RSS Feed for the unit Late nineteenth-century Britain and America: the people and the empire

Introduction

The Open University — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:32:04 GMT

This unit is from our archive.and it is an adapted extract from Understanding Comparative History: Britain and America (AA303) which is no longer in presentation. If you wish to study formally at The Open University, you may wish to explore the courses we offer in this curriculum area.

Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have argued that the empire was not an issue of popular interest in the late nineteenth-century Britain and the United States. This unit examines some of the evidence available to assess the truth of this claim. More broadly, the unit raises questions related to evidence: is it possible to discover what ‘ordinary’ people thought about expansionism?

‘I couldn't give a damn’; ‘I don't know anything about politics’; ‘Why don't they leave us to get on with it?’ How often do we hear sentiments similar to these from the people on the proverbial street today? Yet there are some political issues which do arouse popular interest and concern. Historians on both sides of the Atlantic have argued that the empire was just such an issue in late nineteenth-century Britain and the United States. They urge that the question of expansion drew an enormous response from among the workers.

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Learning outcomes

The Open University — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:32:04 GMT

After studying this unit you should have:

an awareness of the problems related to evidence for supporting claims on ‘ordinary’ people’s attitudes;
an awareness of popular responses to the South African War (1899-1902);
an understanding of attitudes to imperialism held by Americans.

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence

1 Popular responses to the South African War, 1899–1902

The Open University — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:32:04 GMT

It is convenient for purposes of comparison to examine popular responses to the Boer War or South African War of 1899 to 1902, which involved Britain in a war for the Transvaal, and to the Spanish-American War of 1898, which was fought, ostensibly at least, to free the Cuban people from Spanish oppression.

The South African War certainly involved the British working population. The war was fought by members of the working and lower-middle classes, many of whom volunteered. And the war was pre-eminently an imperialistic war, which raised in acute form the old issue of the right of mighty nations to acquire and exploit weak but resource-rich nations at the expense of their independence. Contemporary Liberal and Conservative politicians interpreted worker participation in the war, enthusiasm for its victorious conclusion and patriotic sentiment as support for expansionism. Some historians, such as R. Koebner and H.D. Schmidt, have agreed (Koebner and Schmidt, 1964). But does popular enthusiasm for the fighting and winning of the South African War really imply popular support for its expansionist aims?

If we looked at the evidence for the opinion of labour leaders, we would have little reason to doubt that they were almost all anti-imperialist both before and during the war. At the outbreak of the war there were twelve trade union leaders in the House of Commons and only one was an imperialist. In the 1900 ‘Khaki’ election, nine trade union leaders were returned to Parliament, not one of whom was an imperialist. British labour leaders tended to identify the war as one fought in the interests of capitalism and against those of the working population: Ben Pickard, leader of the Yorkshire Miners, was one who urged the Trades Union Congress (TUC) as early as 1899 to make its stand against the war known.

In 1902 the TUC did declare the war to be unjust. Among organised workers demonstrations of enthusiasm for the war were exceptional, although, while the war was being fought, many preferred to remain silent for fear of embarrassing the troops.

But trade union membership was but the tip of the iceberg. What of the mass of the people who were never organised? Contemporaries thought that they were in favour of an imperialist war. Modern historians have delved deep in the archives to identify where popular sympathies lay. The content of popular music hall songs; the flood of worker recruits into the army during the war; the enthusiasm during popular demonstrations on and after Mafeking night; the activities of a ‘jingo mob’ in breaking up anti-war meetings during the first year of the war; the Unionist election victories of 1895 and 1900; the very lack of an outspoken and organised opposition; the propagandist campaign in the press – all have been adduced to argue that the people of Britain supported imperialism.

On the surface the case looks persuasive. But, if we search more deeply, it is less convincing. For example, while it is possible to show that the people were patriotic and wanted Britain to win the war, it is difficult to prove that they were expansionist. The song in which the word ‘jingo’ was coined was itself patriotic rather than imperialist in sentiment:

We don't want to fight, but, by jingo! if we do,

We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too.

We've fought the Bear before, and while Britons shall be true,

The Russians shall not have Constantinople.

The songs which were most popular at the time of the Boer War were generally not on imperialistic themes, dwelling rather on the theme of another popular song, ‘The Miner's Dream of Home’.

