How to Spin an Empire

Get audio access with any FP subscription. Welcome to FP Free Week. To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, our entire site is completely unlocked this week only. Enjoy the article. Amid losing a war with Iran, the Trump administration has intensified military, economic, and legal pressure against Cuba in recent months, creating fears of a new military intervention in the Caribbean. If Trump continues down this path, he will bring Washington’s long imperial tradition in Latin America back to the very place it began in 1898. This was the year that Americans “went to the aid of Cuba,” and, “by beating Spain,” “won an empire.” At least that’s what Donald Trump and other middle school students would have learned in the 1950s if they read Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders (1954), number 41 in the bestselling Landmark Books children’s history series. Roosevelt waved his sword, the rough riders advanced up San Juan Hill, and in the end, “we got the whole Philippine Archipelago, Puerto Rico and Guam, plus a few coral spits like Wake Island.” Amid losing a war with Iran, the Trump administration has intensified military, economic, and legal pressure against Cuba in recent months, creating fears of a new military intervention in the Caribbean. If Trump continues down this path, he will bring Washington’s long imperial tradition in Latin America back to the very place it began in 1898. This was the year that Americans “went to the aid of Cuba,” and, “by beating Spain,” “won an empire.” At least that’s what Donald Trump and other middle school students would have learned in the 1950s if they read Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders (1954), number 41 in the bestselling Landmark Books children’s history series. Roosevelt waved his sword, the rough riders advanced up San Juan Hill, and in the end, “we got the whole Philippine Archipelago, Puerto Rico and Guam, plus a few coral spits like Wake Island.” Critics have consistently lamented that Americans remain ignorant of this history, and in denial about their country’s imperial past. Trump, they argue, is now exposing the ugly truth lurking beneath the facade of Washington’s liberal rhetoric. Americans, like other peoples, have always preferred an idealized account of their role in the world. Mainstream versions of U.S. history extol moral victories like World War II while downplaying all the occupations and annexations to tell a heroic story of the United States as a global champion of democracy. But, in many cases, empire wasn’t hidden; it was carefully co-opted. In fact, over the course of the Cold War, U.S. historians and politicians were often quite sophisticated in incorporating the darkest chapters of U.S. history into a triumphalist narrative that sought to justify Washington’s expansive role in the world. Rather than ignore U.S. empire, they offered a sanitized version of its flaws, before concluding that the good intentions animating the entire imperial enterprise had finally found their proper outlet in the country’s more principled Cold War policy. The tragic irony, on display in Trump’s foreign policy today, is that the narrative worked all too well. Because he’s convinced that the U.S. liberal internationalist tradition really was selfless, Trump has instead embraced gunboat diplomacy with a glee that was already unseemly in the 1950s. A political cartoon entitled “School Begins” from the late 1800s.Universal History Archive/via Getty images If Americans remain in the dark about their imperial history, they can’t totally blame their education. A wealth of mainstream instructional material from the early Cold War shows how effectively patriotic history incorporated imperialism into a narrative of U.S. virtue and redemption. These rhetorical efforts drew on the undeniable fact that, from the time of the revolution on, Americans conceived of their country and its republican government in opposition to European empires. Of course, Americans shared many of the same racist attitudes as their European peers and relied on many of the same violent techniques to colonize the continent and promote their economic interests around the globe. Yet they remained deeply ambivalent about formal territorial empire. For critics, including both those on the left as well as some old school British imperialists, this was the height of hypocrisy: Stealing Native land wasn’t any better if you eventually made it a state; invading Caribbean islands wasn’t any better if you declined to actually annex them. But for many Americans, these distinctions helped sustain a sense of moral superiority. Of course, the United States did actually acquire a formal empire. But for both pragmatic and principled reasons, it remained much smaller than, say, Great Britain’s. As a result, discussing U.S. imperialism could actually serve as an opportunity for Americans to tell themselves they weren’t actually all that into imperialism. One particularly revealing example comes from The Amer

How to Spin an Empire

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