Dominion From Sea To Sea Part 2

Texas, like California, is a large state (second only to Alaska) that also came into the Union courtesy of James K. Polk. It likewise grew out of an imperial past characterized mainly by Spanish indifference, it is arid (west of the 98th meridian), it has big farms, and like California it emerged on the continent "late" in world time. But its peculiarity was very different, a determining untimeliness: late Indian fighting, late plantations, late slavery, late extractive commodities, late to lay down the traditions of the frontier or the cruelties of Jim Crow. So Texas is also a very different state, something noticeable in its population following the war with Mexico: when San Francisco had more than ioo,ooo residents, Texas's biggest cities were Galveston (13,818) and San Antonio (12,256); Houston was under io,ooo, and Dallas was a village of about 3,000 people. The largest city in 1900, when Los Angeles was exploding, was San Antonio with about 53,000 people.

Unlike California, until recent history Texas was dominated by a handful of commodities, like cotton or oil, and its rural traditions were strong and lasting-while California had none. Lyndon Johnson grew up in the hill country without running water or electricity; Larry McMurtry witnessed the pa.s.sing of "the rural, pastoral way of life" and a general poverty in his West Texas teens in the 1940s-and only after that did the words "Texas" and "affluent" go together. Before that there wasn't the time or the money "for much to happen, in social or cultural terms." Texas didn't get a hint of its populous future-or its status today-until the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, where Frigidaire exhibited a fully air-conditioned home.35 Why? Because Texas is so infernally hot. It isn't uncommon for Houston or Dallas to have three-figure temperatures for much of the summer, nor is it a dry heat like Phoenix. Postwar air-conditioning was as determining for Texas's large population as gold and a temperate climate were for California.

Texas is a microcosm of the continent itself: the 98th meridian divides the state in two: fertile east and arid west. As it happened, Lyndon Johnson's family lived just beyond this meridian in a "dog-run" cabin. It was "a remote and dangerous frontier" in the early i8oos, with most of the dangers coming from fearsome Comanches who ruled Texas until new weaponry arrived to match their horseback fighting skills.36 But it was cotton and slaves that first populated the territory. Early American arrivals like those accompanying Stephen F. Austin in 1821 were like pioneers on the Oregon Trail a few years later; they sought a fecund, well-wooded and -watered terrain and so they settled down near the rivers, stopping just short of the 98th meridian. They were illegal aliens, but Mexico initially welcomed them with land grants proffered at minimal fees, and about 3,000 of them had settled by 1823. A little over a decade later, 30,000 Anglos resided in East Texas, along with some 3,000 black slaves; Mexicans were now a minority.

Pitched battles between Anglo settlers and Mexicans in 1836 led to mutual slaughter and the declaration of the Lone Star Republic on March 2, the heroic symbol of which, of course, was the resistance at the Alamo by 188 Texans-who held Off 3,000 Mexican troops for twelve days in San Antonio until they finally perished. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna had won a great victory at the Alamo, it seemed, until Sam Houston's forces trapped i,5oo of his men along the San Jacinto River a few weeks later and demolished them. A day later Houston captured Santa Anna, negotiated an end to the fighting, stuck a ball and chain on his leg, and threw the Mexican president in jail. It was the first of several American sequences of violence-putsch/revolutionrepublic-annexation, a settler conquest of another's sovereign territory that California soon imitated. The Texas republic was now independent and like California it had "huge tracts of land free for the taking," but it remained outside the Union because opponents disdained bringing in another slave state (statehood finally came a decade later). It was also a republic with imperial pretensions, claiming dominion south to the Rio Grande, northwest to Santa Fe, and even into present-day Wyoming. Finally, it was a republic that would join the Union but would long hold to the view that this was a union of sovereign states, brooking no outside interference.37 A Southern State.

The American narrative of Texas is about the Alamo, gunfighters, Comanches, cowboys, longhorns on the Chisholm Trail, big oil, big hair, and colorful politicians. It rarely accommodates Texas's central place in southern history as a slave and cotton state of the Confederacy. Yet cotton and slavery drove the populating of Texas and helped make the American South the source of almost two out of every three cotton bales sold in the world by 1840. Around the time Texas declared independence (1836), perhaps 3,500 Spanish settlers lived there, most of them raising cattle. A rush of immigration by white settlers quickly overwhelmed them in the 183os and 184os. Indian numbers were similar or perhaps even smaller, mainly a few thousand Apaches and Comanches. A thinly settled region rich in resources with a wonderful coastline, it was child's play (except for the Alamo and a few other glitches) for settlers to declare the Lone Star Republic and then pet.i.tion for members.h.i.+p in the Union. But many of the newcomers were slave owners (when Austin led 300 families into Texas, this colony was supposed to be slave-free, but soon about 400 slaves lived among a white settler population numbering around 2,000), and so Texas came into the union in 1845 as a slave state. On the eve of the Civil War, Texas had over 182,000 slaves living amid a white population of about 430,000, just over 40 percent. Like the South, it was a good place to raise cotton-so long as labor cost was kept at slave reproduction rates. After the Civil War, Texas was a Jim Crow state for black sharecroppers (and also for Mexicans), who lived in segregated housing and were denied service in restaurants and at lunch counters. Well into the 1940s a town proudly displayed a sign reading: "Greenville Texas: the blackest land, the whitest people." It is striking that Simone de Beauvoir's first-and nauseating-glimpse of Jim Crow during her travels in 1947 happens soon after her Greyhound Bus crosses into Texas from New Mexico.38 Alongside big plantations sat small family farms. Eli Whitney's "gin" was essentially a cylinder fitted with wire teeth that pulled cotton through a screen, separating the seed from lint; a worker who before might clean one pound of cotton a day could now clean fifty. Instead of dozens of slave gangs on the plantations, now a small farmer could raise cotton and get it ginned in town. Moreover, as poor southern whites moved west, small farmers and slaveholders alike worked the cotton fields. But as Oscar Lewis nicely put it, cotton and the Civil War made Texas appear "too southern, hence Confederate, defeated, poor, and prosaic."39 Nor could an aristocracy of planters romanticize life here-the planters and the cotton were both too new. Better to go with cowboy boots, Stetson hats, and a Colt 45.

A Western State.

The Nueces Valley at the southern tip of Texas, where Mexico, the Rio Grande, and the Gulf Coast come together, and the starting point for the Mexican War, also became the starting point for a new kind of American society: the kind most Americans still a.s.sociate with their imaginings of Texas. Large-scale cattle production for eastern markets produced a sharp increase in wealth and a culture formed around cattlemen, cowboys, and horse riding that soon spread across the plains; it didn't last that long as a social formation, but long enough to produce several great fortunes (the vast King Ranch still occupies large portions of the Nueces Valley) and the central, archetypical figures and myths of American expansionism.

