introduction
Sliding Scales
Race, Empire, and
Transnational History
On January 9, 1900, Senator Albert Beveridge, Republi-
can of Indiana, stood before the U.S. Senate, defending a war on the otherside of the world that refused to end by American command. The pre-vious November, Gen. Elwell Otis had declared victory and an end tomajor combat operations in the Philippines, where American troops werestruggling to impose U.S. sovereignty on the forces of the PhilippineRepublic. Over the next months, however, much to the frustration of U.S.generals and the McKinley administration, resistance would both vanishand intensify as Filipinos adopted a guerrilla strategy to fight o√ theinvaders. Beveridge was uniquely suited to justify the war before theSenate and ‘‘anti-imperialist’’ critics, having built his early reputation onthundering rhetoric in defense of American empire. Campaigning in Indi-anapolis on September 19, 1898, for example, he had turned the recentU.S. victory against Spain in the Caribbean into a mandate for globalliberation. America’s mission-field would be a world contracted by elec-tricity and steam. ‘‘Distance and oceans are no arguments,’’ he asserted.The seas did ‘‘not separate us from lands of our duty and desire’’ butbound Americans to them. A half century earlier, California had been‘‘more inaccessible’’ from the eastern United States than was the present-day Philippines, where U.S. troops had captured the city of Manila fromSpanish forces the previous month. For Beveridge, Americans had ‘‘worldduties’’ as ‘‘a people imperial by virtue of their power, by right of theirinstitutions, by authority of their Heaven-directed purposes.’’ He urgedhis countrymen to ‘‘broaden [the] blessed reign’’ of freedom ‘‘until theempire of our principles is established over the hearts of all mankind.’’As for criticism that ‘‘we ought not to govern a people without theirconsent,’’ Beveridge asked his audience, ‘‘W ould not the people of thePhilippines prefer the just, humane, civilizing government of this Re-public to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which wehave rescued them?’’
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