Member-only story
On July 4, 1902, Teddy Roosevelt issued a general proclamation of amnesty to “the Filipinos who have been in rebellion” against American troops, so long as they would “recognize and accept the supreme authority of the United States in the Philippine Islands[.]” At the end of the Spanish-American War, Spain agreed to transfer “ownership” of the Philippines to the United States for 20 million dollars. The problem is that no one asked the Filipinos themselves, who had been trying to oust the Spanish for some time, how they felt about that arrangement. And so America fought a brief, devastating war against the Philippines, during which as many as a million civilians died. The USA won, of course, and took sovereignty over the Phillippines until July 4, 1946, thus Americanizing the island nation for (at least) two generations.
By now, this story likely sounds familiar, even to those who might never have heard of the Filipino-American War. America, once cognizant of its own size and influence, set about becoming an Empire of sorts. Not like the Roman or British empires, in the sense that we didn’t take over places and call them all “America” (at least not too much after the beginning of the twentieth century). But in the sense that we needed to impose American-style democracy on the rest of the world.