Cattle have stomachs with four chambers that process gra.s.s into food and its byproduct, gas-literally methane; amazingly, their flatulent exhaust makes a large contribution to greenhouse gases. What Walter Prescott Webb called the "empire of gra.s.s" stretched from southern Texas well northward and westward into the plains, a vast, open environment of mild climate, sufficient water, and feed (gra.s.s) free for the taking as far as the eye could see. Cattlemen ran independent kingdoms in this empire, doing things their own way and dismissing with any kind of government-unless they needed its help with water or rights of way, of course. After the Civil War settled the issue of slavery and Texan loyalties, the state had about 5 million cattle, worth $4 apiece there but $40 in Kansas City or Chicago. Whoever got them to the railhead would make a fortune: take an initial capital of $8,ooo ($4 a head), drive 2,ooo head of cattle to Abilene, and turn over $8o,ooo, minus the cost of supplies and the mere dozen cowboys needed to do the job.

Over the next fifteen years 5 million head got heaved to market, primarily over thousand-mile-long trails to railheads like Sedalia in Missouri or Abilene in Kansas, for movement to the Chicago gallows as cattle and (after the "disa.s.sembly line") to eastern cities as steaks. Economically Texas divided into arid cattle territory west of Dallas and Austin, where in a thousand square miles less than one hundred people lived, and the fertile East Texas, with one person for every square mile. But that was only Texas: a new way of life spread across almost the entirety of the Great Plains from 1865 to about 1885, and then faded out almost as quickly when barbed wire and windmilldrawn water made homesteading and stock raising feasible in the same region, and when railroads arrived through most of the West to pick up the cattle. (Texas led all other states in laying down rails, and by 1904 it ranked first in railroad mileage.)40 But this economic and social formation never faded from the American mind: the free, open range, the ranch and the cattle baron, a handful of men on horseback wrestling thousands of longhorns up to the railhead became the essence of a new, romantic legend, another lost past like the closing of the frontier or the mechanized gobbling up of the garden, but a drama with far more compelling characters set against the matchless natural panorama of the West.

The Benighted but Manly West.

Most Americans find it impossible to separate what they know or don't know about the West from the Hollywood westerns they have seen. It is our only regional drama. We don't have "easterns" or "northerns"-and our only real "southern" is Gone with the Wind. The primary concern of southern literature, fiction and nonfiction, is race, a subject not for John Ford myths but for the depths of a Faulkner. The primary concern of the western is the lone, taciturn individual riding into town to set things straight: Alan Ladd dueling in the mud with Jack Palance in Shane; Gary Cooper defending the town while the good citizens cower in High Noon; Clint Eastwood tearing up the saloon in Unforgiven to avenge the murder of his friend, who happened to be black (like many cowboys); and the apotheosis-Marion Morrison of Glendale, otherwise known as John Wayne, a "perfect mold" through which to pour "the inarticulate longings of a nation wondering at just what pa.s.s the trail had been lost." Even so rock-ribbed an Atlanticist as Henry Kissinger confessed that he liked to think of himself as "the cowboy who rides all alone into the town." (Henry playing the Lone Ranger is less difficult to imagine than Henry on a horse.) The final proof of Hollywood's saturation of the western imaginary, however, is Jane Kramer's "last cowboy"-Henry Blanton, foreman of a large ranch in the Texas panhandle, who learned cowpuncher lore by watching Chill Wills, examined High Noon and The Virginian for pointers, wore black because Gary Cooper did, and paraded in front of the mirror to get his stance just right: "his eyes narrowed and his right hand poised over an imaginary holster."41 Red River was the first movie I ever saw (1948), Howard Hawks's tour de force starring John Wayne in one of his best performances. Cattle rancher Tom Dunston embodied all the virtues of the cowboy: adventurous, strong, courageous, direct, silent (a man of few but telling words), a self-reliant individual not just home on the range but free as a bird, a stoic living by a rough code of honor (never shoot a man in the back, never tolerate a coward), deploying self-contained coercive power: a Colt 45 and a Winchester repeating rifle. (The diminutive Oklahoma outlaw Al Jennings amended the Declaration of Independence when he memorably remarked that "a Colt's 45 makes all men equal.") The Winchester was just as famous as the Colt: a lever-action breech rifle that fired several shots without reloading, John Wayne memorialized it in his films: "Get me my Winchester." (The Winchester factory in New Haven displayed a bronze statue of Wayne in its lobby; it finally closed in January Zoo 6.)42 Most of Red River consists of Wayne and his crew driving io,ooo head of cattle a thousand miles up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene. Less evident is a fleeting parable on Polk and Mexico: at the beginning Wayne rides down to the Rio Grande and claims a huge swath of land; a Mexican shows up to say the estate is owned by one "Don Diego" living 400 miles to the south. Wayne scoffs at him and moments later shoots the man off his horse. (Later in the film a sidekick remarks that Wayne "took empty land.") Even more fleeting is Hawks's temerity in invoking Brokeback Mountain half a century before its time: the gay actor Montgomery Clift prefigures his role in From Here to Eternity, an accomplished but reluctant gunfighter whom Wayne punches around to the point where Clift finally fights back, whereupon another character says, "You two love each other"-for the second time in the film.

A hardy lone man, a rough-hewn but fair individualist, laconic, stoic, unburdened by history, bringing a violent justice to the frontier: John Wayne again. His talent was not acting; he couldn't act, or rather, he had but one act: cowboy. Either Marion Morrison looked like a cowboy when he was spotted on a Glendale tennis court, or Hollywood made cowboys look like him. Wayne didn't always play a cowboy, but when he was a soldier or a cop or hunting Reds for HUAC he recapitulated the same character in a different place-and if and when he didn't, no one remembered. The singular role that he embodied projected strength, determination, and courage in a powerful physique of feline carriage. An actor projects character through his movements, Garry Wills and others have written, and Wayne became the graceful celluloid fulfillment of an apparently unconflicted masculinity (so maybe Wayne was an actor?). In Red River he walks among a mult.i.tude of Texas longhorns in his Stetson cowboy hat, leather chaps, boots clinking with spurs, moving easily through their midst, as if he commanded the cattle and they followed him. It proved to be an archetypal role, and Gerald Mast thought no one else could have played it. Wayne wasn't just a cowboy, he was an American cowboy: he was an American: he was "Manifest Destiny on the hoof," in Garry Wills's words. Americans ranked John Wayne number three among favorite movie stars-not in 1948, but in 2oo6, twenty-seven years after his death. Of course, Wayne wasn't always loved: when he put on his Stetson, sixguns, and spurs and strode onto the stage at the Aiea Heights Naval Hospital in Hawaii in 1945, marines wounded in the Okinawa campaign booed him off the stage.43 No one escapes the cowboy legend. I have seen a picture of Bill Clinton as a boy, dressed head to toe in a Hopalong Ca.s.sidy outfit with pearl-handled revolvers at each hand. I got the same head-to-toe wardrobe on my seventh birthday. Former Joint Chiefs chairman John Shalikashvili learned English by watching John Wayne movies. Sherwood Anderson played cowboy-andIndian games when growing up, but by the time he was an adult he could hardly believe he had done so.44 Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush donned cowboy attire and went out to the back forty to chop wood or clear underbrush, as a centerpiece of their political imagery. If Bush seemed to force himself into the macho image, hunching his shoulders and trying to look tough,45 Reagan learned in Hollywood that you do it with aplomb, not with sweat and beady brow.