The war, also, was presented to the people as inevitable, the result of a Boer ultimatum and declaration. There was no alternative, if national shame was to be avoided, to fighting the Boer and to winning the fight. This, of course, says nothing about popular opinion about the imperialistic motives behind the war but speaks, rather, of popular conviction that the nation must survive and come out of a war with its head held high.

Rates of recruitment into the army are also partially explicable in these terms. In December 1899 there was a request for volunteers for the war. There was, indeed, an overwhelming response: 54,000 men finally volunteered. Why? No doubt, in part, men volunteered because they felt that the war, once thrust upon the nation, had to be fought and won quickly. But there were other reasons. The army was particularly attractive to young men in their early 20s, many of whom were hit by unemployment at home. There is a fairly clear correlation between working-class recruitment to the army and unemployment at home during the war. Unemployment had been fairly low since the early 1890s but it gradually mounted. At the start of the war it was still on the low side and so was working-class recruitment to the army. As the war progressed, unemployment rose markedly, real wages fell and working-class recruitment to the army soared. Tables 1 and 2 show the correlation with respect to the working class as a whole and to two trades.

Table 1 Working-class recruits for Imperial Yeomanry per 100 of total and unemployment per 100 trade unionists, December–March of each year

Year	Recruits per 100	Unemployment per 100
1899–1900	32.6	2.6
1900–1	62.6	3.8
1901–2	76.2	4.2

Source: Price, 1972, p. 213.

Table 2 Carpenters and plumbers recruited for Imperial Yeomanry per 100 of total and unemployment per 100 trade-union carpenters and plumbers, December–March of each year

Year	Recruits per 100	Unemployment per 100
1899–1900	1.31	2.72
1900–1	3.26	4.86
1901–2	3.91	5.2

Source: Price, 1972, p. 213.

The links between working-class recruitment and the labour market seem indisputable. But it is also argued that a high proportion of recruits to the army were not working class at all but lower-middle class in origin, especially at the start of the war. Clerks, for instance, formed the single largest occupational grouping among recruits – 30 per cent of the total number – and skilled craftsmen were also prominent. (Unfortunately for the historian, the attestation forms which provide the clues to a recruit's social standing are insufficiently detailed to enable us to determine which of the recruits were middle and which upper-middle class.) The ‘jingo press’ (the Daily Mail, for instance) and works debating the concept of empire (such as Seeley's Expansion of England) reached a middle and lower-middle class audience. It is tempting to conclude that they had their effect and produced a jingoistic mood at the start of the war among the lower-middle class, leading to considerable volunteer recruitment. Whether this was true or not, lower-middle-class recruitment to the army peaked in 1899 to 1900 and then fell markedly.

The Relief of Mafeking in May 1900 was certainly greeted with spontaneous demonstrations of joy in the streets of the towns. This celebratory crowd included working-class and middle-class people. There seems to be little if any evidence that it was an ‘imperialist’ or ‘expansionist’ demonstration. And by the weekend following, when it took on specifically anti ‘pro-Boer’ characteristics, the mob seems to have been under the leadership not of working-class youth, ‘street-corner’ boys, but of students and members of the lower-middle classes. These demonstrations were encouraged by the press: ‘this crowd is out for killing and it knows whom it wants to kill …’ (Canetti, 1962, p. 49). Some anti-war speakers noted that it was students, and particularly medical students, who broke up their meetings whereas working-class audiences were in general quiet and attentive.

So what of the evidence of the vote? Did not the resounding victory which the Conservatives scored in 1895 prove that the people by and large supported imperialism? There is a divergence of opinion on this point among historians. Koebner and Schmidt say that ‘The election of 1895 gave Salisbury and Chamberlain a majority which could be interpreted by contemporaries as a large vote for empire expansionism and a defeat of the “Little Englanders”’ (Koebner and Schmidt, 1964). Disputing this, Henry Pelling says the empire was not at that point a party political issue but that temperance was much more at issue, a matter which elicited a strong working-class response (Pelling, 1968). The Liberals advocated temperance; the brewers, innkeepers and large sections of the working class did not. In addition, he favours the ‘swing of the pendulum theory’. Because trade was in a slump the outgoing party – the Liberals – were blamed and the pendulum swung in favour of the Conservative alternative.

