Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900.

Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900. By Eric T. Love. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xxii, 245. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8078-5565-0; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2900-5.)

Eric T. Love's Race over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 is that rare book that will fundamentally change how U.S. historians approach an important topic--in this case, American imperialism in the late nineteenth century. Challenging existing scholarship, Love argues that the racist rhetoric of Social Darwinism--of "moral uplift" and the "white man's burden"--was never part of the imperialist case for annexing new territory. Just the opposite, for imperialists avoided race, correctly perceiving that placing nonwhites at the center (or anywhere near) their pro-annexation discourse would doom their cause. It was the anti-imperialists who most efficiently played the race card, torpedoing initiatives to annex Santo Domingo and early efforts to annex Hawaii by arousing the specter of unassimilable hordes thrust upon a country already besieged by racial divides.

Love begins with a useful historiographical critique. Racist impulses to dominate (framed in the rhetoric of "helping") those of differing skin color, most scholars claim, drove the imperialist cause. Even as sophisticated a historian as Michael H. Hunt, while acknowledging racism as a double-edged sword, echoes this consensus. But Hunt, Nell Irvin Painter, C. Vann Woodward, and others, according to Love, have gotten it completely wrong.

Proponents of imperialism in Hawaii, for instance, confronted profound hostility to annexing, in the words of Carl Schurz, a "people so utterly different from ours in origin, in customs and habits, in traditions, language, morals, impulses" (p. 105). Those who lusted after Hawaii quickly realized that the archipelago's racially diverse population threatened their ambitions; thus they devised a new line of argument. Dismissing demographic reality, imperialists audaciously presented Hawaii as a white republic under threat from Asian immigration and foreign powers. This approach, combined with the military necessities of the Spanish-American War, led to annexation in 1898. To insure success, imperialists, knowing well they lacked the two-thirds Senate vote necessary to approve a treaty, instead pushed annexation through by joint resolution, which required only a majority vote.

Within a year the drive to colonize the Philippines almost crashed on similar shoals. In the Senate, anti-imperialists stoked fears that newly annexed peoples of color would be eligible for citizenship, portending, one senator warned, a Congress comprised of "one-seventh Japanese, Malays, Chinese, or whatever mixture they have out there" (p. 191). Again imperialists scrambled to counter such charges, finally devising a formula allowing for annexation without the possibility of statehood or citizenship.

Sympathetically portraying President William McKinley as a realist "unmoved by issues of race," Love insists annexationists were motivated by real concerns about military and international security (p. 179). Britain and Japan both strongly advised the United States to keep the Philippines to prevent a vacuum that would lead to German or Russian intrusion. Today's culturally minded diplomatic historians seem oblivious to the tense international environment of the 1890s, grounding interpretations instead on loose notions of a supposed crisis of masculinity or the racism so prevalent at the time. Yet Love definitively proves that among actual decision makers, other more pressing matters took precedent.

According to present-day paradigms of thought, racism and imperialism stand as perhaps our nation's greatest sins--and rightly so. Yet in their eagerness to denounce both, historians have incorrectly linked the two. Ironically racism, in fact, provided a check on imperialism.

EDMUND F. WEHRLE

Eastern Illinois University