No Duty to Retreat.

Violence attended every step of the cowboy myth and remains permanently connected to the state of Texas. "Murder was too harsh a word to apply to his performance," Webb wrote of the western gunman, the death of an enemy was "a mere incident, as it were." The code only demanded that the gunman "must give notice of his intention" even if the action-murder-followed on the notice like "a lightning strike."46 The code developed in the absence of law, because the range was lawless; an offender was not a criminal but an "outlaw." This was incomprehensible to the easterner accustomed to the rule of law and therefore strange, exotic, fascinating. Central to the code was the "no duty to retreat" doctrine, that a person was legally justified "in standing one's ground to kill in self-defense." This was purely American, having no English common law background, and instead grew out of ideals of masculine bravery on the frontier. Although this doctrine by no means applied just to Texas (the Supreme Court upheld it in 1921), it seems to have had greater application there, entering and never leaving the culture. When law came it was in the form of the Texas Rangers, who began as a mounted militia trying to keep Indians at bay and protect settlers from raids and evolved into a legendary force that combined vigilante justice with professional and (by 1840) legal armed force. They ended up, along with many cowboys, small ranchers, and Klansmen, forming the Border Patrol, where many of the rough rules of the Wild West became inst.i.tutionalized-like being "a little quick on the trigger."47 Few things are more satisfying to the viscera than retributive violence, a bad guy getting what he deserves. Texas-style violence is deeply human because everyone, at least at the first spasm, loves the instant gratification of a wrong righted, revenge on the wing, the good triumphing over the bad. John Wayne embodied this American catharsis: someone mouths off to you, well, don't say a word, just punch him out. Recently a British parliamentarian, George Galloway, came before our Senate and unleashed a withering tirade at a committee supposedly investigating him, accusing his accusers of lying, chicanery, and aggressive war, while remaining coolly in control of himself. It was artful and convincing parliamentary behavior, perhaps typical for Britain, but in many state legislatures he would have been punched or thrown out of the building before getting to his third sentence. But think what Texas pioneers faced: in 184o a combined force of 700 Comanches and Kiowas roared through towns like Victoria and Linnville, killing everyone in sight and capturing fully i,5oo horses. This scourge was the Indians' salutary (and no doubt deeply satisfying) revenge for the pioneers having lured their headmen into a trap where thirty warriors and a number of their women and children died. And then the vigilantes-c.u.m-police named the Rangers took more revenge against the Indians in a continuous cycle, yielding tales and sagas that frightened people for generations, even though most Comanches were on the reservation by 1875.48 Texas in these years recalls Martin Sheen's remark in Apocalypse Now: "Charging a man with murder in these circ.u.mstances is like handing out speeding tickets at the Indy 500."

The code of retributive justice and immediate satisfaction still lives in Texas, of course, even under the rule of law; until recently men who killed their wife's lover were routinely acquitted of murder. But Hollywood did more than any other force to keep this code before the American people, long after it had run its course in the West. The cowboy is a killer, but only in a fair fight-and he kills the people who need killing (just like American soldiers abroad). He doesn't shoot a man who is not part of the code (like, say, an effete eastern dandy). He is chivalrous to the ladies and supremely loyal to his friends. In the climactic scene of Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood slides into a barroom and empties his shotgun into the owner: "Why you yellow-bellied coward," Little Bill says, "You just shot an unarmed man!" "He should'a armed himself" is Eastwood's retort, which seems to violate the code until we understand that two values are in conflict: the owner was indeed unarmed, but he allowed Eastwood's murdered friend to be displayed in a coffin out front of the saloon-so he got what he deserved. After Eastwood cleans out the place, the eastern pantywaist, who had fainted during the gun battle, asks him how he single-handedly took down so many men. It was lucky, he said; "I've always been lucky when it comes to killin' folks."

Lyndon Baines Johnson was a native son of the Pedernales, of central Texas and the 98th meridian, and couldn't hide it from anyone if he tried. Richard Maxwell Brown sought to link the endemic violence of this region to Johnson's prosecution of the Vietnam War.49 No doubt others do the same for George W. Bush and Iraq. But central Texas was an extreme version of a general problem, the extraordinary violence with which white Americans confronted people of color everywhere, while determining to ignore it, forget it, or pretend that it never happened. Which is more difficult to understand: how Johnson's Texas upbringing explains his championing of civil rights for blacks, or how a Boston Brahmin like McGeorge Bundy should have had so much more to do with catastrophic violence in Vietnam than President Johnson? In Texas the American strain of violence which Brown depicts so well persisted because of slavery, the necessities of Jim Crow, its location next to Mexico and the interior presence of so many Mexicans, the encounter with ferociously effective horse-mounted Indians, and a prolonged dilation of the frontier mentality in the form of Texas Rangers and the cowboy as myth and reality (remnant cowboys still corral longhorns today). "Comanche County" might be the best example of this survival; known for its night-riding Committee of ioo and endemic mob violence in the r88os, in the 1940s it still had a reputation for lawlessness.50 White Studies.

If cotton culture came in the east, cattle in the northwest, and eventually petroleum everywhere, south Texas departed from the slave and Confederacy or latifundia narrative. It was and is a cla.s.sic borderland region mingling Anglo, Mexican, Spanish, African, and later English, Polish, German, and Czech influences, yielding extraordinary "social heterogeneity and hybridity." Particularly it yielded lots of Mexicans and still does, leading to high rates of intermarriage and sharp difference with the Confederate South. Central Texas had yet a different mix, being the "west" of the cotton belt and the "north" of the cattle-breeding south, bringing together blacks and whites from the slave states with Mexicans and Anglos from the Southwest, and putting industrialized cotton alongside the small farms of poor peopleplantations met haciendas and they both met picayune tenant farms. (Texas had 300,000 sharecroppers and tenants in 193o.) Amid this diversity, once again a social and cultural definition of white skin animated elite pretensions.