More attention has been given to the evidence afforded by the ‘Khaki’ election of 1900. Once it was accepted that the Conservative victory meant working-class support for the policy in South Africa. But in 1968 Pelling wrote an article modifying this view. Without the war and the boom conditions which it brought with it, the Conservatives would not have won the election but other factors were vital. The Liberals were sorely divided in their attitude to the war and imperialism, and Campbell Bannerman, the new Liberal leader, had not yet consolidated his control of the party sufficiently to offer strong leadership in the campaign. A number of other issues overrode the issue of empire – for example, Jewish immigrants in the East End of London tended to cast their votes for whichever candidate – Conservative or Liberal – promised to protect their interests, and Irish voters were advised by their priests to vote for the candidate who would support the endowment of a Catholic University for Ireland – normally the Unionist.

A little later, Richard Price took up Pelling's points and examined in detail the response during the ‘Khaki’ election (Price, 1972). He began from the premise that, while imperialism and the war constituted a national issue, historians and contemporaries had been wrong to assume that local issues were secondary. He noted several aspects of electoral behaviour which suggested that imperialism was not the deciding factor. The election was characterised by general voter apathy, with turnouts considerably lower than in 1895. Liberal imperialists did not succeed noticeably. A pro-Boer Liberal candidate who was also a notable social reformer tended to do well. Where local economic conditions were bad, the voters voted in a Liberal candidate. In Camborne, Cornwall, and in Northampton, for example, where the war was seen to have brought bad times, an appeal to patriotism was useless. And everywhere Conservative candidates who wished to hold on to seats in predominantly working-class constituencies made an effort to show themselves interested in their constituents’ needs. H.S. Samuel, MP for Limehouse, gave an election address which concentrated on looking after the concerns of the river-men; T.W. Dewar, candidate for St George's-in-the-East, London, made a speech which linked the war with its effects upon the working class:

The war in which we are engaged has served a useful purpose in pointing to the necessity of a thorough reform and reorganisation of our Army system … the field hospital accommodation … [should be] made more satisfactory; the pay and chance of promotion … improved; and adequate state provision should be made for the widows and orphans … [there should be] such legislation as shall ensure for every working man and his family in the East of London decent and comfortable dwellings at fair rents.
(Quoted in Price, 1972, p. 122)

Conservatives who neglected local issues in the London elections were worsted at the polls, as were Liberals who focused on the imperial issue.

Price made a persuasive case for the irrelevance of the imperial issue in working-class constituencies and the disproportionate importance which they attached to local issues. He does not, however, demonstrate that constituents actively voted against the war or imperialism – merely that they found the issue irrelevant. Some might say that both he and Pelling have weakened their cases by singling out the Jewish and Irish ‘immigrant’ vote in East London as tipping the scale. Jewish immigrants to the East End from Russia and central Europe in the late nineteenth century could rarely speak English and probably, as a result, cast fewer votes than their numbers warranted. The voting registration laws were such that the mobile Irish workers were often unable to exercise their votes; there is, therefore, currently some doubt as to their importance in the general election of 1900 even in ‘Irish’ constituencies in London and Liverpool.

Price's case for the irrelevance of the imperial issue to most members of the English working class is strengthened by the fact that there was no strong response to the anti-war protest movement. Despite the existence of the South African Conciliation Committee (SACC) which conducted a pamphlet war against misconceptions about the Boers and the Stop-the-War Committee which organised a religiously motivated Crusade of Peace in 1899, the working classes did not rally to the anti-war banner. Yet a study of working men's clubs does show that when the war was discussed, the feeling was definitely anti-war. The working classes, even when organised, felt that the expansion of the empire was irrelevant to their needs. The clubs, despite some attempts to politicise them, were, for the workers, primarily recreation. An article in the newspaper Club Life, on 11 March, 1899, said : ‘The cry is, “We don't want to be bothered with politics after a hard day's work; what we want is recreation”’ (p. 15).

