"Prodigally Endowed with Sympathy for the Cause": Mark Twain's Involvement with the Anti-Imperialist League


In the United States, the twentieth century began with a "Great Debate" about the country's role in the world. With the annexation of Hawaii during the Spanish-American War, and of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines at its close, the United States gained recognition for the first time as a world power. Concerned that the development of an overseas empire was inconsistent with the country's democratic and anti-colonial traditions, a group of prominent Boston citizens formed the Anti-Imperialist League (1898-1921) to protest U.S. annexation of the former Spanish colonies. When the Philippine-American War began in February of 1899, the Philippines became the League's primary international concern.

At the end of the Spanish-American War, the United States purchased the Philippines from Spain for twenty million dollars. But the Filipinos, who had been fighting for their independence since 1896, actually controlled the archipelago. U.S. troops were confined to Manila and its suburbs. To establish its control over the islands, the United States had to defeat the Filipino army and abolish the newly formed Philippine Republic. On February 4, 1899, with the peace treaty that closed the Spanish-American War still under debate in the U.S. Senate, American troops fired on a group of Filipinos and the new war began. Then called the "Philippine Insurrection," this undeclared war officially lasted for more than three years (1899-1902); skirmishes and local rebellions continued long afterward.

Returning to the United States in October 1900 from nearly ten years living abroad, Mark Twain immediately declared his opposition to imperialism and was soon made a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. He quickly became the country's most outspoken opponent of the Philippine-American War. His turn-of-the-century protest now serves as a reminder that the nation was far from unanimous in its support for overseas expansion. What Henry Luce would later name the "American Century" began with the United States embroiled in its first protracted war in Asia and with its citizens deeply divided over the issues raised by the war. In Twain's time, many people did not want the United States to become a world power. Looking to both historical and contemporary empires, they saw imperialism as bringing an array of "evils" the country had mostly avoided. In his widely circulated tract, The Conquest of the United States by Spain, William Graham Sumner of Yale University listed the things that would hasten the demise of American democracy and herald the beginning of a despotism similar to Spain's. These were: "war, debt, taxation, diplomacy, a grand governmental system, pomp, glory, a big army and navy, lavish expenditures, political jobbery-in a word, imperialism." Now, some of the same issues are being raised again, it seems, as the Pentagon is having a tough time convincing others that the country should lead a "one-superpower world."

Although he served as a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 until his death in 1910, Mark Twain's association with the League was quickly forgotten. It was not mentioned by his official biographer (1912), and in 1947 the first major study of his anti-imperialist writings, William M. Gibson's "Mark Twain and Howells: Anti-Imperialists," stated that "so far as the evidence shows,... Mark Twain had not become a League ‘member.'" Then Louis J. Budd apparently found a letterhead listing Twain as a vice president of the League. His Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (1962) stated that he was an "honorary vice president" for "as long as it could afford stationery." In his 1986 anthology, The Anti-Imperialist Reader, vol. 2, The Literary Anti-Imperialists, Philip S. Foner quoted an open letter of condolence from the Anti-Imperialist League addressed upon his death to Mark Twain's family and friends. Now it was known that Twain was a vice president of the League until his death. But what did he do during those ten years? What role did he play?

Because so little had been published about Twain's relationship with the League before I began my own study of his writings about the Philippine-American War, it has had to be documented almost entirely through the use of contemporary sources. Especially important were the unpublished letters by and about him that can be found in the manuscript collections left behind by Twain and other leaders of the League; the League's many pamphlets, leaflets and broadsides; and contemporary periodicals, especially those such as the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, the New York Evening Post, City and State (Philadelphia), and The Public (Chicago) that were edited by prominent anti-imperialists. Twain was much more actively involved with the League than previously thought and many of his writings were influenced by its contributions to the contemporary debate about imperialism.


The Anti-Imperialist League


The Anti-Imperialist League was formed in Boston in November 1898 when it became clear that the U.S. government was not going to free Puerto Rico, Guam or the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Its first appeal for membership proclaimed: "We are in full sympathy with the heroic struggles for liberty of the people in the Spanish Islands, and therefore we protest against depriving them of their rights by an exchange of masters." Citing such documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, the League based its appeal against imperialism squarely upon America's democratic and anti-colonial traditions. "These principles abandoned," it argued, "a republic exists but in name, and its people lose their rights."

Many of the nation's most prominent politicians, businessmen, educators, social reformers, and literary figures added their support to the anti-imperialist movement and local Anti-Imperialist Leagues were soon formed throughout the country. Highlighting the positive values they advocated, some of these organizations called themselves Liberty Leagues or American Leagues. In October of 1899, a convention was held in Chicago to form the national American Anti-Imperialist League headquartered in that city. This organization united the various local Leagues under a platform that declared that imperialism was the "paramount issue of the day."