In the center of the Lone Star State Neil Foley found white whites, and whites who weren't quite white: "white trash," "scrubs and runts," "worthless human silt," "cotton-mill swill"-people at risk of losing their white-skin privilege. And always, there was a scientist who could lend these invidious distinctions some kind of validity: "poor white trash" became "cacogenic" (bad gened) whites; "race scientists" like Lothrop Stoddard warned "Nordics" that "defective" whites were s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up the gene pool, and even the president agreed (Calvin Coolidge, so.... ). Maybe these degraded white people needed to be sterilized, the experts said-including Boston Brahmin Oliver Wendell Homes, whose most notorious Supreme Court opinion supported a Virginia case in which a r.e.t.a.r.ded young white woman was sterilized: "cutting the Fallopian tubes" of those who "sap the strength of the State" may be necessary, Holmes wrote, lest the country be "swamped with incompetence" (so?). The (low) wages of whiteness were smuggling in cla.s.s difference, and for anyone with eyes to see, demolis.h.i.+ng racism itself. Central Texas was "highly miscegenated" from the word go: German farmers, Czech dairy men, poor Irish Catholics ("n.i.g.g.e.rs inside out"), and pea pickers from the piney woods of Alabama were polluting whiteness itself. Germans established many orderly communities in and between San Antonio and Houston, with German-language newspapers in their towns, but they were still Ben Franklin's "Palantine boors" to wealthy whites. Of course, all the whites.h.i.+gh and low-thought they knew a black when they saw one. But blacks, too, had intermarried (or copulated, or got raped) with whites, Indians, and Mexicans for generations. Hardy men of whatever "race" worked the fields, and the women-well, a lot of women did too, as it happened. One of William Faulkner's tenant farmers tells a landlord he can put "six hands" into the field-four of them women.51 In the South you were either white or black, judged by as little as a drop of blood. That was the past. Central Texas turns out to be another microcosm for the country, in the here and now, of all the race, cla.s.s, and gender myths Americans live by-underlining Richard Walker's point that "racism is not an unalloyed quality of whiteness but a nerve that can be agitated or calmed depending on circ.u.mstances and leaders.h.i.+p (as we can see in our own time)." Texas differed completely from California, however, in having almost no Asians until the last few decades. When tens of thousands of Chinese lived in California in the 187os and const.i.tuted 30 percent of the population in Idaho, there were 25 such individuals in Texas. When California's Chinese population reached its pre-World War II height in 1890 of 107,488, Texas had 710 Chinese. Other Asians were equally scarce. A few hundred j.a.panese came to Texas to grow rice after Saibara Seito (a graduate of Dos.h.i.+sha University in Kyoto and former parliamentarian) opened a rice plantation near Webster in 1903 and succeeded in producing two to three times more rice per acre than local farmers. Their good business reputations did not keep some 450 j.a.panese-American Texans from getting interned in one of three concentration camps opened in the state during the war. The Asian-American population remained small until after the 1965 immigration law, when it grew into the tens of thousands. But as late as 2000 there were barely more than 65o,ooo Asian-Americans in Texas, less than the number in Chicago and several other big cities.12 Texas is thus a diverse state that the dominant narratives-cowboy or cotton or oil man-typically elide. One film doesn't, though: Terrence Malick's Days ofHeaven (1978), which presents a gorgeous panorama of the Texas panhandle in the days just after World War I. Sam Shepard is a wheat farmer presiding over a large Victorian home in the middle of nowhere, with giant combines coursing through his mammoth estate. Texas had fields of one's wildest dreams, just like California: Henrietta Chamberlain King of Corpus Christi had 1.4 million acres, C. W. Post of "Post Toasties" fame had 2oo,ooo acres, and the marriage of vast tracts for cotton or cattle created a highly concentrated and powerful landed oligarchy.53 The seasonal workforce was as varied as California's, too, and in Malick's film, field hands-Mexican, black, German, Polish, Chinese, perhaps Ukrainian and Russian, maybe Native American-don't talk to each other, indeed they can't, they converse in their own languages, so the soundtrack is a record of murmured unknown tongues. The high technologies of the early twentieth century acc.u.mulate at odd moments, like the birds in Hitchc.o.c.k's film by that name: Model Ts, a motorcycle, a small airplane. Great open s.p.a.ces, vast fields of wheat and cattle, the transforming effects of technique, a polyglot population doing the hard work but internally divided, the myth of wealth springing from the head of a single charismatic individual. For my money it is the best Texas film Hollywood has produced (and it produced many-many).

Black Gold.

For decades Spindletop Hill was thought to be a worthless heap of salt, pullulating with sulphur and stinky water, but a one-armed man named Pattillo Higgins wanted to stick a drill through it anyway. He hit several dry holes until it blew out one fine morning-and a glistening slick black column 6 inches wide and 125 feet tall towered above. Spindletop erupted on January 10, 1901, just outside Beaumont, spewing ioo,ooo barrels a day over the earth until it was finally capped (back then successful wells pumped a hundred barrels a day). Derricks sprouted like mushrooms after a hard rain, and Beaumont grew from less than io,ooo to 30,000 in a few weeks; land prices went from $40 to $ioo,ooo an acre, and farmers would sell out for $20,000, only to watch a speculator unload their land twenty minutes later for $5o,ooo. Four years later another huge strike, called the Glenn Pool, came in near a small village called Tulsey Town; it became Tulsa, "Oil Capital of the World." Both strikes set off explosive growth and fevered speculation throughout Texas and Oklahoma: "Petrolia in 1904, Electra in 1911, the Ranger field in 1917," they just kept coming until "petroleum was found under the majority of Texas counties." The state eclipsed California in oil production by 1928, but just two years later came a fantastic strike in East Texas, and many more in far west Texas after World War 11.54 The nation's largest petrochemical industry grew out of these finds, usually producing four-fifths of total American output-but this industry wasn't labor intensive. The popularity of television soap operas about the Dallas superrich and their "ostentatious vulgarity" reflected the reality of a vast but still peripheral state with no authentic middle-cla.s.s narrative, a working cla.s.s nothing like the midwestern industrial states, and a highly diverse but scattered and weak undercla.s.s.

The newer discoveries were by independents, and they fought off Standard Oil's attempts to bring them under its control. Populists and the state government backed Texas "little oil" against big oil, setting up a conflict between nationally based independent firms and integrated multinational conglomerates that would last for decades. Texas regulated the independents and got most of the tax revenue, and the government plowed money back into the state-for example, founding the University of Texas. California oil firms, too, like Union Oil and Southern Pacific, were independent of the majors, thus establis.h.i.+ng the conditions for major industrial conflict that spilled over into politics-most obviously with H. L. Hunt of Hunt Oil, who loathed the Rockefellers and routinely accused them of trying to control the world, a split that deeply affected the postwar Republican Party.

