Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900

Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900. By Eric T. L. Love. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xx, 245 pp. $55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-8078-2900-5. $19.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8078-5565-0.

Eric T. L. Love, an associate professor of history at the University of Colorado at Boulder, makes a sleek, two-hundred-page revisionist assessment of the role that racism played in American foreign policy during the late nineteenth century. He hopes to "provoke controversy" (p. xiv) by arguing against the conventional belief that the desire to spread white supremacy over the world motivated the United States to become a global imperialist power. He contends that imperialist policy makers tried to distance themselves from the racial aspects of American expansion abroad and focus instead on potential economic and military benefits. Concerns over the United States ruling minority races abroad helped the case of anti-imperialists. Race, he says, was merely a distraction, an unwanted complication, to the imperialists. In fact, "in an era marked by as much racial fear, hatred, reaction, and violence as the last decades of the nineteenth century . . . no pragmatic politician or party would fix nonwhites at the center of its imperial policies" (p. xii).

Love begins by examining President Ulysses Grant's struggle to acquire Santo Domingo, explaining how opponents such as Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri successfully used the race question to defeat that acquisition. He then traces the efforts of various imperialists to annex Hawaii over many years, showing how racial concerns delayed annexation. He offers Theodore Roosevelt's handling of the Panama Canal issue as proof that American imperialists had no desire to gain a colonial empire patterned after the European model. Roosevelt acquired only a ten-mile-wide swath of land in Panama, rather than the canal zone and surrounding territory, because he deliberately wanted to avoid annexing the dark-skinned natives. With the Filipino insurrection that followed the Spanish-American War fresh in their minds, imperialists realized that by taking only the land needed for economic and military purposes, rather than what they might want for pride and prestige, "the benefits of empire could be had without the entanglements attached to race" (p. 200).

Some specialists in American race relations, diplomatic history, and the Gilded Age-Progressive Era will find merit in the subtle distinctions Love makes over seemingly trivial details, while others might see the same as splitting hairs. He points out, for example, that Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana, despite being one of the most famous and vociferous imperialists, and a man not bothered by the thought of putting millions of dark-skinned islanders under American tutelage, was not elected to the Senate until after the Spanish-American War had ended, and thus did not have any influence in making the United States a global imperialist power. Likewise, Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden" was not published until after the war, and thus had no impact on American imperialist policy in the pivotal decade of the 189Os. Even if it could have had an impact, Love says, the influence would have been the opposite of what conventional wisdom holds; it was not a poem encouraging white world rule but a poem warning of the dire consequences of white world rule.

Love's thesis is clear, and his evidence seems fairly convincing. Issues peripheral to his thesis that are not addressed, however, leave unanswered questions. He does not, for instance, adequately consider the influence of the Social Gospel on the thinking of U.S. foreign policy makers. Nor does he give enough attention to southern imperialists such as Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, who was just as ardent an expansionist as his more famous northern Republican counterparts, but whose motives were as much racial as they were economic or military. Finally, the author provides almost no comparative analysis of American imperialism with European imperialism. These deficiencies are offset, however, by a more important consideration: this book is part of a new literature that emphasizes how Jim Crow was just one manifestation of the national and international Zeitgeist of racism around the turn of the twentieth century, not a unique embodiment of racial injustice, as it has been portrayed in most southern and U.S. historiography. This book is commendable, therefore, as a supplement but not as a primer on either American imperialism or race relations.

Thomas Adams Upchurch

East Georgia College

Copyright University of Alabama Press Jul 2005
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved