The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890-1913

marc-william palen

The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890–1913* The Open Door Policy was America’s version of the liberal policy of informal empire or free trade imperialism.

—William A. Williams, Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959.1 The open door does not mean and should not mean free trade.

—Benjamin B. Wallace, U.S. Tariff Commission, 1924.2

* The author is grateful to Daniel Headrick, Rachel Herrmann, Wm. Roger Louis, Stephen Meardon, Frank Ninkovich, Rob Rakove, Emily Rosenberg, J. A. Thompson, Adam Tooze, and Ian Tyrrell, as well as the attendees at Monash’s 2012 Inter-University U.S. Studies Conference, Yale’s 2013 International Security Studies Colloquium, and Exeter’s Early Career Seminar for their insights, comments, and criticisms.

1. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1972 [1959]), 97, 55–56.

2. Benjamin B. Wallace, “Preferential Tariffs and the Open Door,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 112 (March 1924): 213.

3. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review 6 (August 1953): 1–15; Robinson, “Imperial Theory and the Question of Imperialism after Empire,” in Perspectives on Imperialism and Decolonization, eds. Robert F. Holland and Gowher Rizvi (London, 1984), 48.

4. See especially Wm. Roger Louis, ed., Imperialism: The Robinson and Gallagher Controversy (New York, 1976).

Diplomatic History, Vol. 39, No. 1 (2015). ß The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.

For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. doi:10.1093/dh/dht135 Advance Access publication on February 7, 2014 157

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In 1953, John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson put forth a tantalizing thesis that revolutionized imperial studies. In their article “The Imperialism of Free Trade,” they suggested that the so-called New Imperialism of the 1870s was not new at all, but actually demonstrated a striking imperial continuity. The authors argued that England’s adoption of free trade from around 1850 onward had helped promote an informal British Empire that historians had previously overlooked. Thereafter, Robinson elaborated further upon the free-trade dimensions of informal imperialism: that it entailed “coercion or diplomacy exerted for purposes of imposing free trading conditions on a weaker society against its will.”3 Gallagher and Robinson’s unorthodox free-trade imperial conclusions have since sparked decades of controversy and scholarship—including within U.S. imperial history.4 Revisionist historians, most notably the so-called Wisconsin School, have adopted “the imperialism of free trade” thesis within

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5. On the revisionist use of “the imperialism of free trade,” see also Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” American Historical Review 116 (December 2011): 1374; Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 192; Frank Ninkovich, “Ideology, the Open Door, and Foreign Policy,” Diplomatic History 6 (September 1982): 190; Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism (Malden, MA, 2004 [2001]), 241; Ernest R. May, American Imperialism: A Speculative Essay (New York, 1968), 15, footnote; J. A. Thompson, “William Appleman Williams and the ‘American Empire’,” Journal of American Studies 7 (April 1973): 102–3; H. W. Brands, What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy (New York, 1998), 245; Thomas G. Paterson and Stephen G. Rabe, eds., Imperial Surge: The United States Abroad, The 1890-Early 1900s (Lexington, MA, 1992), 68; and Ronald Robinson, “Wm. Roger Louis and the Official Mind of Decolonization,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 27 (May 1999): 5.

6. “Revisionist” is used throughout to refer to the prolific work on American open-door imperialism, especially (but not only) the Wisconsin School. Beyond the Wisconsin School, for instance, world-systems historian Thomas D. Schoonover describes the U.S. open-door policy at the turn of the century as utilizing a free-trade imperial approach in developing “an international free market economy,” and David A. Lake incorporates a similar open-door portrayal. Thomas D. Schoonover, The United States in Central America, 1860-1911: Episodes of Social Imperialism and Imperial Rivalry in the World System (Durham, 1991), 131, n. 3; David A. Lake, “International Economic Structures and American Foreign Economic Policy, 1887-1934,” World Politics 35 (July 1983): 517–43; and Lake, Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887-1939 (Ithaca, 1988).

7. Stephen Howe, “New Empires, New Dilemmas—and Some Old Arguments,” Global Dialogue 5 (Winter/Spring 2003), accessed December 23, 2013, http://www.worlddialogue. org/content.php?id¼216.

8. William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (New York, 1980). Other influences included the work of Charles Beard and an opposition to the Vietnam War. See William Appleman Williams, The Great Evasion: An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx and on the Wisdom of Admitting the Heretic into the Dialogue about America’s Future (Chicago, 1964); Emily S. Rosenberg, “Economic Interest and United States Foreign Policy,” in American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890-1993, ed. Gordon Martel (New York, 1993), 37–51; Brands, What America Owes the World, ch. 9; Justus D. Doenecke, “William Appleman Williams and the Anti-Interventionist Tradition,” Diplomatic History 25 (Spring 2001): 283–91; Walter LaFeber, “The World and the United States,” American Historical Review 100 (October 1995), 1024–25; and Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA, 2002), Introduction. For Marxist theories of imperialism, see Anthony Brewer, Marxist Theories of Imperialism: A Critical Survey (London, 1990).

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their own studies of American imperial history.5 Despite the predominance of economic nationalism over the turn-of-the-century American political economy and foreign policy, the revisionist free-trade or open-door interpretation has since become a prominent fixture within U.S. imperial history and historiography.6 How has this tendency to stress the “free-trade character” of turn-of-the-century American imperialism become the “dominant view?”7 The influential Wisconsin School itself deserves due credit. Drawing inspiration in part from Marxist theories of economic imperialism, Wisconsin School revisionists set out in search of an all-encompassing American imperial narrative: “empire as a way of life.”8 Turn-of-the-century Wisconsin School–inspired revisionist histories suggest that, owing to the distinctive nature of American capitalism, imperial presidents embarked upon a bipartisan quest for foreign markets with broad business and agrarian support, culminating in the acquisition of both a formal and informal American empire. Williams termed it “Open Door imperialism,”

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9. Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 (Cornell, 1963). Other key turn-of-the-century works from revisionist open-door scholarship include Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893-1901 (Cambridge, MA, 1967); William Appleman Williams, Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society (New York, 1969); Marilyn Blatt Young, The Rhetoric of Empire: American China Policy, 1895-1901 (Cambridge, MA, 1968); Carl P. Parrini and Martin J. Sklar, “New Thinking about the Market, 1896-1904: Some American Economists on Investment and the Theory of Surplus Capital,” The Journal of Economic History 43 (September 1983): 559–78; and Paul Wolman, Most Favored Nation: The Republican Revisionists and U.S. Tariff Policy, 1897-1912 (Chapel Hill, 1992). It should be noted that, while subscribing to the revisionist narrative of bipartisan imperial expansion during this period, Tom Terrill and Ed Crapol do emphasize instead an economic nationalist drive to empire. See Tom Terrill, The Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 1874-1901 (Westport, 1973) and Edward P. Crapol, America for Americans: Economic Nationalism and Anglophobia, 1876-1896 (Westport, 1973).

10. Diane B. Kunz, “The New Empire Redux,” International Studies Review 2 (Spring 2000): 136–37. For The New Empire’s continued popularity, see also Lloyd C. Gardner and Thomas J. McCormick, “Walter LaFeber: The Making of a Wisconsin School Revisionist,” Diplomatic History 28 (November 2004): 622. An updated version of LaFeber’s informal imperial argument appeared in 1995 as the second volume in The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations series, extending his analysis into the Progressive Era. Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations Vol. 2: The American Search for Opportunity, 1865-1913 (Cambridge, UK, 1993), esp. xiii.

11. Ernest R. May, “Robinson and Gallagher and American Imperialism,” in Imperialism, 228; Michael J. Hogan, “Corporatism: A Positive Appraisal,” Diplomatic History 10 (October 1986): 363.

For Wisconsinite studies on “corporate capitalist” development, see William Appleman Williams, “Age of Corporation Capitalism,” in The Contours of American History; Thomas J. McCormick, “Drift or Mastery? A Corporatist Synthesis for American Diplomatic History,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): 318–30; and Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (Cambridge, 1988).

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an American manifestation of the imperialism of free trade. Thereafter, Williams’s former students expanded upon his laissez-faire open-door speculations. In 1963, for example, Walter LaFeber fleshed out the Gilded Age origins of the Open Door in The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898, arguing that American late nineteenth-century imperialism arose owing to growing national demand for foreign markets as a cure-all to the era’s economic depression, overproduction, and domestic political conflicts.9 Upon The New Empire’s thirtyfifth anniversary rerelease, Diane Kunz observed that it had since become “the prevailing academic orthodoxy” as an American continuation of Gallagher and Robinson’s “imperialism of free trade” legacy.10 Ernest May, although generally critical of the revisionist emphasis on economic imperialism, suggested that their utilization of the Gallagher–Robinson informal imperial thesis might be even more applicable within the Progressive Era—an era that witnessed the development of “corporate capitalism,” what Michael Hogan describes as an evolving compromise “between the older laissez-faire system . . . and paternalistic statism.”11 The “imperialism of free trade” argument has since been utilized within various turn-of-the-century U.S. foreign relations histories in the Wisconsin School’s revisionist tradition, which continues to hold a prominent position within the study of U.S. imperialism.

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12. Lewis L. Gould, “Tariffs and Markets in the Gilded Age,” Reviews in American History 2 (June 1974): 266–71.

13. Williams, Tragedy, 29, 46–47; McCormick, China Market, 45, 63; LaFeber, New Empire, 412–17; Crapol, America for Americans, 120; Edward P. Crapol and Howard Schonberger, “The Shift to Global Expansion, 1865-1900,” in From Colony to Empire: Essays in the History of American Foreign Relations, ed. W. A. Williams (New York, 1972), 140, 171–72; Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and American Foreign Policy, 186. As J. A. Thompson observes, such revisionist work thereby indiscriminately equates “economic expansionism” with “imperialism.” Thompson, “Williams and the ‘American Empire’,” 103–4. Similar criticisms were leveled against “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” See, for instance, Oliver MacDonagh, “The Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade,” Economic History Review, New Series 14 (April 1962): 489–501; D. C. M. Platt, “The Imperialism of Free Trade—Some Reservations,” Economic History Review 21 (August 1968): 296–306; and Eric Stokes, “Late Nineteenth-Century Colonial Expansion and the Attack on the Theory of Economic Imperialism: A Case of Mistaken Identity?” Historical Journal 12 (June 1969): 285–92.

14. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York, 2000), xi; Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, 1998), 210, n. 14. For further cultural imperial approaches, see Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (Princeton, 2010); Frank Ninkovich, Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865-1890 (Cambridge, MA, 2009); and Eric T. Love, Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900

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The historiographical influence of revisionist imperial scholarship stems in no small part from its provocative narrative of bipartisan American empire building.

Open-door imperial histories explicitly minimize politico-ideological conflict between and within the Democratic and Republican parties over the question of American imperial expansion. Consequently, American free traders—previously considered among the most vocal critics of American imperialism—have been recast as advocates of informal imperialism.12 In explaining the latter, Williams termed the seeming contradiction “imperial anticolonialism,” and various other revisionists have likewise suggested that the difference between Republican imperial presidents and so-called anti-imperial commercial expansionists such as Democratic President Grover Cleveland was merely one of tactics.13 Revisionists thus sought to demonstrate that both sides of the aisle ultimately found common ground when seeking an American open-door empire, despite the existence of oppositional politico-economic ideologies, intraparty infighting, and rabid partisanship.

The continued salience of the revisionist open-door thesis also owes much to the cultural turn within U.S. imperial historiography, which has borne witness to a variety of innovative gendered and racial studies of America’s rise to empire at the turn of the century. Because of their cultural focus, however, these studies have largely ceded the economic imperial impetus to the revisionists. In Barbarian Virtues, for example, Matthew Frye Jacobson remarks upon how he remains “struck by the remarkable freshness and staying power” of the open-door imperial interpretation, and Kristin Hoganson similarly grants in her work on turn-of-thecentury imperial gender politics that the open-door thesis played a prominent part in creating an American empire, albeit with the caveat that “commercial ambition alone” cannot explain turn-of-the-century American imperialism.14

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(Chapel Hill, 2004). Paul Kramer innovatively incorporates Gallagher and Robinson’s subsequent “collaborator thesis” in The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines (Chapel Hill, 2006).

15. Mark Atwood Lawrence, “Open Door Policy,” in Alexander DeConde, Richard Burns, Fredrik Logevall, and Louise B. Ketz, eds., Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (New York, 2002), 42. On U.S. economic globalization, see Alfred E. Eckes Jr. and Thomas W. Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (Cambridge, 2003); Eckes Jr., Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy Since 1776 (Chapel Hill, 1995); Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York, 2002); Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900-1930 (Durham, 2003); Rosenberg, ed., World Connecting, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Thomas D. Schoonover, Uncle Sam’s War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization (Lexington, 2005); Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005); David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia, MO, 1998); and Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860-1930 (Durham, 2007).

16. William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 752–72. Emily Rosenberg, for example, has argued that this period was dominated by the ideology of “liberal-developmentalism,” which included “support for free or open access for trade and investment,” in her groundbreaking work, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion 1890-1945 (New York, 1982), 7, and Vincent de Santis asserted that the ideas of “laissez-faire prevailed” alongside “free competition unrestricted by state interference” during the Gilded Age, in “American Politics in the Gilded Age,” Review of Politics 25 (October 1963): 554. Similarly, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York, 1955); Sidney Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865-1901 (Ann Arbor, 1956); John G. Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York, 1968); Geoffrey Blodgett, The Gentle Reformers: Massachusetts Democrats in the Cleveland Era (Cambridge, MA, 1966); Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (New York, 1955), 134–35; and Eckes and Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century, 14.

17. Economic nationalism is defined as a doctrine designed to protect the national market from international market competition and crises through governmental control of trade, most commonly by way of protective tariffs, import restrictions, currency manipulation, and subsidization of domestic agriculture and industry.

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Subsequent work focusing upon American trade expansion within the broader history of modern globalization has ably complemented—but has not supplanted—the “strongly influential” open-door revisionist narrative.15 But a more systemic reason for the long-term success of U.S. free-trade imperial revisionism stems from the all too common laissez-faire mischaracterization of the American turn of the century, a shining example of what William Novak has described as “the myth of the ‘weak’ American state.”16 Aside from minimal governmental regulation of monopolies and industrial practices, however, the Gilded Age was by no means a laissez-faire period of free trade and governmental noninterference in the national market. Instead, economic nationalism prevailed upon the American political economy, including massive governmental intervention to protect the home market through high protective tariffs, immigration restrictions, “infant” industrial subsidization, internal improvements, and governmental land redistribution.17 After the Civil War, economic nationalist ideology subsumed the Republican Party. Free-trade advocacy in the United States correspondingly became tantamount to conspiracy owing to real and

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18. Novak, “Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State”; Marc-William Palen, “Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age: A British Free-Trade Conspiracy?” Diplomatic History 37 (April 2013): 217–47; Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (Cambridge, UK, 2000); Richard L. McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986), 204–14; Richard Sylla, “The Progressive Era and the Political Economy of Big Government,” Critical Review 5 (1992): 531–57.

19. Diplomatic historians have at least reached a general agreement that an imperial approach provides the most useful framework for analyzing the postbellum U.S. expansionist phenomenon.

See James A. Field Jr., “American Imperialism: The Worst Chapter in Almost Any Book,” The American Historical Review 83 (1978): 644–68; Walter LaFeber and Robert L. Beisner, “Comments,” American Historical Review 83 (1978): 669–78; Robin W. Winks, “The American Struggle with ‘Imperialism’: How Words Frighten,” in The American Identity Fusion and Fragmentation, ed. Rob Kroes (Amsterdam, 1980); Edward P. Crapol, “Coming to Terms with Empire: The Historiography of Late-Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 16 (October 1992): 573–98; Kramer, “Power and Connection”; Joseph A. Fry, “From Open Door to World Systems: Economic Interpretations of Late Nineteenth Century American Foreign Relations,” Pacific Historical Review 65 (May 1996): 277–303; Fry, “Imperialism, American Style, 1890-1916,” in American Foreign Relations Reconsidered; and William E. Leuchtenburg, “Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1896-1916,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (December 1952): 483–504.

20. My use of the lowercase “progressive” refers to those forward-looking Republican economic nationalists who aggressively advocated for coercive expansion of American foreign market access, and is not to be equated with “Progressive” Era reformism.

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perceived hemispheric geopolitical weakness, an erratic boom-bust economic cycle, and perceptions of British free-trade imperialism at work in Latin America, the Asia Pacific, and even the United States itself.18 Painting the subsequent Progressive Era with the “laissez-faire” brush proves even more problematic, as the period witnessed a sizeable shift toward federal regulation of labor and industry, while simultaneously maintaining high tariff protectionism and other forms of economic nationalist legislation at home and abroad.

Therefore, debunking the laissez-faire myth allows for a much-needed reconceptualization of American imperialism from 1890 to 1913.19 Economic nationalism and ideological discord dominated the U.S. political economy and Republican foreign policy making at the turn of the century. The Republican Party, the party of protectionism, found itself riven by internal disagreements over the future course for the protectionist system and U.S. imperial expansion.

From within Republican protectionist ranks arose a progressive wing that increasingly looked beyond the home market for the country’s growing agricultural and manufacturing surpluses.20 They did so against staunch anti-imperial opposition not only from Democratic President Grover Cleveland and American free-trade independents, but also from the Republican Party’s isolationist homemarket protectionists, who yet feared or disdained foreign markets and colonial acquisitions. These progressive Republican proponents of empire combined coercive trade reciprocity with protectionism—an expansive closed door—and struggled for control of Republican foreign policy from the Harrison to the Taft administrations. Implementation of the imperialism of economic nationalism began in earnest following the McKinley Tariff’s passage in 1890. In direct

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contradiction to the touted aims of the Open Door, President William McKinley and his Republican successors Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft thereafter coercively enforced a policy of closed colonial markets in Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Republican proponents of this expansive closed door worked hard to extend American imperial power through informal means of high tariff walls, closed U.S.-controlled markets, and retaliatory reciprocity, if possible, by formal annexation and military interventionism when necessary. The haphazard turn-of-the-century American Empire therefore came about owing to the imperialism of economic nationalism, not the imperialism of free trade.

Protectionist policies have, of course, long been associated with imperialism. Adam Smith and his nineteenth- and twentieth-century disciples, most notably England’s radical Victorian free-trade apostle Richard Cobden (1804–1865), explicitly connected past and present mercantilist policies with what they condemned as expensive, aristocratic, and counterproductive imperial projects. Anti-imperial free traders in the United States and throughout the British Empire—called “Cobdenites” by contemporaries—believed that international free trade and non-interventionism would ultimately bring about world peace. Anglo-American Cobdenites conversely considered protective tariffs to be acts of commercial war that tended to lead to imperial conquest and international military conflict.21 The Republican Party’s progressive turn-of-the-century economic nationalist program stood out from earlier mercantilist imperial enterprises, however, owing to its revolutionary combination of high protective tariffs, a militant desire for foreign markets, and a coercive expansionist policy of retaliatory reciprocity.

Although early stirrings could be felt in the quarter century after the U.S. Civil War, the Republican Party’s imperialism of economic nationalism visibly manifested itself in 1890 with the passage of the highly protective McKinley Tariff, just as the American West was reaching the end of Frederick Jackson Turner’s continental Frontier, and even as American missionaries were helping to spread informal U.S. networks throughout the globe.22 Revisionists have astutely picked 21. For more on Cobdenite idealism, see for instance Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846-1896 (Oxford, 1997); Howe, “Free Trade and the International Order: The Anglo-American Tradition, 1846-1946,” in Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership, eds. Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault (Aldershot, 2000); Palen, “Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age”; Patrick J. McDonald, The Invisible Hand of Peace: Capitalism, the War Machine, and International Relations Theory (New York, 2009); Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption, and Civil Society in Modern Britain (Oxford, 2008); Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton, 1996); and Irwin, Free Trade Under Fire (Princeton, 2009 [2002]).