If Hunt became notorious for bankrolling the John Birch Society and for his conspiracy theories involving the Rockefellers (not surprising), communists (?), and the United Nations, Sid Richardson and Clint Murchison were more representative of wealthy oil men. In fact Richardson was the real Texas thing, a wildcatter who borrowed $40 from a friend's mother in Wichita Falls during the Depression and hit black gold in the Keystone and Slaughter fields in West Texas. Soon hugely wealthy and devoted to the industry, he was a lifelong bachelor who conducted his business from a drugstore in Fort Worth (while buying up huge chunks of the downtown). He gave away most of his fortune when he died in 1959 but reserved $11 million in oil a.s.sets for that generous friend: his nephew, Perry R. Ba.s.s. Perry had learned the business at Sid's knee, and prospered beyond anyone's dreams in 1930s Wichita Falls: the Ba.s.ses sold Sid Richardson Energy Services for $1.6 billion in zoos, a mere fraction of a family fortune estimated in recent years at $9 to $11 billion by Forbes; much of this growth owed to the efforts of Perry Ba.s.s's oldest son: called Sid. Like the Bechtels in San Francisco or the Wrigleys in Chicago, the secretive Ba.s.s family shuns publicity and rarely talks to the press. Like the Bushes, they send their sons to Yale.55 Clint Murchison made his vast fortune not from drilling oil wells-although he drilled many-but from sitting at the nexus of the industry and how it was run and regulated in Texas and Was.h.i.+ngton: leasing oil rights, running pipelines, and drilling wells using other people's money, with his main eye on tax advantages-especially the oil depletion allowance. Oil exists naturally, of course; it isn't as if people grow it. They find it and lay claim to it. But after intense lobbying and the exchange of unknown sums of cash, oil came to be treated as if it were the personal property of the finder, an a.s.set the depletion of which would ent.i.tle him to a tax deduction: the notorious oil depletion allowance enabled owners to exempt 27.5 percent of their oil-derived income from taxation.56 Texas Democrats like Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson became diehard defenders of the oil industry and the breathtaking depletion subsidy. Here was just another example of freedom Texas style, where the state was useful when compliant-and any government infringement on whatever an oil man wanted to do was an outrage, bordering on communism. Perhaps that is why Murchison, Richardson, H. L. Hunt, and other oil men loved Senator Joseph McCarthy, bringing him down to their ranches so often that he was called "the third senator from Texas."

Between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, prairie pirates and horse rustlers are long gone, but two of the most powerful political families in the state reside there, on the mammoth King and Armstrong ranches. When Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney rose from a crouch looking for grouse and shot his friend Harry Whittington's face full of buckshot, he was hunting on the Armstrong Ranch; Katherine Armstrong divulged this news many hours after the fact by calling a friendly local newspaper. The Armstrong family is one of the most effective cl.u.s.ters of political power in the Republican Party, a kind of Hyannisport south of Corpus Christi. Over a half-century Tobin and Anne Armstrong raised thousands of cattle and perhaps hundreds of politicians: they counseled Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes, raising oodles of campaign funds for all of them. Gerald Ford made Anne Armstrong amba.s.sador to the Court of St. James, and when he was governor George W. Bush appointed both her and her daughter Katherine to prestigious posts in Texas. When Bush's political consigliere Karl Rove opened his first consulting firm, Tobin Armstrong provided much of the financing. Anne Armstrong is also a powerful lobbyist whose clients included James Baker's law firm; she made $760,000 in lobbying fees in 2004 and 2005 alone. She and her husband were "pioneers" in the 2000 election, defined as people who raised at least $ioo,ooo for George W. Bush .17 Conclusion: The Lights Come On All at Once.

In the literature on California, Carey McWilliams is almost alone in grasping the spurts and surges, the herky-jerky movement, and the telescoping of change that characterized the state's development over the past century and a half. For him it was the key to California's exceptionalism: "California has not grown or evolved so much as it has been hurtled forward, rocket-fas.h.i.+on, by a series of chain-reaction explosions." If he indulged metaphors from the leading technologies of his time, he had also just experienced the shock of explo sive, transformative growth and change since Pearl Harbor. McWilliams was not theorizing but observing a century of California history-the 1949 centennial of the gold rush when "the lights came on all at once, in a blaze, and they have never dimmed."58 But California's pattern of growth was more than just spurts and lunges forward: it was combined, compressed, concatenated, synchronized development across multiple force fields of wealth, technology, energy, and people. It was recent-everything since 1849-meaning that it was "late" in world time; it also occurred in a vacuum of previous development because California was truly virgin land. Rooted interests did not have to be shoved aside or deconstructed or disestablished or transformed as new ones emerged. Growth generated enormous momentum, not only catching up quickly but surpa.s.sing other parts of the country and the world, thus locking in advantages that acc.u.mulated systematically over time. The technology behind the discovery of gold in 1849 was as simple as it could be, but it coincided with a great burst of industry in America and the world-in applications of the steam engine, new technologies and machines set to work in the wheat fields, the extension of railroads, the nearly instant communications of the telegraph, widely spreading print media, with a corresponding shrinking of the world that made the movement of ma.s.ses of people possible. The gold rush set off a ma.s.s migration that for the first time gave California a significant population, but it would not have been possible without the new technologies of ma.s.s transportation and communication. Had this pattern ended in a typical boom and bust fas.h.i.+on, like Texas, it would not hold our attention; but California has had one spurt after another: gold, wheat, citrus, oil, real estate, canned citrus, automobiles, lettuce (called "green gold"), Hollywood films, aircraft, wartime industrial production, cold war defense contracts, intercontinental ballistic missiles, real estate (again and again), the microprocessor, the Internet boom. Often they have combined together, as in the water, electricity, oil, citrus, tourism, autos, films, and housing boom in Southern California in the first three decades of the twentieth century. If the American River was the gift that kept on giving to a mult.i.tude of'49ers, California is the gift and that never stops giving-a Cripple Creek all of our own.

Practically we own more than half the coast on this side, dominate the rest, and have midway stations in the Sandwich and Aleutian Islands. To extend now the authority of the United States over the great Philippine Archipelago is to fence in the China Sea and secure an almost equally commanding position on the other side of the Pacific-doubling our control of it and of the fabulous trade the Twentieth Century will see it bear. Rightly used, it enables the United States to convert the Pacific Ocean almost into an American lake.

-WHITELAW REID.

anifest Destiny had a second run half a century later, half a world later really, because of the turmoil driven by an entirely different .geographic axis: the North-South Civil War. The drive to the Pacific hardly ceased, but it was a people's movement and not dependent on events in Was.h.i.+ngton or elsewhere. The gold rush populated California overnight. Pioneers kept arriving in the western states, and two new ones emerged on the sh.o.r.es of the Pacific: Oregon and Was.h.i.+ngton. But the continent nearly broke in two in the r86os, concentrating minds on the grand themes of the South that barely touch upon the concerns of this book-or the untransacted destiny of the West. Destiny arrived, however, in a confrontation with the oldest American empire.

