American Anti-Imperialist League
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The American Anti-Imperialist League was formed on June 15, 1898 to fight the United States annexation of the Philippines and other U.S. territories, officially called insular areas. The Anti-Imperialist League opposed annexation on economic, legal, and moral grounds. Its president George S. Boutwell was a former United States Secretary of the Treasury.
Well-known members of the League included:
- Jane Addams
- Edward Atkinson
- Ambrose Bierce
- Andrew Carnegie
- Grover Cleveland
- John Dewey
- Finley Peter Dunne
- Samuel Gompers
- William Dean Howells
- William James
- David Starr Jordan
- Josephine Shaw Lowell
- Edgar Lee Masters
- William Vaughn Moody
- Carl Schurz
- Moorfield Storey
- William Graham Sumner
- Oswald Garrison Villard
For this reason, the 1900 presidential election led to many internal squabbles. Particularly controversial was the League's endorsement of Bryan, the leading critic of the gold standard, in the 1900 presidential election. A few League members, including Storey and Villard, worked to organize a third party that would both uphold the gold standard and oppose imperialism. This effort led to the formation of the National Party (United States) which nominated Senator Donelson Caffery of Louisiania. The party quickly imploded, however, when Caffery dropped out, leaving Bryan as the only anti-imperialist candidate.
Samuel Clemens, under his pen name Mark Twain was vice president of the league from 1901 until his death in 1910.Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, Mark Twain, Syracuse University Press, ISBN 0815602685 Many but not all of Mark Twain's neglected and previously uncollected writings on anti-imperialism appeared for the first time in book form in 1992.
The Springfield Republican which was the leading anti-imperialist daily newspaper in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, published an editorial saying, "Mark Twain has suddenly become the most influential anti-imperialist and the most dreaded critic of the sacrosanct person in the White House that the country contains."Ibid p. xix
By the second decade of the twentieth century, the League was only a shadow of its former strength. Despite its antiwar record, it did not object to U.S. entry into World War I. The Anti-Imperialist League disbanded in 1921.
References
- David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, ["Gold Democrats and the Decline of Classical Liberalism, 1896-1900,"]Independent Review 4 (Spring 2000), 555-75.
- Mark Twain. Jim Zwick, ed. Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. (Syracuse University Press: July 1, 1992) ISBN 0815602685
- Jim Zwick, Friends of the Filipino People Bulletin
- Jim Zwick, Militarism and Repression in the Philippines
- Jim Zwick, "Prodigally Endowed with Sympathy for the Cause:" Mark Twain's Involvement with the Anti-Imperialist League" (Ephemera Society of America (January 1, 1992) ASIN B0006R8RJ8
Footnotes
See also
External links and sources
- [Extensive history of the anti-imperialist movement, including the Book online: Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935]
- [Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935: Cuba and the Philippines: Both Entitled to Independence], published by the League in 1900
- [Library of Congress webpage] with short description
- [The League's Platform], from the Internet History Sourcebooks Project at the History Department of Fordham University
- [Recalling the Anti-Imperialist League] - a fact-based article about the anti-imperialist league with some conclusions and parallels toward the end.
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