22. On missionaries as informal imperialists, see Tyrrell, Reforming the World; Edward P. Crapol, ed., Women and American Foreign Policy: Lobbyists, Critics, and Insiders (Wilmington, 1987); Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Kathryn Sklar, and Connie Shemo, eds., Competing Kingdoms: Women, Mission, Nation, and the American Protestant Empire, 1812-1960 (Durham, 2010);

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Eileen P. Scully, “Taking the Low Road to Sino-American Relations: ‘Open Door’ Expansionists and the Two China Markets,” Journal of American History 82 (June 1995): 62–83; and Carol C. Chin, “Beneficent Imperialists: American Women Missionaries in China at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Diplomatic History 27 (June 2003): 327–52.

23. Topik, Trade and Gunboats, 4; LaFeber, American Search for Opportunity, 109.

24. The McKinley Tariff Bill (Washington, 1890); William McKinley, The Tariff in the Days of Henry Clay and Since. An Exhaustive Review of Our Tariff Legislation from 1812 to 1896 (New York, 1896), 139; H. Wayne Morgan, William McKinley and His America (Syracuse, 1963), 129–30; Kasson to Blaine, December 26, 1888, microfilm reel 11, James Gillespie Blaine Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; John A. Kasson, Information Respecting Reciprocity and the Existing Treaties (Washington, 1901), 19.

25. “Memorandum,” June 6, 1890, carton 20, Edward Atkinson Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.

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up on the imperial elements of the McKinley Tariff’s reciprocity provision, but have commonly portrayed it as a policy of free trade.23 In actuality this revolutionary form of reciprocity was part and parcel of a new expansionist program of Republican protectionism, setting the groundwork for an economic nationalist imperial policy that American free traders and more than a few home-market Republican protectionists vociferously denounced.

The McKinley Tariff’s reciprocity provision signified a demonstrable shift in U.S. protectionism and imperialism for decades to come. Republican Secretary of State James G. Blaine was the progressive mastermind behind the reciprocity provision, backed with the blessing of Republican President Benjamin Harrison, developed with the advisory aid of economic nationalist John A. Kasson, and with the eventual support of the “Napoleon of Protection,” William McKinley, the bill’s author and the Republican chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. McKinley and Kasson would continue to advocate for Republicanbacked reciprocity policies. As Kasson put it: “Protection and reciprocity are twin measures of Republican policy and go hand in hand.”24 The McKinley Tariff’s reciprocity provision correspondingly had sturdy protectionist strings attached.

While it provided for the admittance of some agricultural goods from South American countries on an individual basis in return for their own duty-free acceptance of U.S. goods, the bill also allowed for the president to raise rates in retaliation if a country offered unequal reciprocal rates. Such retaliatory reciprocity—the Republican protectionist “trump card,” as American Cobdenite Edward Atkinson called it—stood in contrast to the reciprocity policy advocated by free traders, who were quick to point out that Republican reciprocity encouraged discrimination and retaliation instead of laying the groundwork for further liberalization of trade.25 Blaine and his supporters first had to persuade recalcitrant home-market Republican protectionists to support the insertion of the reciprocity provision into the McKinley bill by explaining that it would at once help maintain the protectionist system and expand American access to foreign markets. Blaine encountered initial intraparty opposition from numerous congressional Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee. Blaine attempted to assuage their fears

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26. Blaine, quoted in Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, 190; Robert M. La Follette, Robert La Follette’s Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (Madison, 1913), 111–14; Washington Post, July 26, 1890, 1; McKinley, The Tariff in the Days of Henry Clay and Since, 141; Harrison to Blaine, October 1, 1891, in Albert T. Volwiler, ed., The Correspondence between Benjamin Harrison and James G. Blaine, 1882-1893 (Philadelphia, 1940), 202. The bill was also tied up with Blaine’s retaliatory measures against an ongoing European boycott of American pork.

Tyler, Foreign Policy of Blaine, 292–301; John L. Gignilliat, “Pigs, Politics, and Protection: The European Boycott of American Pork, 1879-1891,” Agricultural History 35 (January 1961): 11–12.

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for the home market by pointing to the massive opposition to Republican-style reciprocity from American free traders, showing that free trade was receiving “a most severe blow,” and that any protectionist opposing reciprocity in its current form “knocks away one of the strongest supports of his system. The enactment of reciprocity is the safeguard of protection. The defeat of reciprocity,” he hammered home, “is the opportunity of free trade.” Republican politician Robert La Follette recalled being most surprised by “the misunderstanding in many minds of the Republican doctrine of reciprocity . . . as expounded by Blaine,” when it was so clearly “a kind of double protection for American industries—protection of the home market against foreigners, and extension of the foreign market for Americans.” McKinley himself ultimately described the tariff as “protective in every paragraph, and American in every line and word. It recognized and fully enforced the economic principle of protection, which the Republican party from its birth had steadfastly advocated.” It was also just as Harrison had wanted: a system of reciprocity that did not “attack the protective system.”26 Following the successful addition of the retaliatory reciprocity provision, the McKinley Tariff represented an indelible mark of progress for future American economic nationalist imperial expansion. It appeared that enough protectionists were finally coming to recognize the maturation of American industry that they overruled the anti-reciprocity Republican opposition, those home-market protectionists still unwilling or unable to admit that some of America’s once-infant industries had now grown up enough to need foreign markets alongside domestic.

Following the passage of the McKinley Tariff, restrictive and retaliatory reciprocity would become a recurring and controversial theme in U.S. protectionist legislation. In 1890, the decades-long, progressive, economic nationalist era of Republican tariff policy—protectionism mixed with restrictive reciprocity—had begun in earnest.

Soon after the McKinley Tariff’s enactment, more orthodox home-market protectionists duly fell under Blaine’s reciprocal spell. The New York Times reported that within a year after the bill’s passage, for example, the Tariff Protection League’s news organ came to understand Blaine’s “largeness of view,” after initially condemning his reciprocity scheme as a traitorous assassination of protectionist principles. Nor, the Times noted, was the league alone in its conversion: “Now the same high-tariff journals talk . . . glibly in praise of those projects . . . they strive to soften the ire of dissatisfied Republicans by pointing out the beauties of ‘reciprocity’,” Such shifting sentiments did not come about,

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27. New York Times, August 29, 1891; Steven C. Topik, Trade and Gunboats: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Empire (Stanford, 1996), 2, 4. Anglo-American free traders had long supported non-retaliatory reciprocity like the 1860 Cobden–Chevalier Treaty, and were outraged to see the protectionists coopt the term. For the negative free-trade response, see for instance Chicago Tribune, July 3, 1890, 4; Grover Cleveland, Addresses, State Papers and Letters, ed. Albert Ellery Bergh (New York, 1908), 337; London Times, September 14, 1891, 11; Tariff Reform, March 30, 1892, 19; Hilary A. Herbert, “Reciprocity and the Farmer,” North American Review 154 (April 1892): 414–23; Hazard Stevens, Reciprocity: Address of General Hazard Stevens before the Reform Club, Boston, Feb. 26, 1902 (Boston, 1902); and H. Parker Willis, “Discussion on Reciprocity and Preferential Tariffs,” Publications of the American Economic Association 6 (May 1905): 129–34.

28. Marc-William Palen, “Protection, Federation and Union: The Global Impact of the McKinley Tariff upon the British Empire, 1890-94,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 38 (September 2010): 395–418.

29. See especially Stephen Tuffnell, “‘Uncle Sam is to Be Sacrificed’: Anglophobia in Late Nineteenth-Century Politics and Culture,” American Nineteenth Century History 12 (March 2011): 77–99; William C. Reuter, “The Anatomy of Political Anglophobia in the United States, 1865-1900,” Mid-America 61 (April–July 1979): 117–32; and Crapol, America for Americans.

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however, because Blaine was appealing to the Republican Party’s “free trade sentiment,” to establish a “free trade zone,” or out of a desire for an informal freetrade empire as revisionist historian Steve Topik has suggested in his Brazilian case study of the McKinley Tariff. It was quite the opposite—by the 1890s, Republican ranks were effectively devoid of free-trade sentiment. American Democratic and independent free traders, on the other hand, were outraged at the Republican Party’s successful protectionist cooptation of “reciprocity,” a term that for so long had been identified with free trade.27 The 1890 McKinley Tariff sent political–economic shockwaves throughout the globe, from England to Australia, and sparked corresponding global demands for protectionist retaliation and British imperial federation. The new tariff also allowed for enlarged American power in the Western Hemisphere, and the possible undermining of the British Empire’s North and South American spheres of influence. Canadian–American relations further deteriorated, for instance, when Republican Anglophobes nixed plans to develop Canadian– American reciprocity under the McKinley Tariff provision. Many in Canada and England thus suspected that the new Republican tariff was designed specifically to annex Canada, an annexationist sentiment James Blaine himself had expressed.28 Blaine’s closed-door Pan-American vision for extending American economic influence over Latin America further accentuated the Harrison administration’s expansionist closed-door designs for the Western Hemisphere. It also further exemplified the Anglophobic sentiment that permeated the turn-of-the-century American political arena. Republican protectionists were especially fearful of Britain’s pronounced advantages in the way of industrial production, and both major political parties remained wary of the British Empire’s geopolitical presence in the Western Hemisphere.29 It was no coincidence, therefore, that Blaine’s Pan-American conference was convened in Washington, DC from 1889 to mid-

The Imperialism of Economic Nationalism, 1890–1913 : 167

30. Smith, Illusions of Conflict, 130–54; A. Curtis Wilgus, “James G. Blaine and the Pan American Movement,” Hispanic American Historical Review 5 (November 1922): 662–708; Russell H. Bastert, “A New Approach to the Origins of Blaine’s Pan American Policy,” Hispanic Historical Review 39 (August 1959): 375–412; James G. Blaine, Political Discussions: Legislative, Diplomatic, and Popular 1856-1886 (Norwich, CT, 1887), 411; Walter LaFeber, The Cambridge History of American Foreign Relations Vol. II: The American Search for Opportunity (New York, 1995), 80; J. Laurence Laughlin and H. Parker Willis, Reciprocity (New York, 1903), 134; David M. Pletcher, “Reciprocity and Latin America in the Early 1890s: A Foretaste of Dollar Diplomacy,” Pacific Historical Review 47 (February 1978): 53–89; David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Trade and Investment: American Economic Expansion in the Hemisphere, 1865-1900 (Columbia, 1998), 237–79; David Healy, James G. Blaine and Latin America (Columbia, MO, 2001), ch. 9; Edward P. Crapol, James G. Blaine: Architect of Empire (Wilmington, 2000), 65–66, 111–36; Terrill, Tariff, Politics, and Foreign Policy, 162–63; John D. Martz, “Economic Relationships and the Early Debate over Free Trade,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 526 (March 1993): 25–35. Reciprocity treaties were signed with Brazil, Spain (for Cuba and Puerto Rico), the Dominican Republic, the British West Indies, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

31. “Yankeephobia” foiled the Harrison administration’s imperial desire for naval bases and coaling stations in the Caribbean, much as Blaine’s Pan-American scheme had been undone. See Healy, Blaine, 180–204; Crapol, Architect of Empire, 129–30; Alice Felt Tyler, The Foreign Policy of James G. Blaine (Hamden, 1965 [1927]), 91–96; Ludwell Lee Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714-1938 (Durham, 1940), 94–109; and Allan Spetter, “Harrison and Blaine: Foreign Policy, 1889-1893,” Indiana Magazine of History 65 (September 1969): 214–27.

