Pox_ An American History - Michael Willrich [69]
At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States of America, born of a colonial revolt against England, followed in Britannia’s wide wake and became, in the words of William Howard Taft, “a colonizing and colony-holding people.” Taft was in a good position to know. He served, in close succession, as America’s first “civil governor” of the Philippines, secretary of war, and president. In contrast to its long history of conquest and empire-building across North America, the United States had for the first time taken possession of foreign territories without any serious intention of incorporating them into the political nation as states. For Taft and other defenders of overseas expansion, the success of U.S. health interventions in the tropics proved, before all the world, the morally progressive and technologically superior character of American colonialism. Army surgeons and U.S. health officers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and the Panama Canal zone labored mightily to reduce the incidence of many terrible infectious diseases, including yellow fever, malaria, bubonic plague, beriberi, leprosy, and smallpox.13
“We expended many lives and much money in the Spanish War, and in the discharge of the responsibilities that have followed that war,” President Taft told a rapt audience at the Medical Club of Philadelphia in 1911. “But they are as nothing compared with the benefits to the human race that have already accrued and will continue to accrue from the discoveries made under the conditions and necessities which the exigencies of that war and the governmental burdens following it presented.” Pointing to American “sanitary achievements” in the tropics, expansionists argued that the new possessions, rather than repudiating the values of self-determination expressed in the republic’s founding, demonstrated the nation’s desire to spread the blessings of liberty and modernity to dark corners of the globe. This belief has remained a touchstone in the ideology of American empire ever since.14
None of this, however, had been part of the original war plan. The celebrated American sanitary campaigns originated in a far more limited objective: to protect the health of U.S. troops. A cluster of historical factors raised the stakes involved in meeting even that objective. The Spanish War was the first American war to be fought in the era of the bacteriological revolution. The Medical Department of the U.S. Army was under considerable pressure to show how the scientific advances made in the field of medicine since the Civil War would benefit the soldiers under its care. Alas, the department had already failed the soldiers as they assembled for war. In a grotesque public scandal for the department and the McKinley administration, the mainland encampments had become centers of infection and death.15
The intensity with which U.S. military surgeons conducted their sanitary work in the Caribbean and Pacific was heightened, too, by deeply held cultural beliefs that the tropics posed untold hazards for civilized white men. A new discipline—“tropical medicine”—had risen up to address precisely this concern. As The Baltimore Sun opined, European and American physicians “look forward to a time when vast regions of the globe, now desert, or inhabited only by inferior races, will afford safe homes for the people of temperate climates.” Medical science seemed to hold the key to white settlement and further commercial exploitation of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. But American tropical medicine was still young in 1898, and, after the debacle of the assembly camps, military surgeons viewed their duties in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines with deep apprehension.16
With great challenges, though,