But the failure of the anti-war movements to enlist wholesale working-class support must also rest partly with their ineffectual approach. The SACC essentially appealed to the middle classes and adopted Fabian tactics; the Stop-the-War Committee realised that mass support was necessary, but did not provide a platform moderate enough to give it mass appeal; the Liberals were hopelessly divided and lacking in leadership. It is one of those tantalising ‘ifs’ of history, that the working class might indeed have exhibited its latent feeling against the war and, perhaps, the idea of empire had it been given the right leadership. But this seems to be lending support to the view that the working classes rarely exercise their own judgement on any but ‘bread-and-butter’ issues and are readily manipulated by political leaders of whatever persuasion. Scottish labour leader Keir Hardie himself ascribed the silence of the working classes on the imperial issue to the lack of national leadership against the war:

The working people do not think and have lost the power of asserting themselves in politics, have blindly followed leaders who found most favour with the aristocratic or moneyed classes. When they found nearly all those condoning the war they followed their lead. There has been no voice at Hawarden.
(Quoted in Price, 1972, p. 45)

If left to their own devices, the mass of English workers will concern themselves with the business of day-to-day living. What they need, by implication, is either right-minded leadership or political consciousness-raising and education.

We might conclude, then, that the British working class comprised two distinct segments: the organised labour movement, made up above all of skilled workers who declared against the Boer War as a war at the expense of the workers; and the unorganised mass of the workers, semiskilled and labouring manual workers, who found politics, including the empire question, irrelevant to their everyday existence. This second group, when they could vote, cast their votes for candidates who promised advantage – the ‘cheap, big loaf’. They were willing to fight the wars of the upper classes because the laws of survival gave them little choice. But there are some who would urge that historians such as Price still have not identified what the workers of the second group thought. By analysing voting behaviour and working men's clubs they ignore the larger part of the working class – perhaps 60 per cent.

Price was anxious to examine the response of unorganised workers to the imperial issue but, in fact, he spurned the records of one type of working-class institution – the trade unions – in favour of another, the working-class clubs. It is unfortunate that no significant work has been done on the evidence of support or antagonism to the war or the empire arising from non-institutional sources such as correspondence, sermons and diaries.

We must also take stock of the fact that, while the British working class was either anti-imperialist or merely not interested in the issue, this did not mean that the workers were unpatriotic or unpossessed of a nationalistic sentiment. In time of war, when the workers were forced into the front line by events, the whole question of survival brought such nationalistic instincts into the fore. Price has not explained why, if the workers were so apathetic towards empire, they responded so enthusiastically to the call to arms in World War I. Perhaps the answer lies in the reality of working-class patriotism and nationalism. Price may well have over-emphasised the dedication of the working man to the need for social reform and general apathy towards war and expansion at the expense of attention to a deep-rooted although not ideological commitment to the flag. Apathy may have made the working man unsuitable material for the socialist movement; so, it could be contended, did patriotism.

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2 The Americans and imperialism

The Open University — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:32:04 GMT

If many questions must remain unanswered concerning popular responses to imperialism in Britain, this is doubly the case when we turn to the United States. Enough work has been done, however, to make it possible to make some useful comparisons.

While the British readily acknowledged their imperialism, the Americans have always denied theirs. The invisible nature of its empire and a determined anti-imperialist ideology made it possible for America to maintain such a position even in its decade of imperialist territorial acquisition – the years 1898 onwards. Whatever the topic of study, the historian is faced with the problem of penetrating what people say they thought and did, to discover what they, in reality, thought and did. The problem is, however, particularly acute when we attempt to assess the commitment of the American people to imperialism. For, even more than the British, Americans have sought officially to lay the onus for the Spanish-American War upon popular demand. Gareth Stedman Jones put it neatly in his essay on ‘The History of US Imperialism’:

Incursions into the Caribbean and Philippines were not in any sense determined by real economic interests, but were the result of the machinations of the cheap yellow press. The war was necessary to satisfy the frenzied and hysterical emotions of the people. The United States was forced to intervene to prevent new colonial incursions into the American hemisphere. America had not engaged in a determined war of economic expansion but had reluctantly assumed the Anglo-Saxon burden of helping backward peoples forward to liberty and democracy.
(Stedman Jones, 1972, pp. 208–9)

It was because of its anxiety to avoid charges of economic expansionism that the American government made so much of the war frenzy of the people. This, of course, raises questions concerning the propensity of strong governments to engage in wars which they consider both morally indefensible and unbeneficial on popular demand and, also, the balance of influences and motivations operating in this particular case. More important to our immediate purpose is this question: is it true that the American people wanted war and, specifically, a war of deliberate expansionism?

