Viewing page 74 of 100

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

FREEDOMWAYS          FOURTH QUARTER 1972

a relatively short period of time and were not preserved.
  The period, 1898-1900, which Marks treats, was critical for the emergence of America as a world force.  The new corporate indus-trialists' demand for new markets, raw materials, and cheap labor supplies pushed them into the scramble for territories.
  Before the end of the nineteenth century, Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico fell into the circle of American economic domination.  To push expansion, the national leaders first had to convince a basically reluctant and isolationist American public to accept militarism as a priority.  This was no easy task.  Many senators and congressmen initially voiced strong reservations about America's new direction.  The National Anti-Imperialist League formed in 1898 included some of the leading political figures in the country.
  Socialists and numerous key labor leaders lined up against impe-rialism.  However, as expansion increased, the liberal opposition melted away.  The black population, though, was another matter.
  The black press believed that the war being fought in Cuba and the Philippines was a racist war aimed at home, blacks didn't fail to note the similarities between the way whites described the Filipinos ("degenerate," "uncivilized," "lazy," etc.) and themselves.
  Blacks reasoned that as long as the government didn't provide civil rights and equal protection in America then they shouldn't be asked to serve in the military.  Lewis Douglass, son of the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, in an article in the Cleveland Gazette, December 23, 1899, argued:  "The administration holds that this is a white man's government and that dark races have no rights which white men are bound to respect.  It is a sorry, though true, fact that wherever this government controls, injustice to dark races prevails.  The people of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Manila know it as well as do the wronged Indian and the outraged black man in the United States."
  Other blacks were not as polite and labeled those blacks who chose to enlist as "race-traitors."  The Reporter, February, 1900, bluntly stated:  "Any Negro soldier that will cross the ocean to help subjugate the Filipinos is a fool or a villain, more fool, however, than villain, we trust.  May every one of them get ball-stung is our sincere prayer."
  When war loomed as a possibility in China during the so-called Boxer Rebellion in 1898, Bishop Turner in a letter to the New York Age, July 27, 1900, vowed to do everything in his power to prevent blacks from enlisting:  "This is not our war, and the black man that puts a gun upon his shoulder to go and fight China should find the

336