Debating Intervention... Lessons from the Spanish American War: Stephen Kinzer's True Flag

Americans are asking hard questions about the nation’s role in the world. Should the US act as “world policeman” and use its influence to spread democratic ideals all over the world? Or should it refocus its energies inward and avoid major “foreign entanglements?”

Author Stephen Kinzer demonstrates in his new history The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain and the Birth of American Empire (Henry Holt: 2017), the debate over American interventionism

really began over 100 years ago. America’s foremost luminaries and intellectual heavyweights found themselves starkly divided over the Spanish American War and its major consequences. Kinzer argues that the debate over American interventionism has its roots, not in the jungles of Vietnam, nor the trenches of France, but rather in th

e gazettes and ballrooms of the fiercely proud and brash America of the late 1890s. Kinzer methodically introduces the eccentric political powerhouses of that day,including not just Roosevelt and Twain, but also William Randolph Hearst, Andrew Carnegie, and William Jennings Bryan. Kinzer brings his readers inside the wharfside Boston taverns with their fiery oratory. There, the leaders of the anti-imperialist movement first kindled the flame of opposition to the government’s expansionist policies. One such leader was, “...the tall, erect, and vigorous figure of Carl Schurz, known as the ‘Dutchman’” (40). This towering figure, an immigrant to the US with a thick foreign accent, improbably reached the rank of Senator through his hard work and brilliance. He then made a powerful mark on the movement with his cutting criticism of “the large policy,” favored by Roosevelt and other expansionists. However, these cries fell on deaf ears. Kinzer writes with great effect on the mad rush to global expansion undertaken during the war. There is not much description of the battles, since the young, strapping American Republic handily defeated a decrepit and crumbling Spanish Empire, which was already on its last legs. He observes that within five short months of 1898-99, the US conquered or annexed five islands, including Cuba, Guam, Hawaii, the Philippine Archipelago, and Puerto Rico, along with the 11 million inhabitants of these distant islands.

The book’s main focus is on the aftermath of the war. During the sunset of a wild and raucous 19th century, eccentric Mark Twain put pen to paper and, “composed a series of devastating critiques of the expansionist ethos. Two became the best-selling items ever offered for sale by anti-imperialist leagues” (180). Kinzer is laser-focused when detailing a chronology of Twain’s sharp editorials against the U.S. acquisition of the Philippine Islands. The author explains how the Supreme Court then ruled in support of imperialism: “The Constitution does not apply to foreign countries...” and, “There may be territories subject to the jurisdiction of the United States which are not of the United States” (200). Indeed, Kinzer elegantly dissects the razor sharp tension between those stridently opposed to what they viewed as American Imperialism, and those who viewed Americans as liberators, freeing distant lands from poverty and violence. Echoes of these viewpoint are still with us today today in terms of ongoing foreign policy debates. This debate reaches across both sides of isle and makes us all question: what it is that makes us American? Is it the tough, crusading spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, or the modest righteousness of Mark Twain?