The received opinion is certainly that the people welcomed the Spanish war:

The American people accepted the war with a light-hearted patriotism. Every band played Sousa's new air, The Stars and Stripes Forever, and every piano strummed the ragtime march, There'll be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. Party lines were forgotten as Bryan served as colonel of a Nebraska regiment. The last vestiges of wartime antagonism between North and South melted away in the fire of national feeling; and Joe Wheeler, the famous Confederate Cavalry leader, fighting before Santiago, exclaimed that a single battle for the Union flag was worth fifteen years of life. From Boston to San Francisco whistles blew and flags waved on the hot July day when word came that Santiago had fallen. Newspapers rushed their correspondents to Cuba and the Philippines to see the fun, and these writers trumpeted the renown of a dozen new national heroes. There were ‘Fighting Bob’ Evans of the Iowa, who took Cervera aboard after his defeat; Captain Philip of the Texas, who as a Spanish vessel sank said, ‘Don't cheer, boys; the poor fellows are dying’; … It seemed an ideal war. Its casualty lists were short, it cost no great debt, it raised American prestige abroad, and the nation emerged with its pockets full of booty.
(Nevins and Commager, 1967, pp. 364–5)

This view deserves careful criticism, however. For several points can be made which point to the conclusion that the American people who called for war and supported it when it came were not necessarily expansionist. During the 1880s and 1890s floods of European immigrants entered the United States. American society was faced with an acute problem: how to integrate these non-English-speaking immigrants, from a number of very different cultural traditions, into the predominantly Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking society of nineteenth-century America. There was the added problem that the flood of immigrants during a period of economic depression was the cause of intense feeling against the immigrants, even in the formerly ‘internationalist’ organised labour movement as represented by the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. The answer was found in a very deliberate programme of Americanisation of the immigrants – using the public schools as community education centres which taught not only English to the immigrants but also American ways and standards (for example, of child care and housewifery) – and a wave of xenophobia. The schools laid great stress upon inculcating patriotism in their pupils, with sessions of flag exercises and citizenship classes; the well-to-do founded patriotic societies; belligerent attitudes to foreign governments were encouraged. Not for nothing have these years been dubbed the ‘nationalist nineties’. The new American ‘nationalism’, then, was very jingoistic. The popular press – William R. Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World in the fore – made capital out of this fact and made sure that public feeling against foreign powers remained high. There is good reason to believe that the American people at this point would have welcomed any war – imperialist or not – and that the question of expansionism scarcely needed to be raised. Moreover the war was not portrayed as an aggressive, expansionist venture but as a defence of the oppressed. There was also every reason for Americans – especially new immigrants – to make their allegiance to America and their enthusiasm for its wars beyond doubt. Immigrants felt very insecure in this atmosphere of nativism – they had to place their loyalties beyond doubt. Hence the wild demonstrations in favour of the war and, perhaps, the absence of popular argument against it. Many immigrants, of course, were not citizens and spoke no English: their participation in civic life (and especially elections) was presumably minimal.

There seem to be good reasons for doubting whether the American people at the time of the Cuban war were necessarily very interested in the question of whether or not America, the first ex-colony, should have an empire. But they were certainly out to prove their patriotism and displayed a jingoistic mood. They may have been nationalistic and xenophobic rather than imperialistic, but the end result was that they proffered vocal and unequivocal support for an imperial war, much to the politicians' satisfaction.

Some contemporaries outspokenly identified the Spanish war as a welcome tool in the Americanisation campaign. The National Education Association rejoiced that it brought solidarity to a people riven by internal dissension before its coming. The French ambassador in Washington commented: ‘More than one American hopes that the war will definitely create a Nation out of the mass of heterogeneous populations’.

It is true that there was one voice of dissent – the voice of the American organised labour movement which was interested in the imperialism issue and, before the war, was declaredly anti-imperialist. But it is also true that the pressures which ensured that the people as a whole did not resist the imperial war also made their mark upon the stance of the labour movement.