The war with Spain began with the sinking of the Maine in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, a ma.s.sive explosion that took the lives of 266 men-and an explosion which every American believed to have been determined by Madrid. President McKinley had dispatched this ungainly battles.h.i.+p, sporting four ten-inch guns, to Havana in case American citizens might need evacuation amid the sporadic war ongoing in Cuba since 1895, when some 30,000 armed insurgents launched an insurrection against Spanish rule to the cheers of many Americans. But war between the United States and Spain was avoidable until the Maine exploded and the famed "yellow press" kicked up an incessant racket. (William Randolph Hearst offered $5o,ooo to find the criminals who used a "secret infernal machine" to demolish the wars.h.i.+p.) And so a reluctant, sleepless, and haggard William McKinley authorized the strike that Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Whitelaw Reid, and their friends had long antic.i.p.ated. The army was a mere 27,865 strong in 1898, but volunteers quickly swelled its ranks, this time to over 200,000 men, and it was soon reorganized into a modern fighting force by Secretary of War Elihu Root. It was the newly enlarged and competent navy, however, that struck the first and hardest blows.' Admiral George Dewey's decisive attack on the fleet at Manila provided a large ma.s.s of American patriots with another lightning victory and dealt a quick death blow to the Spanish empire in the Pacific. Of course it was hard to tell here (and in much of the war) whether Dewey was brilliant or the Spanish incompetent. In any case, he outgunned them two-to-one, with the Spanish guns ranging from antiques to brand new cannons that somehow they had forgotten to mount. In Cuba an opera bouffe ensued "in which an enfeebled Spain," in Robert Dallek's words, "outdid the United States in military inept.i.tude."

Easy initial victories in Manila and Havana cost the lives of a mere 770 Americans, but as with Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, the easy initial victories gave way to years of b.l.o.o.d.y and inconclusive warfare, this in spite of commanding officers skilled in Indian fighting: Walter L. Williams discovered that 87 percent of the generals who fought Filipino rebels had also fought Indians, but the most ill.u.s.trious was Brigadier General Arthur MacArthur, who at the age of eighteen had distinguished himself at Missionary Ridge in the Civil War, who fathered Douglas MacArthur, and who commanded 5,000 soldiers-all of them "totally ignorant" of the Philippines.2 Soon they put their ignorance into action in a dirty war that lasted nearly three years. Men, women, and children were slaughtered; captured guerrillas were tortured with the "water cure" (forcing water down the throat) among other techniques; one town after another was put to the torch, destroying food stocks (i million tons of rice and 6,ooo homes destroyed in just one week in 1901), ultimately forcing ma.s.ses of Filipinos into "protected zones." One soldier remarked, "This business of fighting and civilizing and educating at the same time doesn't mix very well," an understatement but evincing more brains than his superiors: General William Shafter thought it might be necessary "to kill half of the Filipinos in order that the remaining half of the population may be advanced to a higher plane of life than their present semibarbarous state affords," and Secretary of War Elihu Root recommended using "methods which have proved successful in our Indian campaigns." It goes without saying that not all American soldiers and officers indulged in ma.s.sacres; indeed, many decried the indiscriminate violence, but a ubiquitous turn-of-the-century racism made everything worse. White soldiers almost always called Filipinos "n.i.g.g.e.rs" or "goo-goos" (the origin of the term "gook"), and officers disparaged Filipinos time and again. Perhaps as a result some Soo African-American troops decided to stay in the Philippines, and most intermarried with Filipinas. All this after Aguinaldo had "desperately wanted an alliance with the United States" from the beginning and, of course, recognition of the Philippine Republic he and his allies established in January 1899. The war began a month later and lasted until July 19o2.1 The war occasioned America's first extensive colonial acquisitions, ending continentalism with a leap into the Caribbean and across the Pacific: the United States seized Cuba, Puerto Rico, and three strategic positions in the Pacific: Guam and Wake Island along the line to Manila, and the Philippines itself. Cuba got its independence in 19oi, but not before the navy got a base on Guantanamo Bay, and under the Platt Amendment Cuba remained a virtual American protectorate until 1959, an adjunct to American-owned sugar plantations, nickel mines, and casinos, as Was.h.i.+ngton reserved to itself a "right to intervene" to protect "life, property, and individual liberty." Panama was more or less the same. Puerto Rico was a protectorate, modeled on the British colony of Hong Kong, and it remains so today; it was joined by the informal protectorates of the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua.4 The United States had carved out an empire in the Caribbean, and with Pearl Harbor and Manila, Guam (i,5oo miles south of j.a.pan), Wake (2,ooo miles west of Hawaii), and Midway (2,2oo miles east of j.a.pan), stepping stones across the Pacific to a boundless maritime empire.

Less conspicuous was the simultaneous development of a j.a.panese empire in the Pacific, beginning with the colonization of Taiwan in 1895 and the emergence of its first-rate navy; suddenly the "West" was not empty of anyone who could effectively resist, the vast ocean was not a void, "natives" had arisen who were formidable. Akira Iriye's life work has taught us how half a century of cooperation and rivalry, trust and distrust, friends.h.i.+p and secret war plans, accommodation and racism played out across the plain of the North Pacific as prelude to that "sneak attack" at Pearl Harbor.' Commodore Perry had awakened a sleeping giant that unaccountably gave off surprise after surprise: here were Orientals who were "clean" and vigorous instead of "torpid and slow," leaping forward instead of vegetating in the teeth of time. After a "sudden revolution," the most isolated, exclusive, rigid, and conservative nation in Asia overnight had become "the most active and enterprising."6 This was an American, Henry M. Field, commenting in 1877, but this became the consensual American judgment after Perry: the j.a.panese are different, they give surprise, they are special, they are formidable-they are dangerous.

If the United States now had an empire resisted by tens of thousands of guerrillas in the new century, Americans would still claim it for the antiimperialist side, a war of liberation in the interest of Filipinos against a decrepit Spain that should have been ashamed of itself for not vacating the historical stage sooner. The previous pattern of "savage war," in which barbarity by the enemy justified even greater barbarity by G.o.d-fearing whites, now sanctified empire in the guise of self-determination. Equal measures of selfrighteousness, ambition to be not just a stronger power than others but a better one (a special one), zeal to remake the world in the American image, and ignorance of that world to be remade mingled with a characteristic lack of introspection or reflection and the predictable mundane material interests (the China trade, Philippine mahogany and coconuts) to convince American leaders that right made might, and might made right-Santayana's American in a repeat performance: victorious and blameless. It proved to be a pattern repeated in every big war down to the present, with the singular exception of the one conflagration that truly threatened America's vital interests: World War II.

Empire?