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1890, right around when McKinley’s new tariff bill was making its way through Congress. The former had been a pet project of Blaine’s for some time, stemming from his desire to see Britain’s influence in North and South America replaced by that of the United States. Laughlin and Willis observed in their detailed contemporary study of American reciprocity that the conference promised to create a closed Western Hemispheric trading block: a coercive customs union that “would have meant practically that we had succeeded in forcing our tariff system upon the smaller countries associated with us” and would have secured their markets “as a field for the sale of our manufactures.” The Pan-American Conference thus was a decidedly protectionist enterprise that, if successful, would have complemented the McKinley Tariff and would also have excluded Canada and the British West Indies. Blaine’s desired Western Hemispheric preferential trading zone would thus have minimized commercial competition from Europe and Asia through the adoption of hemispheric-wide high tariff walls, while allowing American exports privileged access to Latin American markets through the establishment of retaliatory reciprocal trade. Through the reciprocity agreements, the Latin American signatories’ excess raw materials would in turn have received privileged access to U.S. markets. Although Blaine’s conference fell into shambles, he would soon procure some of his desired Latin American reciprocal agreements between 1891 and 1892 through the McKinley Tariff’s retaliatory reciprocity provision.30 In the wake of the McKinley Tariff’s passage and the failure of Blaine’s PanAmerican Conference, the Harrison administration’s imperial designs for Hawaii bore more fruit, or at least more sugar.31 The McKinley Tariff proved instrumental in triggering the Hawaiian revolution in January 1893. Since 1876, the

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32. The 1876 Republican-backed reciprocity treaty prohibited Hawaii from signing similar treaties with other nations, essentially turning the islands into an informal colonial market. It correspondingly received the condemnation of American free traders as well as home-market protectionists. See Merze Tate, Hawaii: Reciprocity or Annexation (Lansing, 1968), 108–17 and Donald Marquand Dozer, “The Opposition to Hawaiian Reciprocity, 1876-1888,” Pacific Historical Review 14 (June 1945): 157–83. On the early convergence of reciprocity and protectionist ideology, see Stephen Meardon, “Reciprocity and Henry C. Carey’s Traverses on ‘The Road to Perfect Freedom of Trade,’” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 33 (September 2011): 307–33.

33. LaFeber, American Search for Opportunity, 94; Merze Tate, “British Opposition to the Cession of Pearl Harbor,” Pacific Historical Review 29 (November 1960): 381–94; Love, Race over Empire, 74–78; Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Chicago, 1964 [1936]); Richard D. Weigle, “Sugar and the Hawaiian Revolution,” Pacific Historical Review 16 (February 1947): 41–58; William A. Russ Jr., “The Role of Sugar in Hawaiian Annexation,” Pacific Historical Review 12 (December 1943): 339–50; George W. Baker, “Benjamin Harrison and Hawaiian Annexation: A Reinterpretation,” Pacific Historical Review 33 (August 1964): 295–309; Gignilliat, “Pigs, Politics, and Protection,” 3–12; David M. Pletcher, The Diplomacy of Involvement: American Economic Expansion across the Pacific, 1784-1900 (Columbia, MO, 2001), 234–42; Tyler, Foreign Policy of Blaine, 205.

34. Alfred T. Mahan, “Hawaii and Our Future Sea Power,” Forum 15 (March 1893): 1–11; Spetter, “Harrison and Blaine,” 227; LaFeber, Cambridge History, 94; Love, Race over Empire, 73–78.

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United States had established exclusive reciprocal trade relations with Hawaii, and, since 1884, a coaling station at Pearl Harbor in order to take advantage of Hawaii’s possible strategic and commercial role in accessing the long-sought Asia Market.32 The McKinley Tariff ended this earlier agreement, which had the effect of displacing Hawaiian sugar from its favored position of unfettered access to the protected U.S. market. The new tariff also granted a substantial bounty to American sugar producers, further incentivizing annexationist sentiment in Hawaii. The change in policy precipitated an economic depression in Hawaii, as sugar made up 93 percent of the country’s exports. Hawaii’s revolutionary leaders—predominantly U.S. businessmen—believed that only American annexation could solve the myriad problems surrounding the islands’ depressed sugar trade and Queen Liliukalani’s power grab. Blaine, his June 1892 State Department successor John Foster, and Harrison himself were more than happy to oblige the Hawaiian annexationists.33 The Harrison administration backed up its support for the Hawaiian annexationists with naval power. U.S. sailors landed on Hawaiian shores to protect American property and to intimidate the royalists in mid-January 1893. The queen was deposed the next day. Blaine’s State Department replacement, John W. Foster, desired speedy annexation, and crafted a treaty that he hoped the Senate might ratify before Harrison stepped down from office in early March. The treaty was nevertheless stalled in the Senate, and was soon to be undone by the incoming Democratic administration of Grover Cleveland.

Further implementation of the imperialism of economic nationalism would have to wait.34

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35. Williams, Tragedy, 30–32, 33–34, 29, 46–47; Williams, Contours of American History, 320–42, 341.

36. McCormick, China Market, 45, 63, 35, 77, 184, 105.

37. Hugh de Santis briefly notes this contradiction in “The Imperialist Impulse and American Innocence, 1865-1900,” in Gerald K. Haines and J. Samuel Walker, eds., American Foreign Relations: A Historiographical Review (Westport, CT, 1981), 71.

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Revisionist scholarship has struggled to fit the nonconsecutive Democratic administrations of Grover Cleveland (1885–1889, 1893–1897) into its free-trade imperial paradigm. In trying to force Cleveland into the Open Door, for example, W. A. Williams called him and other critics of Republican imperialism “so-called” antiimperialists, and suggested that proponents of laissez-faire naturally sanctioned economic expansion, which for Williams was synonymous with imperialism. He depicted the Gilded Age as part of the “Age of Laissez Nous Faire,” and described how late nineteenth-century “exponents of laissez faire” like Cleveland invariably fell “into the quicksand of colonialism” at the turn of the century, even though Cleveland proclaimed himself to be a staunch anti-imperialist.35 Revisionist historian Thomas McCormick has similarly described the foreign policy of Cleveland as the “imperialism of anti-imperialism,” an updated version of “the mid-century British system of ‘free-trade imperialism’,” decked out “in an Uncle Sam suit.”

Thus, Cleveland’s policy in the Pacific exemplified an American “free trade empire” because Cleveland’s cabinets and advisors were desirous of new markets in Asia. Exemplifying the revisionist consensus-driven portrayal of Open Door imperialism, McCormick added that “Cleveland’s ‘free-trade imperialism’ and McKinley’s ‘pragmatic expansionism’ shared in common a great deal of intellectual real estate,” such as the “industrial overproduction analysis,” the “corollary commitment to marketplace expansionism,” and the desire for “commercial Open Doors over closed colonies or spheres of influence.”36 Lumping Cleveland with McKinley and blurring the line between non-imperial market expansionism with informal imperialism, however, overlooks how McKinley, along with Harrison and Blaine before him, was a staunch protectionist who wanted— indeed preferred—closed colonial markets and spheres of influence to an international free-swinging Open Door.37 Protectionist opposition to Cleveland’s anti-imperial foreign policy only further underscored the sizeable differences between free traders and economic nationalists regarding American global economic expansion. While Anglo-Saxonism, upholding the Monroe Doctrine, and a desire for new markets certainly motivated Cleveland’s foreign policy, it remains problematic to place such actions within a free-trade imperial framework.

The missing piece to the Cleveland anti-imperial puzzle is found in both his administrations’ adherence to Cobdenism, sometimes referred to as the “Manchester School,” the utopian belief that free trade and non-interventionism would bring about world peace. Until recently, however, scholars of turn-of-the-century American imperialism, revisionist and non-revisionist alike, have overlooked the

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38. McCormick, China Market, 77, 105. Among Cleveland’s Cobdenites were cabinet members Thomas Bayard, J. Sterling Morton, William C. Endicott, L.Q.C. Lamar, John G. Carlisle, and unofficial advisors Edward Atkinson, Carl Schurz, Horace White, and David Ames Wells. See Palen, “Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age.” 39. McCormick, China Market, 40, 202.

40. Palen, “Foreign Relations in the Gilded Age.” For the Cobdenite anti-imperial influence upon British foreign policy, see especially Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England; Peter Cain, “Capitalism, War, and Internationalism in the Thought of Richard Cobden,” British Journal of International Studies 5 (October 1979): 229–47; and Richard Francis Spall, “Free Trade, Foreign Relations, and the Anti-Corn-Law League,” International History Review 10 (August 1988): 405–32.

41. MacDonagh, “Anti-Imperialism of Free Trade.”

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crucial Cobdenite element of the Cleveland administrations.38 McCormick proves a notable exception, observing that “in analytical terms, Cleveland and his supporters simply echoed the mid-century tenets of Great Britain’s ‘free-trade imperialism’,” their rhetoric reminiscent of Cobden’s speeches.39 While acknowledging the Cobdenite influence on Cleveland’s administration, McCormick’s revisionist interpretation nevertheless brushes aside the strong anti-imperial dimensions of Cobdenism, as well as the prolific Cobdenite anti-imperial scholarship within British imperial historiography. As a result, the Cobdenite Cleveland administrations have long remained an anti-imperial anomaly.40 Revisionist attempts to place Cleveland and his anti-imperial Cobdenites alongside their imperial Republican predecessors and successors are eerily reminiscent of the early disagreements surrounding the Gallagher–Robinson thesis.