Before the outbreak of war over Cuba, the labour organisations and the labour journals were outspoken in their condemnation of imperialist expansion and militarism. The basis of this opposition was, without doubt, the internationalism of the labour movement. The concept of the brotherhood of the workers, the identity of their interests as a class, crossing national boundaries, suffused labour pronouncements on expansionism. It was as American labour leader Samuel Gompers declared to the New York Central Labor Union:

Labor is never for war. It is always for peace. It is on the side of liberty, justice and humanity. These three are always for peace … Who would be compelled to bear the burden of a war? The working people. They would pay the taxes, and their blood would flow like water. The interests of the working people of England and the United States are common. They are fighting the same enemy. They are battling to emancipate themselves from conditions common to both countries. The working people know no country. They are citizens of the world, and their religion is to do what is right, what is just, what is grand and glorious and valorous and chivalrous. The battle for the cause of labor, from times of remotest antiquity, has been for peace and for good-will among men.
(Quoted in Foner, 1977, p. 406, italics added)

War was a device used by despots to drown the legitimate complaints of their subject peoples. In 1897 Gompers wrote an article in the American Federationist entitled ‘Let us have peace’ in which he foresaw an age in which workers from all countries would unite and make peace. Time and time again before the war, American labour leaders spoke out against the war and expansion on the grounds that it was against the practical and the ideological interests of the workers. For instance, when President McKinley asked the Senate in 1897 to approve the treaty of annexation with Hawaii, the American Federationist argued that workers would gain nothing ‘from vainglory of territorial expansion … for behind this cry for glory there exists real danger to the liberties of our citizens, perhaps the decadence of our republic and the degeneration of our people’. When the destruction of the American ship, Maine, in Havana harbour in January 1898 produced a clamour for war, many labour papers tried to stem the tide of jingoistic feeling. The Coast Seamen's Journal, for example, described the projected war as an ‘expensive proceeding that the working class pays for and gains least from’. For the war would mean retrogression in terms of social reform at home:

A war will put all social improvements among us back ten years … If there is a war, you will furnish the corpses and the taxes, and others will get the glory. Speculators will make money out of it – that is, out of you. Men will get high prices for inferior supplies, leaky boats, for shoddy clothes and pasteboard shoes, and you will have to pay the bill, and the only satisfaction you will get is the privilege of hating your Spanish fellow-working-men, who are really your brothers and who have had as little to do with the wrongs of Cuba as you have.
(Quoted in Foner, 1977, p. 411)

The internationalist and humanitarian emphases of the labour opposition to imperialism put the labour movement in a quandary when war was declared. For the American government laid great stress upon the need to save the Cuban people from oppression as the prime motivation for the American involvement. Moreover, workers were anxious, given the prevalent jingoistic mood, not to appear un-American. In the early stages of the war, therefore, there was a tendency for labour to remain silent on the issue. A very few unions even came out in favour of the war – for example, the Typographical Union favoured acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish colonies because this would benefit the printing industry.

When labour leaders did speak out against the annexation of Spanish colonial territories, the imperialists certainly made every effort to brand them as traitors to the nation. For example, between December 1898 and March 1899 there were 31 petitions to Congress opposing annexation as well as thousands of individual petitions and some joint petitions to the president from the American Federation of Labor and the Anti-Imperialist League. Imperialists tried to denigrate all as traitors and singled out Gompers.

The Anti-Imperialist League, in which many American labour leaders were active, continued to agitate against imperialism after the ratification of the treaty. The distinctive voice of American labour, characterised by internationalism, a concern for the working class and an acknowledgement of the economic basis of imperialism, was, however, drowned by the voice of American industrial capitalists like Andrew Carnegie who financed the movement. The league stressed the religious, constitutional and humanitarian objections to imperialism, rarely mentioning its other aspects. And labour leaders, especially Gompers, were happy to go along with this programme because by this time they identified the chief enemy as labour competition from colonial peoples and not the monopoly capitalists who had wanted expansion in the first place.

The trade unions and the labour press were more faithful to their traditions. Although they often neglected the connection between imperialism and capitalism, they did continue to draw attention to the common oppression of American workers and colonial peoples. In 1899 the American Federation of Labor was only too pleased to draw parallels between the slaughter of 3,000 Filipino soldiers (during this island people's liberation) and the treatment of striking workers at Coeur D'Alene, Idaho: ‘When the Cuban, the Porto Rican, and the Philippinos [sic] are deprived of the right of self-government by our ruling class, it is our political rights which are in jeopardy.’ Similar sentiments were expressed when the military governor of Havana broke up a strike in September 1899 simply by casting its ringleaders into gaol: ‘The Spaniards did not treat Cuban labour in a more arbitrary manner. This is one of the incidents of military rule.’

