Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [99]
The Anti-Imperialists did not sweep up with them the Populists and followers of Bryan and those soon to be known as Progressives. While these groups opposed standing armies, big navies and foreign entanglements and were in theory anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-European, they were simultaneously imbued with a fever to fight Spain as a cruel European tyrant stamping out liberty at America’s doorstep. Bryan called for war as loudly as Theodore Roosevelt and in sincere flattery, if less promptly, had himself appointed Colonel of the Third Nebraska Volunteers, too late to see action in Cuba. Most vociferous of all was a young lawyer from Indianapolis, already famous at thirty-six as a political orator and soon to become a leader of the Progressives. The taste of empire, the rising blood of nationalism expressed in terms of wide-flung dominion, found in Albert Beveridge its most thrilling trumpet. Like Bryan, he possessed that dangerous talent for oratory which can simulate action and even thought. The war sent Beveridge into transports of excitement.
“We are a conquering race,” he proclaimed in Boston in April, even before the victory of Manila Bay. “We must obey our blood and occupy new markets and if necessary new lands.… In the Almighty’s infinite plan … debased civilizations and decaying races” were to disappear “before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of man.” Pan-Germans in Berlin and Joseph Chamberlain in England also talked of the mission of the superior race, variously Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, but Beveridge had nothing to learn from them; it was all his own. He saw in present events “the progress of a mighty people and their free institutions” and the fulfillment of the dream “that God had put in the brain” of Jefferson, Hamilton, John Bright, Emerson, Ulysses S. Grant and other “imperial intellects”; the dream “of American expansion until all the seas shall bloom with that flower of liberty, the flag of the great Republic.” It was not so much liberty as trade that Beveridge saw following the flag. American factories and American soil, he said, were producing more than the American people could consume. “Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.… We will cover the ocean with our merchant marine. We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness.… American law, American order, American civilization will plant themselves on those shores hitherto bloody and benighted but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.”
Beveridge was so carried away by the opportunities for greatness that the sword he waved flashed almost too nakedly. He spoke of the Pacific as “the true field of our operations. There Spain has an island empire in the Philippines.… There the United States has a powerful Squadron. The Philippines are logically our first target.”
During the summer while others volunteered and fought in Cuba and sickened of yellow fever and over five thousand died of disease, Beveridge’s personal obedience to the call of blood remained rhetorical. He poured scorn on the Anti-Imperialist arguments. “Cuba not contiguous? Porto Rico not contiguous? The Philippines not contiguous?… Dewey and Sampson and Schley will make them contiguous and American speed, American guns, American heart and brain and nerve will keep them contiguous forever!… Who dares to halt it now, now when we are at last one people, strong enough for any task, great enough for any glory destiny can bestow?” In the following year Beveridge was elected