Particularly, in 1962 Oliver MacDonagh countered “the imperialism of free trade” thesis with that of “the anti-imperialism of free trade.” He persuasively argued that the foremost British adherents to the Victorian free-trade ideology known as Cobdenism were inherently opposed to informal and formal imperialism alike.41 American Cobdenites shared the anti-imperial free-trade sentiments of their British counterparts. Furthermore, Cleveland and his Cobdenite cabinets time and again thwarted Republican annexationism, militarism, and informal imperial policies throughout the 1880s and 1890s, all while also attempting to ameliorate the Republican protectionist system by instituting freer trade at home. Their Cobdenite bona fides were put on further display when they became leading antiimperial opponents of the Spanish–American War and of the subsequent acquisition of an American colonial empire. The free-trade policies of the Cleveland administrations are better described as anti-imperial: Cobdenite policies that contrasted sharply with his imperial Republican predecessors and successors.

This contrast was made even more visible soon after Republican William McKinley entered the White House in early 1897. He quickly sought to overturn Cleveland’s Cobdenite foreign policy and reemploy Republican economic nationalism. President McKinley, whose 1896 campaign slogan had been “protection and reciprocity,” was by now a full-fledged fan of foreign markets, requesting that “especial attention should be given to the reenactment and extension of the reciprocity principle of the law of 1890, under which so great a stimulus was given to

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our foreign trade in new and advantageous markets for our surplus agricultural and manufactured goods.”42 With an eye toward the markets of Latin America and Europe, in 1897 the McKinley administration promptly replaced the more moderate Wilson–Gorman Tariff with the Dingley Tariff, raising average import tariffs from 41.2 percent to 47.6 percent. It was replete as well with a new set of reciprocity provisions that allowed the president to place items on the free list (without consent from Congress); to lower tariffs with signatories on an individual basis by no more than 20 percent (with congressional consent); and to institute retaliatory duties against countries that subsidized exports destined for the United States. In selling the new tariff, McKinley suggested that protectionism should now “be employed to extend and promote our market abroad.”43 Soon to follow this bit of economic nationalist legislation was a declaration of war against Spain. The formal and informal American Empire acquired from the Spanish–American War was obtained primarily owing to the efforts of the country’s more progressive economic nationalists, and against the loud protestations of American Cobdenites as well as some home-market protectionists (see Figure 1). Although McKinley himself was initially reluctant to declare war on Spain, his lifelong patriotic defense of the American System would

42. William McKinley, Speeches and Addresses of William McKinley (New York, 1900), 6–7.

43. The Tariff Law of 1897 (Washington, 1897); McKinley, quoted in J. A. Hobson, Fruits of American Protectionism: The Effects of the Dingley Tariff upon the Industries of the Country, and especially upon the Well Being of the People (New York, 1906), 7, 37. On the Dingley Tariff and reciprocity, see also Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, chs. 9–10 and Lake, Power, Protection, 125–31.

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Figure 1: “The Rapid Growth of Prosperity.” President McKinley pushes the massive imperial “Protection Snowball,” on its way to absorbing “Extension of Territory.” American Economist, February 23, 1900, 89.

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soon find its complement in the nation’s jingoistic response to the sinking of the Maine. The imperial acquisitions at the turn of the century were a militant manifestation, not of the imperialism of free trade, but the imperialism of economic nationalism.

III

44. John Hay to Andrew D. White, September 6, 1899, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington, 1899), 129–30; David L. Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism: American Diplomats in China, 1861-1898 (Bloomington, 1985), 179; Michael H. Hunt, Frontier Defense and the Open Door: Manchuria in Chinese-American Relations, 1895-1911 (New Haven, 1973); McCormick, China Market, 127–28.

45. Michael H. Hunt, “Americans in the China Market: Economic Opportunities and Economic Nationalism, 1890s-1931,” Business History Review 51 (Autumn 1977): 297–98, 301–2; Raymond A. Esthus, “The Changing Concept of the Open Door, 1899-1910,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 46 (December 1959): 436–37; Charles Vevier, “The Open

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Admittedly, of all Republican turn-of-the-century imperial projects, the McKinley administration’s declaration of an open-door policy toward China nominally sounded closest to a free-trade clarion call. Secretary of State John Hay, a fan of imperial expansion in both its formal and informal guises, marked the official beginning of this policy with the Open Door Notes of 1899 and 1900.

A spokesman for the McKinley administration stated that Hay’s Open Door supplemented and complemented the Spanish–American War, while also demonstrating that “the whole world listens to the United States now.”

Thomas McCormick has even gone so far as to suggest that “the promulgation of the Hay Doctrine” passed “the scepter of Open Door champion from Great Britain to the United States,” calling as it did for open markets “instead of closed doors.”44 However, before concluding that Hay’s Open Door Notes represented a Republican call for international free trade, it is worth remembering that such demands were being made under a broader Republican-held economic nationalist umbrella. Unlike English Cobdenite support for free trade at home and abroad, the McKinley administration’s so-called open-door policy was solely directed at markets yet lying within foreign spheres of influence beyond U.S. imperial reach.

Henry Cabot Lodge, although ignoring the Open Door’s coercive foreign control over Chinese tariff policy, acknowledged the Open Door’s economic nationalist underpinnings to the Home Market Club in the spring of 1901: “It does not mean free trade. Let China levy any duties she pleases, but let them be the same to all the world.” With similar reference to the Open Door, pro-reciprocity advocate James F. Taylor, a prominent leather goods manufacturer from Ohio, declared before the 1901 Convention of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) amid great applause: “we want to close tight the doors to America.” The American Economist similarly reminded its readers not to “forget that the foundation of this magnificent open door policy is Protection for American Industry.”45 As late as 1919, William Smith Culbertson, a member of

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Door: An Idea in Action, 1906-1913,” Pacific Historical Review 24 (February 1955): 50, 53–54; Lodge, quoted in Protectionist 13 (May 1901): 23; James F. Taylor, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Convention of the National Association of Manufacturers (Philadelphia, 1901), 83; Wolman, Most Favored Nation, 28; “The Best Open Door Policy,” American Economist, January 18, 1901, 31.

46. William Smith Culbertson, “The ‘Open Door’ and Colonial Policy,” American Economic Review 9 (March 1919): 325, 337.

47. Anderson, Imperialism and Idealism, 183; Wolman, Most Favored Nation, xiv–xvi, 14.

48. Wolman, Most Favored Nation, 19–37; Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, 338; “Cuba Wants Reciprocity,” American Economist, March 8, 1901, 113; “Shaw Talks on Reciprocity,” New York Sun, September 21, 1902, 9.

49. Proceedings of the National Reciprocity Convention (Washington, 1901), 136. For an example of home-market opposition, see John P. Young, “Economic Aspects of Reciprocity,” Protectionist 13 (June 1901): 89–91 and “True and False Reciprocity,” Protectionist 13 (June 1901): 101–2.

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that year’s U.S. Tariff Commission and a proponent of tariff preferences between the United States and its colonial dependencies, candidly noted: “The principle of the Open Door does not imply free trade.”46 The limited acquiescence of the European powers to the American request merely illustrated that the United States had gained a notable imperial status in the decade since the McKinley Tariff’s passage. It was not, however, a sudden Republican appeal to free-trade principles or out of “respect for free trade.” As Paul Wolman has observed, the Open Door was by no means a “free trade conception.”47 The Open Door in Asia found its economic nationalist counterpart in the 1897 Dingley Tariff’s reciprocity provision. More progressive protectionist elements— who John Kasson called “reasonable” protectionists and who oppositional homemarket protectionists disparagingly termed “half-breeds”—came to Republican reciprocity’s quasi-liberal defense. For example, NAM and the National Association of Agricultural Implements and Vehicle Manufacturers lobbied strongly for Kasson’s reciprocity treaties. As a further bulwark against homemarket attacks, however, McKinley’s treasury secretary, Leslie Shaw, clearly denied that the reciprocity provision was “a step toward free trade, but the natural handmaiden of protection.”48 Amid growing “half-breed” Republican support for reciprocity as well as continued resistance from “stalwart” Republican home-market protectionists who yet opposed accessing foreign markets, Kasson continued to work on behalf of the Republican administration’s protectionist reciprocity policy. He received support at the 1901 National Reciprocity Convention from F. B. Thurber, a representative of the U.S. Export Association, who called upon the seeming pro-reciprocity majority within the protectionist camp to overrule the home-market Republican opposition, as “reciprocity affords an opportunity to reform the tariff by its friends, which, if not embraced, may result in a tidal wave of free-trade sentiment which will be disastrous to all our industries.”49 Brooks Adams, an unofficial Republican advisor, in turn viewed the United States at a crossroads, with one road leading to Cobdenite free trade and the other to protectionism mixed with

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50. Brooks Adams, “Reciprocity or the Alternative,” Atlantic Monthly 88 (August 1901): 145–55.

51. John W. Foster, “The Reciprocity Treaties and the Senate,” Independent 52 (December 6, 1900): 2897.

52. Theodore Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Policy: Speeches, Letters and State Papers (New York, 1908), 175.

53. “Reciprocity Convention with France,” Reports of the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, 1789-1901 56th Cong., 2d Sess. (Washington, 1901), 542; Wolman, Most Favored Nation, 30–34; Lake, Power, Protection, 127–28. On Kasson and reciprocity, see also Edward Younger, John A. Kasson: Politics and Diplomacy from Lincoln to McKinley (Iowa City, 1955), 364–79; and U.S. Tariff Commission, Reciprocity and Commercial Treaties (Washington, 1919).

54. In 1902 the NRL began publishing a monthly magazine, National Reciprocity, which took for its motto a quotation from the late William McKinley: “Reciprocity is the natural outgrowth of our wonderful industrial development under the domestic policy now firmly established.” Kasson, Information Respecting Reciprocity; Kasson, “The Demand for Reciprocity,” National Magazine 15 (December 1901): 353; National Reciprocity 1 (September 1902): 37.