McKinley's war with Spain and Roosevelt's presidency add up to a selfconscious policy of empire on the territorial European model: colonies and protectorates. Before 1898 Polk, Cus.h.i.+ng, Perry, Seward, and many others rarely missed an opportunity to expand, and especially to extend, the realm of American trade. Likewise the literature abounds with attributions of single purpose and imperial ambition to Jefferson, Adams, Monroe, and Seward. If the issue was expansion across the continent or new opportunities for trade, yes. But they didn't want colonies, and they didn't have a country behind them that wanted such things-they didn't even have a State Department behind them, Foggy Bottom specializing in prevarication, caution, and pa.s.sivity; the Foreign Service never approximated a diplomatic service like those in Europe until the 192os. Expansionism was westward bound, away from Europe, toward regions thought to be empty both of people who could resist and powerful nations who might want to try. New territory came through serendipitous, entirely unexpected windfalls, like the Louisiana Purchase, and through conscious intent, like Polk's acquisition of Texas and California. But there was no conscious follow-on to these events, no continuity, no systematic policy of expansion or empire that followed ineluctably from one president to the next, and no daily calculation of how any of this played into the European balance of power. Perry's Black s.h.i.+ps continued the pattern of westward movement into places not occupied by other empires, yet shortly after "opening" j.a.pan, the United States was consumed by civil war and three decades pa.s.sed before the United States and j.a.pan came into close contact again. After the vast expansion of armies in the interior cataclysm, the U.S. Army fell back to a skeleton crew of roughly 25,000 men-this for a continent still contested by hostile Indians-and the navy dropped from 600 s.h.i.+ps to 6o. When Was.h.i.+ngton thought about chastising Chile for some infraction in 1881, it discovered that Chile's navy was larger than its own.

A great power signifies a central state, large standing armies, and a capital: London does this, Paris and Berlin do that. Was.h.i.+ngton was a sweltering, muddy place where mangy dogs and greasy pigs ran through the streets, the muggy headquarters of a state that could not make a pretense of itself, as Marx said, in a country still preoccupied with local affairs, local autonomy, and self-government. Likewise an empire is not const.i.tuted by grandiloquent rhetoric, far-reaching schemes, or distant outposts that can't be defended: empires have structures like war industries, blue-ocean navies, forward-based troops, a civil service schooled in colonial administration. Westward expansion had a sporadic, patchy, intermittent quality of sudden spasms forward, and except for California gold, the new acquisitions did not have strong refractory effect on Was.h.i.+ngton or really on the nation itself. People lived where they lived, and if California or Alaska was acquired it did not change the lives of those in Maine or Ohio, or force a new worldview on them-or their president.

Even near the end of the century Josiah Royce was still so impressed with the vastness of the unplumbed continent that he ill.u.s.trated how the United States was a world all in itself. He prepared a map showing how England, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Palestine-really everything from Edinburgh to Baghdad-could easily fit inside the United States with enough room left over to accommodate j.a.pan (which he draped over twothirds of California) and "China proper" (which he centered over the Great Plains). (The area of the contiguous forty-eight states is 7.8 million square kilometers, of Western Europe, 2.9 million.) Missionary that he was, he ran this map under a line from the Song of Solomon: "He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from the river unto the ends of the earth." Royce thought the West would fall back upon and dominate the eastern United States soon enough, since Berkeley's westward course of empire would terminate at the Pacific-and "there is no further West; beyond is the Orient."' Traders always wanted new frontiers at home and abroad, of course, but they didn't dominate foreign policy and generally abhorred the use of force. (Wall Street opposed the conflict with Spain until a critical point in March 1898, when it turned and urged McKinley to war.) As Robert H. Wiebe wrote, "Foreign relations were composed of incidents, not policies-a number of distinct events, not sequences that moved from a source toward a conclu- sion."8 The normal state of the nation was a comfortable and unthreatened isolation from world affairs, in the natural shelter of two great oceans-and that remained the normal state, minus a couple of intermissions, until Pearl Harbor. As we will see, however, McKinley's new empire set several highlevel Americans to thinking about how the broader world might be made to conform to new American rules.

A Continent Pregnant with Energy.

Amid this isolation and indifference, American industry continued to lengthen its lead over everyone else. Professor Turner may have made Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition famous by declaring the end of the frontier, but few recall that he was surrounded by an astonis.h.i.+ng plethora of new products and technologies, most of them invented by Americans: General Electric's threeton searchlight and its Edison Tower of Light, a shaft nearly eighty feet tall worthy of Albert Speer; the company town of Pullman, providing for the worker's every need (housing, stores, health, culture); Transportation Hall full of mighty, polished locomotives of all types and finely appointed dining and sleeping cars; Machinery Hall, with Westinghouse's incandescent lighting system and oil-fired dynamos to drive it, making for the largest central power station in the country (with Standard Oil's experimental forty-mile pipeline bringing in the petroleum); Electricity Hall, with long-distance phones, trolley cars, was.h.i.+ng machines, sewing machines (hugely important to the textile industry), typewriters (already creating a revolution in the office), even early dishwas.h.i.+ng machines; Agricultural Hall, with threshers and reapers towering over a lesser-known aspect of American commercial dominance: food processing, as in California pears, Armour bacon, Swift beef roasts, and Borden condensed milk. Here was the American dream of high technology and ma.s.s consumption spread out for a world that barely knew what either one was, as Emily Rosenberg said, but was eager to try; in the two decades after the exposition American exports rose 240 percent as the world sampled Colgate tooth powder, Heinz ketchup, Kodak cameras, Columbia gramophones, and Fords and Oldsmobiles powered by Rockefeller's gasoline.9 Henry Adams took it all in and decided that even Harvard dons would be reduced to the level of "r.e.t.a.r.ded minds" trying to fathom "a watt or an ampere or an erg" (just as they are today with terabytes and nan.o.bots and googols). Barely was the Columbian fair a memory before X-rays came along, also radium and atoms-"absolute, supersensual, occult" discoveries. Chicago was "the first expression of American thought as a unity," Adams wrote, a protean unity beyond measure-but the unity was pragmatic, mechanical, and capitalistic and he didn't like it anymore than he could resist it: a crawling infant in 1838, by 1904 Adams had himself become "a howling, steaming, exploding, Marconing, radiumating, automobiling maniac."10 As in the 1840s, this bursting energy found a foreign outlet.

"Fire When Ready": Seizing Manila.

No one has ever quite explained how the battles.h.i.+p Maine found itself at the bottom of Havana Harbor, setting Was.h.i.+ngton on a course ofwar with Spain: the experts think it was an accidental explosion internal to the s.h.i.+p. But Spain was instantly blamed, and that set in motion the American way of going to war: behold, an unprovoked attack, prelude to a howling throng of outraged congressmen, newspaper pundits, and other demagogues. After weeks of clamor and agitation, Congress declared war on April 25, 1898, and provided $5o million to President McKinley, who had finally been shaken into momentary action by Henry Cabot Lodge. Fighting began a week later with Admiral Dewey's spectacular dawn attack on the Spanish fleet.