But, despite this declared opposition to imperialism and militarism, labour leaders were opposed to mobilising workers at the ballot box. Ironically enough, the few socialists who did want to found a workers' party were less than interested in fighting on the issue of imperialism because they saw it as a peripheral issue. It was left to the Anti-Imperialist League to found a third party, which it did in January 1900. However, when Carnegie withdrew his support and finance, the initiative was dulled and labour failed to rescue the new party because it was not wholehearted in its support.

In 1900 McKinley was returned to the presidency largely because there appeared no viable anti-imperialist alternative. William Jennings Bryan, the leader of the Democrats, was not really an anti-imperialist. After this, even the American Federation of Labor capitulated: while the trade unions did not endorse aggressive imperialism, they accepted that America's colonial acquisitions were permanent and the American Federation of Labor as usual resisted the more radical call to attack the capitalistic forces which some saw behind imperialism.

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3 A comparison of attitudes

The Open University — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:32:04 GMT

It is, indeed, instructive to compare the attitude of the people to imperialism in both these nation states during the final decade of the nineteenth century. Clearly, although there are surface similarities in the situation, the historical tradition of both countries respecting empire in fact determined to a great extent responses to imperialism. It was possible to speak of imperialism and the empire with pride in Britain. The United States denied its empire and its imperial ambitions. When it developed a policy of territorial acquisition, it tried to clothe naked greed in the garments of humanity and benevolence. In both countries the organised labour movement stood out against territorial expansion, especially where an aggressive war was involved. In both countries this stand against imperialism was considerably weakened when war broke out: it was both inappropriate and dangerous to be seen to oppose one's own government in time of war.

It is, therefore, fairly clear where the organised workers stood on the imperial issue. What is less certain, and much more difficult to ascertain, is where the unorganised workers saw themselves with regard to this issue. Contemporaries thought that they knew: both the British and the American governments believed that they had received an overwhelming mandate from their respective peoples to conduct an imperial war and pursue a policy of active expansion. But the evidence lends itself to another interpretation – that the people were not interested in imperialism as such.

In Britain the working class was involved in the war – workers had to fight its battles, after all. There was a ‘natural’ desire to fight, to win and to nurse wounds. There was also considerable patriotism. But there is also evidence that these same people who sang patriotic songs during the war, who waved the flag and shouted ‘Death to the Boer’, had no hankering after another imperial war. Even Tory politicians believed that the people's support was fickle. In the early twentieth century Chamberlain believed that support had been alienated by the Education Act, but in point of fact the disillusionment of working people with the promised benefits of empire was more crucial. Few believed that their personal economic circumstances would benefit from the tariff reform which Chamberlain proposed. When it came to the point the free traders’ promise of a cheap loaf was much more tempting than the tariff reformers’ offer of full employment. The point was driven home when the ‘carrot’ of employment in the empire was shown after the war to be rotten. Large numbers of Chinese labourers were brought in to work the South African mines for low wages and in appalling conditions. This type of competition closed the empire to emigrant British workers. In 1904, Charles Fenwick, Northumberland Miners MP, noted that:

… towards the close of the late unhappy war supporters of the government pointed out to the working classes in this country what a happy hunting ground South Africa would be for the British labourer and what a splendid outlet it would be for the surplus population of this country. Now it turned out that this country had shed the blood of tens of thousands of its subjects not in the interests of British labour but in the interests of Chinese labour.
(Quoted in Pelling, 1968, p. 98)

The poor performance of the Conservatives in the 1906 general election showed that the electorate was unprepared to pursue the policy of imperial consolidation if it implied any lowering of their current living standards. Yet, had Britain become involved in an imperial war, the response may well have been similar to that in 1899 to 1902. Popular enthusiasm for the war in the United States equally must not be mistaken for enthusiasm for – or even interest in – imperialism. There, even more than in Britain, the response was a patriotic one and, by all accounts, an even more self-consciously patriotic one. Prevalent nativism and xenophobia made all sections of the community eager to assert their Americanness and deny their loyalties to other nations. The war of territorial aggression was simultaneously a war which healed a nation riven by ethnic rivalries. Empire itself was an issue which little interested the American worker.