55. Willis, “Discussion on Reciprocity,” 131–32; Lake, Power, Protection, 131.

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reciprocity. He preferred the latter, alongside massive increases to the army and navy.50 Former Republican Secretary of State John W. Foster likewise applauded retaliatory reciprocity. He also lavished praise upon Hay’s Open Door Notes and McKinley’s “wise and prudent” act of sending U.S. troops into China, “a country with which we were nominally at peace, without the constitutional warrant of legislation by Congress,” in order to “arbitrarily determine the destiny of a great empire.”51 In December 1901, now-President Theodore Roosevelt reiterated: “reciprocity must be treated as the handmaiden of protection.”52 John Kasson himself—both as reciprocity Special Commissioner Plenipotentiary and following his resignation amid continued senatorial opposition to the reciprocity treaties—staunchly defended the Dingley Tariff’s reciprocal provisions to “stalwart” home-market protectionist opponents. He emphasized the silver lining, particularly that artificially high duties had actually been placed on goods for the sole purpose of maintaining “the possibility and necessity of reducing them” under section four of the tariff act.53 He would thereafter go on to help direct the National Reciprocity League (NRL), most of its members being “naturally protectionists.”54 Although Kasson’s own reciprocity treaties were suffering “a quiet death” by senatorial hands owing to opposition from free traders, as well as from home-market protectionist stalwarts, “protection and reciprocity” would remain the preferred policy approach toward U.S. imperial expansion for Republican presidents in the years to come.55 Thus, while appearing paradoxical at first glance, the Open Door’s expansionist designs were quite in keeping with progressive Republican adherence to protective tariffs, retaliatory reciprocity, and colonial closed doors (see Figure 2).

Transatlantic free traders quickly picked up on the Open Door’s warped protectionist frame, and puzzled over the seeming paradox. During the 1900 presidential campaign, for example, American free traders at once attacked Republican closed-door Filipino policies and condemned the Dingley Tariff. University of

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Chicago economist Robert Franklin Hoxie explained away the Open Door’s perceived contradictions by observing that the past four years had witnessed a “progressive reconciliation” between protectionism and imperialism.56 American Cobdenite Henry Adams, in disagreement with his brother Brooks, critically described the so-called open-door policy as “the instinct of what might be named McKinleyism.”57 U.S. Cobdenite Worthington C. Ford, the New York Board of Trade and Transportation, and the New York Chamber of Commerce unsuccessfully called for a policy of free trade with the newly acquired American colonial acquisitions, and the free-trade organ the Nation condemned Kasson’s nascent reciprocity treaties. American Cobdenite William Lloyd Garrison Jr. and the American Peace Society in turn called attention to the hypocrisy of calling for

56. “Paramount Issues,” American Economist, August 10, 1900, 62; R. F. Hoxie, “The American Colonial Policy and the Tariff,” Journal of Political Economy 11 (March 1903): 198.

57. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1919), 342.

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Figure 2: “The White Light of Protection.” The American protectionist colonial empire shines with prosperous “white light” at the dawning of the twentieth century. American Economist, December 28, 1900, 305.

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58. Worthington C. Ford, “Trade Policy with the Colonies,” Harper’s Magazine 99 (July 1899): 293–303; “Reciprocity Treaty between the United States and France,” Nation 70 (March 29, 1900): 233–34; Arthur Latham Perry, Miscellanies (Williamstown, 1902), 157; “The Closed American Door,” Advocate of Peace 64 (February 1902): 22–23.

59. Charles W. Dilke, “The Future Relations of Great Britain and the United States,” Forum 26 (1898): 521, 522, 524.

60. Philippine Tariff Act of March 8, 1902, reprinted in The Tariff of 1897 on Imports into the United States (Washington, 1908), 159–63; J. B. Foraker, “The United States and Puerto Rico,” North American Review 170 (1900): 471; Frank D. Pavey, “The ‘Open Door’ Policy in the Philippines,” North American Review 169 (November 1899): 668; H. Parker Willis, “The Economic Situation in the Philippines,” Journal of Political Economy 13 (March 1905): 145–72.

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an Open Door in China while keeping American doors closed to Chinese immigrants.58 British free traders were similarly critical of the so-called Open Door. British Cobdenite Charles Dilke worried (correctly as it turned out) that the introduction of the U.S. “Protective system” in the Caribbean would likely carry over to the newly acquired American colonies in the Pacific. Protectionism in the Philippines, he noted, would then undermine the McKinley administration’s ostensible call for an open-door policy in China. It was this “uncertainty concerning the future colonial and foreign policy of the United States” that held Anglo-American cooperation in China in the balance: “It is evident that the imposition in the Philippines of a Protective system . . . would cause an outcry against the consistency or sincerity of a Power which, closing the door itself . . . was going to China with us on behalf of the Open Door.”59 U.S. colonial tariff policy in the Philippines clearly outlined the Open Door’s protectionist frame (see Figure 3). From 1898 to 1902 the Philippines, despite its dependent colonial status, received the same tariff treatment as would a foreign country. J. B. Foraker, Republican senator from Ohio, among many others, argued forcefully against free trade in the Philippines, as such a policy would allow for the free flow of Asian immigrants and competitive global exports, thereby leading to “the overthrow of our protective tariff.” Under the subsequent U.S. Revenue Act of 1902, Philippine exports to the United States were given a 25 percent discounted tariff rate. New York Senator Frank D. Pavey, a supporter of a prohibitive tariff against the Philippines so long as the insurgency of Aguinaldo continued, stated that any “Open Door to the world’s commerce” in the Philippines would remain “a political myth.”60 American and Filipino free-trade critics of the U.S. closed-door policy in the Philippines thereafter garnered support from a rather unusual source: the Episcopal Church. In 1906, Charles H. Brent, the Episcopalian Bishop of the Philippine Islands, attacked the so-called “splits” tax, which placed a 100-percent surtax on cheap, low-quality, textiles from England. Enacted following the lobbying efforts of the American cotton textile industry, its purpose was to encourage Filipino consumption of American-made textiles. But it resulted in pushing already poor Filipinos further into poverty by forcing them to purchase the more expensive American cotton fabrics. The American Anti-Imperialist League and many U.S.

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Episcopal bishops duly seconded Brent’s free-trade call. Alternatively, the protectionist publication of the U.S. cotton textile industry, the Textile World Record, imperialistically defended the tax by paternalistically deeming it “a trifling detail” that helped alleviate the burdensome U.S. guardianship over those “brown men in the Philippines,” who were unable to govern themselves.61 Congress would once again revise its closed-door policy in the Philippines in 1909 with the passage of the Philippine Tariff Act. The new act, alongside the Payne–Aldrich Tariff, eliminated tariffs on U.S.–Philippine trade while also levying duties on non-U.S. imports into the Philippines in order to minimize foreign competition.62 Protectionist proponents of U.S. imperial control over the Philippine tariff policy, such as Harold M. Pitt of the Manila Chamber of 61. Charles H. Brent, “Tyranny or Democracy—Which?” Outlook 83 (May–Aug. 1906): 599–600; “Wawbeek” Petition, New Hampshire Congregation of Christians, to F. D. Currier, Sept. 6, 1906, Herbert Welsh Papers, Special Collections Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI [hereafter cited as SCL]; Brent to Welsh, Oct. 31, 1906, (SCL); Brent to Welsh, Nov. 15, 1906, (SCL); “Memorandum”, July 25, 1907, Philippine Tariff Papers, Vol. 2, (SCL); “The Truth About Cotton Splits in the Philippines,” Textile World Record 32 (Dec. 1906), 69-70.

62. The Tariff Act of 1909 (Washington, 1909); Wolman, Most Favored Nation, 15–16, 39–43; Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, 333–35; Pedro E. Abelarde, American Tariff Policy towards the Philippines, 1898-1946 (New York, 1947); Culbertson, “Open Door and Colonial Policy,” 334.

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Figure 3: Uncle Sam, dressed in maternal garb and carrying a disciplinary birch rod, warns the childlike Philippines to stay away from the water labeled “Free Trade in Tobacco and Sugar.”

Puck 58 (January 24, 1906).

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IV

The McKinley administration’s actions toward Puerto Rico in 1900 laid the groundwork for subsequent American protectionist policies toward its newfound formal and informal colonial acquisitions. As the American Protective Tariff League’s news organ the American Economist described it: “No question that has been before Congress during . . . any recent session has caused greater interest among the leaders of both parties.” McKinley had initially favored a more liberal trade policy with Puerto Rico, to fiscally treat it “like Oklahoma and Alaska.” The administration quickly reversed this decision, however, upon the realization that such a precedent would play out throughout the new colonies, putting the U.S. market in direct competition with Cuban tobacco and sugar growers, “shrewd, cheap” Filipino labor, and a potential deluge of foreign exports and Asian immigration. As a spokesman for the McKinley administration put it: “He don’t want any legislation for Puerto Rico that will keep us from legislating for Manila.”65 The U.S. government therefore maintained paternalistic imperial control over Puerto Rico’s tariff policy (see Figure 4).66 The Republican administration correspondingly ignored American and Puerto Rican calls for free trade, and instead 63. Harold M. Pitt, “Article on Conditions in the Philippines” (unpublished, 1912), 1–3, 16, folder 6, vol. 1, Dean C. Worcester Papers, Philippine Collection, SCL. 64. “‘Greedy Protectionists’,” American Economist, April 13, 1900, 177.

65. “The Porto Rican Tariff,” American Economist, March 9, 1900, 111; “American Labor and the Puerto Rican Problem,” American Economist, April 6, 1900, 165; J. H. Hollander, “Excise Taxation in Porto Rico,” 190–91; “The President’s Second Thought,” American Economist, April 20, 1900, 182.

66. For explicit examples of U.S. imperial control over Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Filipino tariffs, see The Tariff Schedules Now in Force and Effect in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippine Islands (Washington, 1900).