Dewey's s.h.i.+ps were pre-positioned in j.a.pan: why? Because on a Friday afternoon in February when his boss had gone home early and he was momentarily "acting secretary" of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt had sent Dewey a secret dispatch ordering him to attack if war was declared with Spain. Dewey, commander of the Asiatic Squadron at the port of Nagasaki, left for Hong Kong in February 1898 aboard the gleaming white flags.h.i.+p Olympia, accompanied by the small cruiser Boston, a gunboat named Petrel, and an ancient paddle-wheel steamer called the Monocacy which had taken part in the "Little War with the Heathen" in Korea back in 1871. Around midnight on April 3o Dewey maneuvered his wars.h.i.+ps in the bright moonlight past Corregidor and several batteries of Spain's sleeping sentinels into Manila Bay, and at dawn the next morning issued through a bra.s.s speaking tube his memorable order: "You may fire when you are ready, Gridley." Soon the Spanish fleet, which returned fire with uncanny inaccuracy (a five-hour barrage hit nothing of substance), was on the bottom of the bay at the cost of about 380 Spanish casualties and a mere 8 Americans wounded (slightly). With no armor to speak of, antique muzzle-loading guns with much less range than Dewey's eight-inch cannons, and the hare-brained placement of the defending s.h.i.+ps outside the protection of sh.o.r.e batteries, defeat was almost instant. Americans hailed it as the greatest naval victory in history. Meanwhile, the Spanish commander in Manila, fearing Aguinaldo and his insurgents much more than the Americans, beseeched Dewey to mount a small, face-saving exchange of gunfire before imposing the surrender. After that and quick campaigns in Cuba and Puerto Rico (a young Charles Beard soldiered in Cuba), Spain capitulated-ending nearly four centuries of rule in the Philippines. John Hay's "splendid little war" was almost as easy as taking California, if 345 combat deaths and 2,565 soldiers dead from disease can be called splendid."

McKinley announced that the United States was sovereign throughout the Philippines on December 21, 1899. The president didn't know what to do with the islands when they fell into his lap and couldn't find them on a map when Dewey reported his victory. But it would be wrong, he surmised, to let Spain keep them; taking Manila would be sufficient for this purpose. But taking the capital required taking all of Luzon, the military said, plus there was a new republic seeking independence-and so presently McKinley discovered that Filipinos were "unfit for self-government." At length, while lying awake one night, the president prayed for divine guidance, and it came to him that the only decent mission would be to "uplift and civilize and Christianize" the Filipinos-"benevolent a.s.similation" as it came to be known. But the real movers and shakers were Roosevelt, Hay, Lodge, and Whitelaw Reid (the latter was instrumental in convincing the president to take it all). So the United States found itself in occupation of Manila and little else in this sprawling archipelago, now an American colony but also a tinderbox. Not for the first time, the United States had won the battle but not the war. Independence forces under the leaders.h.i.+p of Aguinaldo controlled Luzon (where about half of the 7 million Filipinos lived) and several other main islands in the archipelago, and it took 126,648 American soldiers and three years of counterinsurgency to defeat them, at the cost of somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 civilians, 16,ooo to 20,000 insurgents, and 4,165 American soldiers dead of all causes.12 This counterinsurgency campaign is mostly unknown in the United States, but it is well remembered in the Philippines. It took the form of subsequent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq: stumbling into an unknown political and cultural thicket with widespread expectations of easy victory and messianic deliverance only to get bogged down, lose popular support, and ultimately find no way out short of defeat or indefinite occupation.

McKinley stumbled along into empire with "no more backbone than a chocolate eclair" [sic] in Roosevelt's view. The president wanted to avoid war with Spain but the Maine forced his hand; after Dewey's victory he reckoned ground troops better go to Manila, then he decided Luzon should be ours, too; then it turned out the natives "appear unable to govern" (in Dewey's words), so finally the president sanctioned colonization of all the islands. "There is a very general feeling," he said in October 1898, "that the United States, whatever it might prefer as to the Philippines, is in a situation where it can not let go."13 When a sailor sees that his heading is disastrous he changes course, but imperial armies sink their boots in quicksand and keep marching, if only in a circle, while the politicians plumb the phrase book of American ideals.

Savage War Again.

The war offered Major General Arthur MacArthur a chance finally to implement his 1883 "Chinese Memorandum": as he told the Senate in 1902, the Philippines provided a way station toward the China market and "a commanding position" against any enemy; furthermore the Filipinos would become missionaries for the American cause of commerce and republican inst.i.tutions throughout Asia. Major General Elwell S. Otis a.s.sured McKinley that Filipinos did not support Aguinaldo but preferred the president's strategy of benevolent a.s.similation, and just in case they didn't, in February 1899 he launched his forces against Aguinaldo. The campaigns "quickly a.s.sumed a numbing similarity," in Brian Linn's words: "Otis would dispatch a column ... the soldiers would deploy and attack; the Filipinos would withdraw." Then the column would push on after them for a few days, until dehydration and exhaustion in the hot and humid jungle took their toll-and then the column would withdraw. Aguinaldo's forces would return and punish collaborators. It was "like pa.s.sing a finger through water," one veteran said. A year later things were not better, with endless skirmishes and ambushes yielding little result. Aguinaldo was finally captured in March 1901 and many of his followers capitulated, but fierce resistance continued in southwestern Luzon and the island of Samar. The war petered out in 1902, but now the United States had its first formal colony to administer; if Dewey had his way it would also have a naval base at Subic Bay, and it was fighting insurrectos in southwestern Luzon and Moro Province-and a century later Americans were still fighting Moro's Muslim insurgents, who were never completely pacified.14 American atrocities were indulged liberally, like previous attacks on Indians-and not a few made that comparison, including General "Howlin' Jake" Smith, who fought the insurgency like an Indian war: "Kill and burn, kill and burn. The more you kill and burn, the more you please me." He wanted to turn the island of Samar into "a howling wilderness" but drew the line at killing children: his men were authorized only to kill men and women above the age of ten. When President Roosevelt got wind of Howlin' Jake's statements he called a cabinet meeting and instantly demanded all the facts of the situation, punishment of those guilty of "cruelty or brutality," and the court-martial of General Smith. Elihu Root, however, justified Smith's actions via the brutality of the insurrectos and the "half-devil and half-child" nature of the Filipinos, while Governor William Howard Taft thought Filipinos inferior to "the most ignorant negro" and completely unfit for self- government.15 Mark Twain's "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (19oi) maybe the best anti-imperial polemic among the many penned by Americans at the time. Unsparing in its account of American atrocities and racism, it also penetrated into a peculiar propensity to combine pitiless violence with idealism: There have been lies; yes, but they were told in a good cause. We have been treacherous; but that was only in order that real good might come out of apparent evil. True, we have crushed a deceived and confiding people; we have turned against the weak and the friendless who trusted us; we have stamped out a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic; we have stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of a guest; we have bought a Shadow from an enemy that hadn't it to sell; we have robbed a trusting friend of his land and his liberty; we have invited our clean young men to shoulder a discredited musket and do bandit's work under a flag which bandits have been accustomed to fear, not to follow; we have debauched America's honor and blackened her face before the world; but each detail was for the best.

Twain was merely the most brilliant of a broad swatch of Americans-politicians, philosophers, writers, labor leaders, academics-who condemned this war and the empire that resulted