philippines to free them from Spanish brutality. Truth: We invaded Cuba and the Philippines to benefit U.S. business and to gain strategic military locations.24
Betty: : How will history judge this administration? Highly regarded presidential historian Sean Wilentz reported a 2004 survey of 415 historians, 81% of whom voted our current administration a failure; and 12% voted our current president the worst U.S. president. Wilentz added that if that survey were done today, a higher proportion of historians would vote him our worst president.26
Frank: We have created a generation of Middle Eastern Muslims who fear and hate us. Betty, how do we get out of our present crisis?
Betty: Surely we must elect wise leaders, renew international coalitions, use arbitration, end the Iraq war fairly, assure freedom at home, restore good will abroad.
Frank: Pray U.S. voters do just that. Well, thank you, audience, for your attention.
References for Quotations
1. Zimmermann, Warren. First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. N.Y.: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, p.275.
2. Ibid., p. 6. 3. Ibid, p. 24. 4. Ibid. p. 94. 5. Ibid.
6. Uhlig, Jr., Frank. "The Great White Fleet," American Heritage, Vol. XV, No. 2 (Feb. 1964), pp. 30-43.
7. Zinn, Howard. A People's History of the United States 1492-Present. N.Y.: Perennial Classics, 1999, p. 299.
8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid p.297.
11. Kinzer, Howard. Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. NY: Times, 2006.
12. Http://www.spanamwar.com/casualties.htm
13. http://www.cwc.lsu.edu/cwc/other/stats/warcost.htm
14. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 419.
15. Ibid., p. 455.
16. Zimmermann, Warren. Speech, April 9, 2003, Council on Ethics and International Affairs.
17. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 123.
18. Ibid. 19 and 20. Ibid., pp. 487-488.
21. Zimmermann, Warren. "Jingoes, Goo-Goos, and the Rise of America's Empire, Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 22, No.2 (Spring 1998), pp. 42-65.
22. Uhlig, op cit.
23. Zimmermann, First Great Triumph, p. 503.
24. Zinn, Howard. http://itzie83.blogspot.com/2006/04/hegemonic-nationalism.html.
25. Wilentz, Sean. Rolling Stone (April 21, 2006): http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042006J.shtml
Used for Background
"Admiral Mahan, Naval Critic, Dies," New York Times, December 2, 1914, http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0927.html
Avram, Wes., Ed. Anxious About Empire; Theological Essays on the New Global Realities. Grand Rapids, MI, 2004. (13 religious leaders criticize the morality of the "Bush Doctrine"). Braun, Theodore A. Perspectives on Cuba and Its People. N.Y.: Friendship Press, National Council of Churches, 1999.
Byrd, Robert C. Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency. N.Y.: W.W. Norton, 2004.
Morris, Richard B., Ed. Encyclopedia of American History. N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1953.
END of Manuscript. Comments, corrections to bfparker@frontiernet.net
Addendum: 24 of Franklin and Betty J. Parker’s book titles are listed in:
http://www.library.vanderbilt.edu/peabody/about/alum6.html#P
For their writings in blog form, enter bfparker in google.com or in any other search engine.)
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