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Commerce, argued that U.S. command of Filipino industry and commerce was “gradually binding up the destiny of the Philippine Islands . . . inseparably with our own.” Why? Because the “Payne bill . . . gives American products blanket protection in Philippine markets and Philippine products a sort of limited, half-hearted preference” in the United States. Pitt also pointed out that this protectionist Filipino policy would ultimately furnish “the means with which to gain control of the trade of China.”63 The American Protective Tariff League, for once in agreement with AngloAmerican free-trade critics, happily noted that the U.S. colonial trade policy in the Philippines was antithetical to the Open Door. “When a Tariff policy is being formed for one it should be adapted to the other,” the league argued. “We cannot have Free-Trade with the Philippines and hold the door open to trade between the islands and China without the practical abandonment of our Protective policy.”64 As Foraker, Dilke, and the American Protective Tariff League also observed, the U.S.–Philippines protective tariff policy ultimately depended upon how the United States dealt first with Puerto Rico.

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instituted a tariff policy derived from the Dingley Tariff, offering a discounted tariff (15 percent) on Puerto Rican exports to the United States. Anti-imperialists promptly condemned this protectionist decision to treat Puerto Rico “in a manner different from . . . an organized Territory of the United States,” calling it “the entering wedge of ‘imperialism’.” Critics and proponents alike viewed the new Puerto Rican tariff policy as “doubtless the most momentous that has come up since the Civil War.” Whereas “every paper which opposed expansion has loudly urged Free-Trade . . . every supporter of expansion has supported the Puerto Rican Tariff,” the American Economist observed with delight. The protectionist news organ was of course a supporter of the colonial tariff, warning detractors that “the imperialist principle will have to be accepted sooner or later.” It also reiterated Gunton’s Magazine’s racialist demand that Puerto Rico and Hawaii “be permanently annexed as colonies, with no rights of American citizenship or statehood,” so as to restrict immigration and foreign representation in Congress, and to set an imperial “precedent for Cuba, if it should eventually be annexed.”67 The subsequent bilateral trade proclamation of July 1901 allowing Puerto Rican exports duty-free entry into the United States unsurprisingly came attached with protectionist bounties for American sugar interests. “Clever Free-Trade and anti-imperialist strategists” may have “engineered” stiff opposition to the imperial Puerto Rican tariff, but they apparently were not clever enough.68 67. “Was Wisely Settled,” American Economist, March 16, 1900, 128; “Its Importance Overestimated,” American Economist, March 23, 1900, 130; “Make Them Colonies,” American Economist, January 19, 1900, 31; George L. Bolen, “Hawaii and Porto Rico as Colonies,” Gunton’s Magazine 18 (January 1900): 26–32.

68. J. H. Hollander, “The Finances of Porto Rico,” Political Science Quarterly 16 (December 1901): 580; Hollander, “Excise Taxation in Porto Rico,” 197; “The Real Puerto Rican Issue,” American Economist, March 30, 1900, 150.

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Figure 4: “The Ill-Fated Sister:—A Case of Unjust Discrimination.” A forlorn female Puerto Rico looks on as McKinley rides past, carrying a well-dressed female Hawaii and Uncle Sam on a buggy labeled “Free Trade.” Puck 47 (April 25, 1900).

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69. Sydney Brooks, “American Imperialism,” Fortnightly Review 70 (July to December 1901): 227–30, 237–38; Erving Winslow to Herbert Welsh, December 7, 1901, box 2, Welsh Papers, SCL. For the protectionist defense of the Supreme Court’s imperial decision, see “Expansion and Reciprocity,” American Economist, January 4, 1901, 9; “Constitution and Flag,” American Economist, January 11, 1901, 21; “The Insular Decisions,” American Economist, June 7, 1901, 266–67; “Supreme Court Decisions in Porto Rican Cases,” Protectionist 13 (July 1901), 121–36; and “The Opinions in the Insular Cases,” Protectionist 13 (July 1901), 165–69. On the Insular Cases, see especially Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire (Lawrence, KS, 2006).

70. Emily S. Rosenberg, “Foundations of United States International Financial Power: Gold Standard Diplomacy, 1900-1905,” Business History Review 59 (Summer 1985): 172–83; Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream; Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World; Rosenberg and Norman Rosenberg, “From Colonialism to Professionalism The Public-Private Dynamic in

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The Supreme Court’s subsequent decisions concerning colonial tariff policy played a crucial role in expanding the American closed-door empire. British writer Sydney Brooks, having only just returned to England after a five-year stint in the United States, noted how the Supreme Court’s May 27, 1901 decision had legalized the American empire. The first of the now-infamous Insular Cases “decreed” that the Constitution “does not follow the flag,” by allowing McKinley and Congress to implement a protective tariff policy upon Puerto Rican goods. Brooks observed that this imperial tariff policy owed much to the “Protectionists to the bone” alongside a general racist fear of nonwhite immigration. “The American Empire,” he wrote, “is a Protectionist Empire.” Nor had the new tariff been made “for the benefit of Porto Rico . . . but to establish the principle, now ratified by the Supreme Court, that Imperialism did not imply free trade within the Empire.” Erving Winslow, an officer of both the Anti-Imperialist League and the American Free Trade League, similarly recognized that the Puerto Rican decision meant that the Philippines would remain “outside the Constitution” and its tariff conditions “subject to the arbitrary power of Congress.”69 The rapidly developing Puerto Rican tariff policy duly became the protectionist lynchpin of Progressive Era economic imperialism, as it allowed for a disparate, protectionist, ad hoc imperial administration for each of the new territorial acquisitions.

With the frequent overlap of tariff and monetary issues, it should not come as a surprise that the era’s leading dollar diplomats were likewise working within the Republican-devised economic nationalist imperial framework. In a matter closely tied with imperial tariff policy, Emily Rosenberg has explored how the initial attempt at gold-standard foreign currency reform also arose in Puerto Rico at this time. Puerto Rican planters and manufacturers acquiesced to the U.S.controlled gold standard in 1901 in return for freer access to the American market. An early blueprint for the implementation of dollar diplomacy in the Pacific and in Latin America for decades to come had thus been drawn up.

Rosenberg and the Wisconsin School have also directed renewed light upon U.S. “financial missionaries” like Charles Conant, who proved instrumental in extending U.S. fiscal control over its colonies and protectorates.70 In keeping

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United States Foreign Financial Advising, 1898-1929,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 59–82. For the revisionist interpretation of Conant and dollar diplomacy, see Parrini and Sklar, “New Thinking about the Market”; Carl Parrini, “Charles A. Conant, Economic Crises and Foreign Policy, 1896-1903,” in Thomas J. McCormick and Walter LaFeber, eds., Behind the Throne: Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents, 1898-1968 (Madison, 1993); Parrini, “Theories of Imperialism,” in Redefining the Past: Essays in Diplomatic History in Honor of William Appleman Williams, ed. Lloyd C. Gardner (Corvallis, OR, 1986); and Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy, 1916-1923 (Pittsburgh, 1969); and Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction.

71. Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door: America and China, 1905-1921 (Pittsburgh, 1971), 53–54.

72. Charles A. Conant, “Economic Basis of ‘Imperialism’,” North American Review 167 (September 1898): 339–40; Conant, “Our Duty in Cuba,” North American Review 185 (May 1907): 141–46; Conant, “Our Mission in Nicaragua,” North American Review 196 (July 1912): 63–71; Conant, “The Struggle for Commercial Empire,” reprinted in The United States in the Orient, 89; Conant, “The United States as a World Power—Their Advantages in the Competition for Commercial Empire,” ibid., 209–10; Conant, “The United States as a World Power—Nature of the Economic and Political Problem,” ibid., 156, 158; Conant, “Advantages in the Competition for Commercial Empire,” ibid., 224.

73. Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, 351; Theodore Roosevelt, The Works of Theodore Roosevelt: Presidential Addresses and State Papers Part Two, 14 vols. (New York, 1926), XIV: 551, 567–68; National Reciprocity 1 (September 1902); Philip S. Foner, The Spanish-Cuban-American War and the Birth of American Imperialism 1895-1902, 2 vols. (New York, 1972), II: 634–35.

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with the revisionists’ turn-of-the-century laissez-faire depiction, it has also been suggested that Conant was “deeply imbued with a free-trade kind of competition in the ‘struggle for commercial supremacy’,” working within the “tradition of Adam Smith’s capitalism.”71 On the contrary, Conant support for American imperialism deviated greatly from the Cobdenite classical liberal critique of imperialism. Conant granted that protectionism was useful to stimulate infant industries; he justified state control of railways and telegraphs; and he ideologically imbibed that progressive economic nationalist formula, protectionism mixed with reciprocity.72 Dollar diplomacy and the imperialism of economic nationalism were tied together.

Along with having a direct impact upon American policies toward the Philippines, the imperial tariff decisions concerning Puerto Rico soon bled into the struggle from 1901 to 1903 over Cuban reciprocity. At the time, Laughlin and Willis described the struggle as a “new stage in the history of reciprocity.” Upon his presidential succession, Roosevelt promised to continue his predecessor’s reciprocal designs for Cuba, with the backing of the NRL. In his first annual message to Congress in 1901, Roosevelt therefore asked for the “application” of Cuban reciprocity owing to “weighty reasons of morality and national interest.”

He also expressed his private delight at the coercive idea of pulling Cuban politicaleconomic strings through reciprocity.73 In February 1902, American Cobdenite Hazard Stevens conversely castigated Republican reciprocity “under protection auspices,” which “leads to discrimination, retaliation, and war itself.” The Dingley Tariff, he charged, was obstructing “real reciprocity,” thereby proving “an effective abates in front of the fortress of protection.” Boston’s protectionist Home Market Club had long noted similar objections from the New England Free

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Trade League and “the general body of American Cobdenites.”74 A retaliatory reciprocity agreement with Cuba had previously been tried under the 1890 McKinley Tariff, to the mutual benefit of both signatories’ exports. Cuban sugar exports to the United States came to a halt, however, owing to the lobbying efforts of American beet sugar growers during the crafting of the 1894 Wilson– Gorman Tariff. Following the war with Spain, Cuba’s nominal independence was thereafter curtailed by the Platt Amendment of March 1901, which gave the United States the right to naval stations and military intervention, as afterward enacted in Cuba from 1906 to 1909.