In studying the response of the American and British people to these imperial wars, it becomes evident that politicians in both countries were anxious to appear to act in accordance with the popular will. This was necessary in a democratic system. In the case of America it was particularly important for the government to claim an imperial mandate from the people because the policy of territorial acquisition and aggression against outside powers was so very out of line with orthodox American ideology.

It is more difficult to determine whether these same politicians understood the nature of the public response to the wars. It is true that they noted popular support and war fever, but it is also true that they were careful to appeal to the more mundane interests of the electorate and were aware of the fickle nature of their support. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that politicians were well aware that imperialism as a concept was for the middle classes and that for the worker it was at best an emotive issue, to be confused with patriotism. Politicians manipulated the populace.

Although, in both nations, the labour movement stood out against imperialism there were important differences in approach. Those who spoke for the working class in Britain were well aware that imperialism had an underlying economic base. The capitalist was the enemy. Territorial expansion was to be deplored but so was economic infiltration and exploitation of other lands. In Britain, also, there was more talk of the adverse effects of the empire and its wars upon the conditions of the workers at home. But anti-imperialism did not imply an unpatriotic stance. When war came, labour stood for Britain. In the United States, there was little acknowledgement of the economic roots of imperialism. Territorial expansion was deplored because it involved the oppression and exploitation of others. Economic imperialism by American capitalists abroad came in for little analysis. The labour movement was outspokenly internationalist in approach. Its declarations before the war laid its leaders open to charges of unpatriotic, even traitorous, behaviour during the war. Relative silence was the result.

Nevertheless, in both nations, the labour movement did stress the implications of empire for the indigenous populations. Competition from colonial peoples was feared. Parallels were drawn between the attitudes of employers to contract labour in the imperial possessions and the way in which employers wanted to treat labour at home. Always there was the problem of reconciling the view of the movement as a whole that war and empire were bad for the workers with the fact that war sometimes brought boom conditions and usually benefited certain sectors. In fact, the concerted stand of the movement against imperialism in Britain successfully refutes the charge made by some Marxist historians that the skilled workers, the labour aristocracy, were bought off by the profits of empire.

Above all, this short survey must remind us of the immense difficulties involved in discovering the opinions of ‘the working people’. It is hard to interpret the statements of trade union leaders or to assess the stand of members of working men's clubs, but at least we have their statements to hand. The position is very different when it comes to studying the opinion of the masses. There is sufficient evidence to suggest that the organised labour movement was not representative of ordinary workers, to hint that they were at best apathetic about the labour stand. But for the most part we are thrust back at every turn upon statements about the supposed opinions of these people rather than upon what they, themselves, said or did.

The historian's approach is in danger of being circular: if a person declared a political position, even more if they were able to write it down, they were by definition not average and were, therefore, not one of the masses; only the illiterate and the apathetic justify the epithets ‘average’, ‘representative’ or ‘ordinary’. Yet we are bent upon discovering whether average working people were apathetic or whether they did have views on empire or other political issues. How do we as historians circumvent this problem? What sources can we use which demonstrate the views of the ‘person in the street’? Even in this essay, it has been only too easy to slip into using ‘electoral behaviour’ or the working men's clubs as evidence of working opinion yet both were open only to a portion of the class under discussion.

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References

The Open University — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:32:04 GMT

Canetti, E. (1962 edn) Crowds and Power, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Foner, P.S. (1977) History of the Labor Movement in the United States, vol. 3, New York, International Publications.

Koebner, R. and Schmidt, H.D. (1964) Imperialism: The Story and Significance of a Political Word, 1840–1950, Cambridge University Press.

Nevins, Allan and Commager, H.S. (1967) A Pocket History of the United States, 5th edn, New York, Washington Square Press.

Pelling, Henry (1968) Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain, Macmillan.

Price, Richard (1972) An Imperial War and the British Working Class, Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Stedman Jones, Gareth (1972) ‘The History of US Imperialism’ in Robert Blackburn (ed.) Ideology in Social Science, Fontana.

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Acknowledgements

The Open University — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 09:32:04 GMT

This unit was written by Professor Martin Clayton

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Grateful acknowledgement is made to Macmillan, London and Basingstoke for Tables 2, p. 36, and 4, p. 37 from Woodruff, W. (1966) Impact of Western Man: A Sudy of Europe's Role in the World Economy.

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