America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior. This apparent contradiction was not a flaw, though; it was a key feature of the new democratic republic. For the Founders, the concept that “all men are created equal” depended on the idea that the ringing phrase “all men” did not actually include everyone. In 1776, it seemed self-evident to leaders that not every person living in the British colonies was capable -- or worthy -- of self-determination. In their minds, women, slaves, Indians, and paupers depended on the guidance of men such as themselves. Those unable to make good decisions about their own lives must be walled off from government to keep them from using political power to indulge their irresponsible appetites. So long as these lesser people played no role in the body politic, everyone within it could be equal. In the Founders’ minds, then, the principle of equality depended on inequality. That central paradox -- that freedom depended on racial, gender, and class inequality -- shaped American history as the cultural, religious, and social patterns of the new nation grew around it.
These forces of inequality have been supported throughout America’s history by a wide variety of people and politicians. Sometimes, the coalesce around identifiable groups and movements -- such as the Confederates in the 1860s, the Robber Barons in the 1890s, and, essential to the narrative of this work, the Movement Conservatives of the 1960s and, to a large degree, today.
Richardson helps us see that when we view American history through this lens -- as the on-going tension between the forces of equality and inequality -- we can develop a richer and deeper understanding of our history -- both its successes and its failures, its tragedies and its possibilities -- and, at least for this reader, better solidify one’s commitment to one of these sides or the other.
Here’s a taste of what I mean.
Taking the Philippines was the underside of Americans’ reflexive humanitarianism in Cuba. If business interests had objected to intervention in Cuba, they were positively quivering with excitement at the idea of expansion into the Pacific. Not only were the islands way stations to Asia, but they also produced sugar -- more than 200,000 tons of it in 1897. At the insistence of the enormously powerful Sugar Trust, which controlled 95 percent of the U.S. sugar market, the 1890 McKinley Tariff had put duties on foreign sugar, and sugar growers wanted a way to avoid those tariffs. In 1893, sugar growers on the Sandwich Islands in the Pacific (Hawaii) staged a coup to overthrow the Hawaiian queen and asked for the islands to become an American state, a move that would exempt them from the tariff. McKinley’s friend and confidant President Harrison had cheerfully backed annexation, and westerners had been calling for the islands for years. But before the treaty could be approved, Grover Cleveland took office. With Hawaiians furiously protesting against the machinations of an American business cabal, Cleveland insisted on an investigation, and Hawaiian statehood stalled.
For me, this is one of those lost stories of history -- the fact, evidently, that the reason Hawaii became a U.S. state (or, at least, why some wanted Hawaii to become a state) was that the Sugar Trust wanted to avoid paying a tariff. Today, we all know that Hawaii became a state. But why? Like most things in American history, there were mercantile and/or political realities operating at the time which took precedence over everything.
When the Spanish-American War broke out, the Senate still did not have enough votes to admit Hawaii, so Congress annexed it by a joint resolution -- called the Newlands Resolution after its sponsor, Francis G. Newlands, [Senator William] Sharon’s son-in-law and an avowed white supremacist -- and McKinley, now president, signed it. America was swallowing “sugar plums,” as the popular magazine Harper’s Weekly put it: the 1899 Treaty of Paris that ended the war gave the United States the sugar islands of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, as well as a number of smaller islands, including Guam.
Love that. Congress annexed it by joint resolution. I guess that’s legal, huh? But, more importantly to Richardson’s narrative, and as just alluded to, this is not just about business interests. White supremacy had to have its say, too.
Those in favor of taking these islands, valuable not just for their sugar but also for their location, did not want to argue that they took the land for private gain, as European colonial powers did. Instead, they fell back on the rhetoric of individualism. The American system was superior to any other, they said, and the country had a duty to export democracy and the capitalism that supported it to benighted peoples. Ignoring the Filipinos’ long history of Catholicism and education, pro-annexationists argued that they were savages unable to govern themselves. The Filipino government was illegitimate, Brigadier General Thomas M. Anderson said from his post in Manila, a “revolutionary” junta that did not truly represent the people; they simply wanted to control politics so they could confiscate the wealth of their betters, as well as take over the railways, tramways, electric plants, and waterworks. An Illinois man wrote to Harper’s Weekly that permitting the Filipinos to govern themselves would like turning “over the entire West to Geronimo and his band of Apache cutthroats when in 1885 they claimed that territory, and pressed their claim, as [General Emilio] Aguinaldo is doing to-day, killing, butchering, devastating any and every thing in his path!”
Those brown people are savages who can’t govern themselves! That rings out loud and clear on the surface, but there is actually something deeper and more nefarious going on here -- and it is directly related to that vision of the Founders where inequality of the other is needed in order to preserve equality of the tribe.
If this was a “part of ‘the white man’s burden’ which we can not now lay down,” as one man declared, it presented a problem. The inhabitants of the territorial islands were people of color who had been defined as savages. How could the United States “provide a safe government for the Philippines, without granting that degree of citizenship in such a colony as will permit actual voting powers in the United States?” Beginning in 1901, the Supreme Court, consisting of all but one of the justices who had handed down the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 maintaining that racial segregation was constitutional so long as accommodations were “separate but equal,” decided the issue with a number of cases collectively known as the Insular Cases. Focusing on the nation’s history of allowing “white” people to be citizens -- the same foundation western states used to deny rights to Chinese and Indians -- the court created a new legal doctrine in America. It concluded that the newly acquired islands were not the same as previous territories. Rather than assuming that any new acquisitions would automatically begin the process of becoming states incorporated into the Union, as had been the case since the signing of the Constitution, the Supreme Court decided that the islands were “unincorporated territories”; that is, they were, to paraphrase the southern Democratic Justice Edward Douglass White, “foreign in a domestic sense.” Sugar growers could bring in their product without paying tariffs, but the land was not fully American.”
This, frankly, had never occurred to me before. When America acquired territories on the American continent -- through the Louisiana or the Gadsden Purchases, for example -- the territories were fairly quickly divided and developed into states that subsequently joined the Union. That’s pretty much how America went from 13 to 48 states between 1776 and 1912. But that process seems to have stopped. Business interests evidently wanted Hawaii admitted as a state so they could avoid the sugar tariff there, but the Supreme Court rulings in these Insular Cases made that unnecessary. In 1902, Hawaii, like the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, became a sugar plum, where the white supremacists could have the best of both worlds.
This immediately raised the question of the status of the inhabitants of the newly acquired islands. When a pregnant twenty-year-old Puerto Rican woman named Isabel Gonzalez arrived in New York City in 1902 to join her fiance, the immigration commissioner turned her away on the grounds that she was an “alien” who would require public support. Gonzalez sued. When her case reached the Supreme Court, it concluded that Gonzalez was not an alien, and indeed that she should not have been denied entry to the United States. The justices went on to create a new category of personhood for the islands’ inhabitants. They were not aliens, but they were not citizens, either. Instead, they were “noncitizen nationals.” As such, they had some constitutional protections but not all. They could travel to the American mainland without being considered immigrants, but they had no voting rights. In short, the Insular Cases meant that exactly what Lincoln had feared in the 1850s -- that America would sort people according to categories -- had become national law.
So to recap: Why did Hawaii become a state? To allow the Sugar Trust to avoid paying tariffs. Why didn’t Puerto Rico become a state? To keep its people of color from becoming U.S. citizens.
It’s amazing what you discover when you start peeling back the onion of American history.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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