The powerful U.S.-based Sugar Trust was reluctant to lose Cuba’s potentially bountiful source of sugar, and Republican proponents of reciprocity like Roosevelt claimed it was the moral duty of the United States to provide freer trade to the Cubans (and by extension the U.S. Sugar Trust). A reciprocity treaty was therefore worked out between 1902 and 1903 that opened the Cuban market on a preferential basis with the United States, despite opposition both from protectionist American beet sugar growers (fearing Cuban competition), and from free-trade purists (see Figure 5).75 As a partial salve to U.S. sugar growers, however, the new Cuban treaty of 1903 included a discounted protective tariff on Cuban exports to the United States, in keeping with the Puerto Rican decision and in spite of Cuban

74. Stevens, Reciprocity, 1, 4, 6; [Home Market Club], “Fair Trade and Reciprocity,” Protectionist 13 (June 1901): 116.

75. “The Cuban Problem,” Protectionist 13 (May 1901): 53–55; Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, 351, chs. 11–12; Foner, Spanish-Cuban-American War, II, ch. 29.

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Figure 5: “A Strenuous Job on the Cuban Ranch.” Pro-Democratic Puck Magazine illustrates the difficult road ahead for cowboy Roosevelt in corralling his party’s “high protectionist” and “beet sugar” senatorial bulls into the Cuban reciprocity corral. Puck Magazine, December 17, 1902, centerfold.

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76. Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, 143, 175; H. Parker Willis, “Reciprocity with Cuba,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 22 (July 1903): 129–47; “Tariff Relations with Cuba,” Protectionist 13 (June 1901): 106–7; “Cuba’s Idea of Reciprocity,” Protectionist 13 (July 1901): 160–61. On sugar tariffs, see also Leonard J. Arrington, “Science, Government, and Enterprise in Economic Development: The Western Beet Sugar Industry,” Agricultural History 41 (January 1967): 1–18; Sara Fisher Ellison and Wallace P. Mullin, “Economics and Politics: The Case of Sugar Tariff Reform,” Journal of Law and Economics 38 (October 1995): 335–66; and Scott Reynolds Nelson, A Nation of Deadbeats: An Uncommon History of America’s Financial Disasters (New York, 2012), ch. 10.

77. Mary Speck, “Closed-Door Imperialism: The Politics of Cuban-U.S. Trade, 1902-1933,” Hispanic American Historical Review 85 (August 2005): 451, 453, 456–57; Cesar J. Ayala, American Sugar Kingdom: The Plantation Economy of the Spanish Caribbean, 1898-1934 (Chapel Hill, 1999), 3.

78. Laughlin and Willis, Reciprocity, 423, 434.

79. Stanley D. Solvick, “William Howard Taft and the Payne-Aldrich Tariff,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 50 (December 1963): 442, 425.

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and American calls for free trade.76 In 1909, the Taft administration would thereafter replace the Cuban reciprocity treaty with a more stringent retaliatory tariff, effectively implementing a further closed-door policy that stunted Cuban economic independence and growth.77 As Laughlin and Willis observed, Cuban reciprocity was “not based upon free trade philosophy,” but instead assumed “the form in which it was denounced by President Cleveland . . . as a device for entangling our revenue system with that of foreign countries for the purpose of territorial expansion, or national aggrandizement.”78 After twelve years under the Dingley Tariff, the Taft administration’s progressive 1909 Payne–Aldrich Tariff gave the American closed-door policy a gentle protectionist push. The new tariff allowed for a maximum–minimum tariff schedule; a lowering of duties on imports from countries that reciprocated with nondiscriminatory tariffs on American goods; a retaliatory increase of 25 percent on imports from countries that discriminated against the United States; and a clause allowing for the president to appoint a special tariff commission to determine the tariff’s application. Although Taft was a proponent of freer trade with the Philippines and slight downward tariff revisions generally, he stuck to his protectionist principles.79 Thus, according to David Lake, Taft’s 1909 tariff once again “eschewed liberal free-trade principles” by means of “the coercive power of high tariffs” for the exploitation of foreign markets, despite a slightly less illiberal policy of nondiscrimination (of course excluding colonial tariff policies), alongside slightly lower average import duties (41 percent), and an expanded free list. Tariff expert Frank Taussig explained the tariff a few years after its passage: nondiscrimination did not mean “the same thing as to adopt a policy of laissez faire in foreign trade.” The American Free Trade League’s Free Trade Broadside reported that retaliatory reciprocity had reached “its high water mark.” Prominent protectionist John Ball Osborne confirmed this assessment

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80. Lake, Power, Protection, 119, 120, 131, 133–35; H. Parker Willis, “The Tariff of 1909,” Journal of Political Economy 17 (November 1909): 595; Woodrow Wilson, “The Tariff Make-Believe,” North American Review 190 (October 1909): 539; F. W. Taussig, Free Trade, the Tariff and Reciprocity (New York, 1924), 113; “Reciprocity Gives Way to Retaliation,” Free Trade Broadside 2 (October 1909): 3; John Ball Osborne, “Protection of American Commerce and Capital Abroad,” North American Review 195 (May 1912): 687–700; Claude E. Barfield, “‘Our Share of the Booty’: The Democratic Party Cannonism, and the Payne-Aldrich Tariff,” Journal of American History 57 (September 1970): 308–23.

81. Taft to Roosevelt, January 10, 1911, quoted in Stephen Scheinberg, “Invitation to Empire: Tariffs and American Economic Expansion in Canada,” Business History Review 47 (Summer 1973): 227. For the failed 1911 reciprocity treaty, see also L. Ethan Ellis, Reciprocity, 1911: A Study in Canadian-American Relations (New Haven, 1939); Kendrick A. Clements, “Manifest Destiny and Canadian Reciprocity in 1911,” Pacific Historical Review 42 (February 1973): 32–52; R. A. Shields, “Imperial Policy and Canadian-American Reciprocity, 1909-1911,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 5 (January 1977): 151–71; R. E. Hannigan, “Reciprocity 1911: Continentalism and American Weltpolitik,” Diplomatic History 4 (Winter 1980): 1–18; and Simon J. Potter, “The Imperial Significance of the Canadian-American Reciprocity Proposals of 1911,” Historical Journal 47 (March 2004): 81–100.

82. Louis, quoted in Go, Patterns of Empire, 132.

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amid his contented effusion over the Payne–Aldrich Tariff’s retaliatory measures.80 The combination of protective tariffs and retaliatory reciprocity as a Republican imperial tool during the Taft administration had come a long way since its 1890 manifestation. Whereas arch-Anglophobe James Blaine opposed Canadian–American reciprocity, by 1911 Republicans like Taft now gave their support for it. Taft believed reciprocity would allow for Canadian economic exploitation. He wrote Teddy Roosevelt that reciprocity would transform Canada into a mere “adjunct of the U.S. It would transfer all their important business to Chicago and New York, with their credits and everything else, and it would greatly increase the demand of Canada for our manufactures.”81 Of course it was now Canada’s turn to decline the reciprocal offer.

The Taft administration’s approach to the imperialism of economic nationalism was by now a familiar progressive Republican refrain. Imperial Republican maneuvers to maintain an expansive closed-market protectionist system of trade, alongside procuring various protectorates and colonies, “pacification” of insurgencies in the Philippines and Cuba, military interventions in the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Honduras, and the acquisition of Panama, all illuminate how the turn-of-the-century Republican administrations crafted both an informal and formal American empire within an economic nationalist framework.

Imperial historian Wm. Roger Louis may be right that “Robinson and Gallagher’s Victorians would have recognized the methods of post World War II Americans.”82 But these same Victorians would have looked askance upon American imperial expansion between 1890 and 1913—ironically the period in which revisionist historians have most commonly applied “the imperialism of free trade” thesis. At issue here therefore is not to deny an American empire at the turn of the century, but to counter the prevailing free-trade portrayal of it. Some of the most influential studies on the U.S. imperial turn of the century have subscribed to

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83. On politico-ideological differences among and between the parties, see H. Wayne Morgan, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse, 1969); R. Hal Williams, Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s (New York, 1978); McCormick, Party Period; Charles W. Calhoun, “Major Party Conflict in the Gilded Age: A Hundred Years of Interpretation,” OAH Magazine of History 13 (Summer 1999): 5–10; Lewis L. Gould, “Party Conflict: Republicans versus Democrats, 1877-1901,” in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun (Wilmington, 1996); David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran, “The Partisan Paradox and the U.S. Tariff, 1877-1934,” International Organization 50 (Spring 1996): 301–24; Worth Robert Miller, “The Lost World of Gilded Age Politics,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (January 2002): 49–67; and Ninkovich, Global Dawn.

84. David A. Lake, “The State and American Trade Strategy in the Pre-Hegemonic Era,” International Organization 42 (Winter 1988): 48–56; Eckes, Opening America’s Market, ch. 5.

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the myth of the laissez-faire state, wherein the United States set forth on a bipartisan, free-trade imperial mission to forcibly gain access to foreign markets. Such consensus-driven open-door imperial analyses nevertheless fall short of effectively explaining U.S. expansion in an era dominated by economic nationalist policies at home and abroad. No political consensus came into existence surrounding American imperialism, the ill-named Open Door, or Republican retaliatory reciprocity. Rather, the haphazard turn-of-the-century American Empire arose amid great politico-ideological conflict, and arose owing to the imperialism of economic nationalism. Political rifts within and between the Republican and Democratic parties over American imperialism continued unabated, even as economic nationalist ideology continued to permeate the U.S. political economy and Republicanled imperial expansion.83 In particular, Republican imperialism of economic nationalism encountered strong opposition from both stalwart home-market protectionists and American free traders, and was temporarily halted in the mid1890s owing to the anti-imperial Cobdenite policies enacted under President Grover Cleveland.

Only in areas beyond American influence did the Republican call for the Open Door apply, and only nominally at that. Thus, the United States knowingly and purposefully did not apply the principles of the Open Door to its own newly acquired colonial markets. Instead, these markets remained effectively closed to the rest of the world, as did much of the protected U.S. domestic market.

Republican presidential victories throughout the 1920s would usher in the final years of any concerted implementation of the imperialism of economic nationalism, a Republican imperial program that was quite distinct from either President Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic free-trade vision, or the subsequent neoliberal reciprocity regime begun in the 1930s under the supervision of FDR’s secretary of state, Cordell Hull.84