The Wages of Empire: Labor and American Colonialism
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THE WAGES OF EMPIRE: LABOR AND AMERICAN COLONIALISM, 1895-1905 BY KEVIN ALEXANDER HOSKINS B.A., BOSTON COLLEGE, 2004 A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2005 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2012 © Copyright 2012 by Kevin Alexander Hoskins This dissertation by Kevin Alexander Hoskins is accepted in its present form by the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date__________ ___________________________________ Elliot J. Gorn, Co-Director Date__________ ___________________________________ Naoko Shibusawa, Co-Director Recommended to the Graduate Council Date__________ ___________________________________ Michael Vorenberg, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date__________ ___________________________________ Peter Weber iii Curriculum Vitae Kevin Hoskins was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on October 8, 1981. He attended Boston College, graduating summa cum laude as a Scholar of the College with the degree of Bachelor of Arts. In 2004, he entered the graduate program in American History at Brown University, where he served as a teaching assistant in courses on the history of the United States and modern Latin America. In 2010, he accepted a position as Visiting Professor of History at Boston College. iv Acknowledgements There are many people I would like to thank. While an undergraduate at Boston College, Father John W. Howard, Father Stephen Schloesser, and Father William B. Neenan provided immeasurable inspiration and support at key junctures in my life and academic career. And I owe the greatest debt of gratitude to Lynn Lyerly – my undergraduate advisor, favorite teacher and friend. As a graduate student at Brown University, James N. Green and Naoko Shibusawa contributed greatly to my development as a teacher and scholar. And I would like to express my appreciation to Elliot Gorn for his continued guidance and dedication to my research project throughout the years. Numerous friends played essential roles in maintaining (or recovering) my sanity throughout this far-too-drawn-out process. My special thanks to Katherine Flynn and Brad and Amy Davenport. My parents – Steve and Susan –rendered unflagging support. My brothers – especially my elder brother Jason – were always a great comfort. I would also like to thank my wife’s family, who accepted me with open arms and provided the two of us with incalculable assistance while I finished this dissertation. Finally, I would like to dedicate this dissertation to three people – my late-grandmother Maxine, my grandfather Bill, and my wife Jesse. Without my grandparents there is no way I would have made it to this point. And my wife’s unceasing encouragement and never-ending patience are the reasons this dissertation has taken its current form. Thank you for everything. v Table of Contents CURRICULUM VITAE .......................................................................... IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ........................................................................ V TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................... VI INTRODUCTION .................................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1 ............................................................................................. 18 CHAPTER 2 ............................................................................................. 71 CHAPTER 3 ............................................................................................. 135 CHAPTER 4 ............................................................................................. 201 EPILOGUE .............................................................................................. 275 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................... 302 vi Introduction – From Empathy to Empire In late April 1898, with the United States seemingly days away from war with Spain, Pittsburgh labor editor A.R. Hamilton sought to explain why “the cry for intervention in Cuba comes the more strongly from the wage-earners of the country.” Hamilton insisted working-class Americans were “more profoundly stirred by the sufferings of the Cuban people” because they knew “more about hunger and privation from personal experience than people of wealth, and their hearts are more quickly moved by stories of distress.”1 Such stirrings of empathy for their “fellow oppressed” emerged back in the fall of 1895 when, in the midst of the worst economic depression to date in U.S. history, union workers assumed a leading role in a national grassroots ‘movement’ to express Americans’ support for the Cuban revolution. Cuban sympathy meetings were saturated with allegory, and they allowed workers reeling from social discord to take part in celebrations of traditional American nationalism and make symbolic professions regarding the nation’s republican “duty” to aid the oppressed. But the grassroots movement also rooted “sympathy” for the Cuban revolutionaries as a genuine cry from the American people. A couple of years later, after many twists and turns in the labor movement’s “story of Cuba,” workers now faced a foreign war – the nation’s first in fifty years and workers’ first as industrial proletarians. Despite persistent, and sometimes violent, conflict with capital, a long anti-war tradition and considerable unease from some of the labor movement’s top officials, union workers from across the country rallied to the flag and 1 A.R. Hamilton, “Working People and War,” National Labor Tribune, April 21, 1898, 1. 1 championed what they believed would be an honorable war. They made public professions of working-class patriotism, hailed America’s duty to protect the oppressed, and fantasized about the possibilities of social reconciliation through war. Some within the labor movement, such as Birmingham, Alabama’s J.H.F. Mosley, imbued the War of 1898 with immense significance for the future of America and workers’ broader class struggle. “For more than a quarter of a century the toilers of the United States have been contending for liberty and the abolition of industrial slavery,” reflected Mosley. “Will they now understand that the avenue to their goal is via the down-trodden patriots on the island of Cuba?”2 Needless to say, the War of 1898 failed to satisfy workers’ grandiose ambitions. Labor’s quixotic vision for the war, however, revealed much about the turn-of-the- century workers’ movement. By the middle of the 1890s, the harsh realities of Gilded Age industrialization, the proliferation of state-sponsored violence to crush strikes, and the devastating effects of cyclical economic depressions had forever shattered workers’ illusions about returning to a somewhat-mythic “Artisan’s Republic.” The distinctive moral universality of workers’ aspirations died alongside those illusions – and for years afterwards the nation’s now-ideologically-adrift working class strove for stability, social acceptance, and a semblance of meaning and direction in a world that scarcely resembled that which they had envisioned for so long. The war they hoped would unify the nation, liberate Cuba, and save the ‘soul’ of the American Republic concluded with the nation still rife with social discord, scores of racist denunciations of Cubans and Filipinos’ worthiness for self-government, and the seizure of an overseas American empire. 2 J.H.F. Mosley, “Labor and the United States Will Profit by the War,” Birmingham Labor Advocate, May 21, 1898. 2 Something had gone terribly awry. The McKinley administration created a coercive protectorate over Cuba and assumed colonial control of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii. In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt snatched the Panama Canal Zone and set the nation’s global initiatives for the century to come. The elevation of an official government policy of military-industrial expansion forced American labor to confront the fateful implications of empire: Would they embrace it as the nation’s destiny? Or reject it as antithetical to the ‘spirit’ of America? Take up the “White Man’s Burden”? Or forge an international, racially inclusive, critique of ‘capitalist empire’? Between 1898 and roughly 1902, much of the American labor movement vehemently protested American imperialism. Empathy for their fellow oppressed, however, was not the driving force of their opposition to Empire. Labor united against imperialism in order to defend their racial and class privileges that they held were threatened by competition with, immigration of, or, God forbid, even citizenship for, the inhabitants of America’s newfound colonies. A.R. Hamilton had praised workers’ compassion for the struggling Cubans, but when he turned his gaze towards the victims of American imperialism in the Pacific his fellow-feeling was more narrowly confined: “In their work, their homes, food and clothing,” Hamilton balked, they “endure conditions amid which no self-respecting white man could live.”3 Hamilton later cautioned that competition with such workers would subject American labor to its greatest ever threat.4 Others within the labor movement were even more apoplectic. Jared Sater, an Indiana union worker, asked derisively: “Are we such great humanitarians 3 A.R. Hamilton, “Hawaii’s Labor Problem,” National Labor Tribune, Sept. 22, 1898, 5. 4 A.R. Hamilton, “The President’s Message,”