13 From Opponent of Empire to Career Opportunist: William Howard Taft as Conservative Bureaucrat in the Evolution of the American Imperial System William Marina The Evolution of the Imperial Presidency

Any reassessment of the presidency in general, or of any president in particular, must begin with some understanding of the concept of the presidency itself in American history and its evolution over the last two centuries. From the writing of the Constitution and the election of George Washington as the first president, to the election of William Jefferson Clinton in 1992, it would not be unfair to suggest that the office of the president has been viewed as something in the nature of an American “tribunate”—despite the electoral college mechanism, an individual elected by the whole people.

From its beginnings in the Renaissance with Machiavelli, modern classical-Republican political thought was permeated with a fascination for Greece and Rome—their histories and institutional structures. Thus, the protests of Cato’s Letters against the corrupt politics of eighteenth-century Great Britain were enormously popular reading in the formation of the ideology of the generation of Americans who led the American Revolution and created the republic.[1] The terminology of Roman ideals and institutions was apparent in such organizational concepts as the Senate, “virtue,” and even the ill-fated Society of the Cincinnati.

But American leaders were also aware that the Roman Republic and its institutions over several centuries of warfare and conquest had evolved into the Roman Empire and the Pax Romana, the latter not universally acclaimed by those inhabitants who suffered under its yoke. The difference was nicely summed up in 1775 by John Adams, when, in the midst of citing Aristotle, Livy, and James Harrington, he wrote:

[T]he British Constitution is more like a republic than an empire. They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men. . . . An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation of his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments. Even this formality is not necessary in an empire.[2]

One of the significant aspects of the worldview of many of the Founding Fathers such as John Adams, but certainly evident in writings of intellectuals such as Baron de Montesquieu or Edward Gibbon, was a belief in a cyclical view of history. The fear was that the American republic would evolve in much the same cycle as had the Roman: into empire.[3]

As we survey the American presidency from the perspective of over two hundred years, it is difficult to disagree with the liberal historian, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., that there has been an evolution toward an imperial presidency.[4] The difficulty with any evolutionary continuum or spectrum, of course, is to determine at what point a substantive transition has been made from one entity toward another—in this case, from republic to empire.[5]

In the case of classical Rome’s leadership, that transitional spectrum might be said to have evolved from tribune to consul to caesar to emperor over several centuries. In the case of the United States, it took only a couple of generations before some politicians were calling popular leaders such as President Andrew Jackson “caesarian,” although the Whigs backed off from that assessment when the party also began to select generals for presidential candidates in the 1840s.[6]

One of the first American political thinkers to discern this drift toward centralization and empire was Alexander Stephens, Abraham Lincoln’s old friend from their service together in the House of Representatives in the 1840s. Stephens, later the vice president of the Confederacy, devoted his last years to a perceptive analysis of the evolving American political system, and argued, very much like Oswald Spengler several decades later, against “empire,” and that there was “no difference between centralism and imperialism.”[7]

Whether or not one agrees with the view of a drift toward empire, several definitional matters need to be explored with respect to the phenomenon of empire. From the great imperialist surge of the Western powers into both Africa and Asia during the late nineteenth century, and given even greater emphasis by the Leninist and other neo-Marxist attempts to explain those policies, empire and imperialism have come to be almost synonymous with foreign policy. But it needs to be remembered that the other definitions of empire—centralization and the erosion of the rule of law—are in no way abrogated by the attention drawn to the former. Indeed, the two aspects of empire most often function together.

The key link between the two is the emergence of bureaucracy. Empire, whether due to an acquisition of territory abroad or an expansion and centralization of the role of government at home, is never a result of some fit of “absentmindedness”; it requires an expanding bureaucracy to administer the increasing governmental role. This inevitably leads to a massive explosion of rules and bureaucratic law, often unclear, vague, and even perhaps contradictory—what in ancient China was called legalism.[8]

In the United States, these two impulses came together at the end of the nineteenth century with the acquisition of an overseas empire and a simultaneous demand for domestic reform that numerous intellectuals and politicians came to believe could only be achieved by an increase in the role and function of government. If those who have argued that the major change of the last century or so has been the emergence of empire are correct—and this writer agrees with that view—then any reassessment of the presidency, or of a particular president must be undertaken in the context of that development. It is thus fair to ask: How does the presidency of William Howard Taft relate to that overall movement toward an imperial presidency?

At first glance, one might dismiss the Taft presidency as a four-year interlude between the dynamic almost eight-year Republican progressivism of the ultra-activist Theodore Roosevelt, and the eight-year Democratic progressivism of the intellectual Woodrow Wilson. To do so would be to severely underestimate Taft’s role in the development of events between 1900 and 1912.

No president, no emperor, can rule alone. Whether there is anyone among the people to suggest he might be without clothes, as did the small boy in the Hans Christian Anderson story, the executive needs a burgeoning bureaucracy to administer an expanding empire. This expansion of the role of government presents an extraordinary opportunity for those businessmen providing goods and services to the empire and those with credentials, scholarly or otherwise, for administrative service in the empire. Such bureaucrats are unlikely to tell the executive any more than they believe he needs to know, and they inevitably filter the information that he receives.

Given that reality, Taft’s career in government during these years assumes at least as great an importance as the four years of his presidency, for his twelve years at the very cockpit of bureaucratic decision-making at the turn of the century was greater than any of his immediate predecessors or successors. One would have to go back, perhaps, to John Quincy Adams, or forward to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to find a president or soon-to-be-president, so long near the helm of the policymaking apparat as Taft. Taft served as head of the Philippine Commission, governor-general of the Philippines (or, as he later described it, pro-consul), secretary of war, and, finally, president. William McKinley might have been directed by God to acquire the Philippines, but it was Taft who went to the islands to work out the parameters of colonial policy. Teddy Roosevelt may have “taken” Panama, but it was Taft who administered the building of the canal. The same can be said with respect to a number of other countries—such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico, and China, to name several—where in those years the United States felt it necessary to intervene. Even if Taft was not always the actual architect of a given policy, he was entrusted with the task of executing it.

The Emergence of “Big Bill” Taft

The Taft family was well connected to the Ohio Republican political organization that dominated late-nineteenth-century American politics. Taft was an amiable giant of a man, weighing over three hundred pounds. After graduation from Yale University in 1878 and the University of Cincinnati Law School two years later, Taft gravitated toward the law. He later remarked that, “[I]n my early married life, I told my wife that I was so fond of judicial work that if I could be made a Common Pleas Judge in Hamilton County in Cincinnati, I would be content to remain there all my life.”[9] During the next twenty years, Taft was appointed to several judgeships—once even elected to the Superior Court—as he moved with distinction up the ladder of the judiciary. By the turn of the century, it was evident he had set his sights on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Jacob Gould Schurman, president of Cornell University, and head of the first Philippine Commission to the islands in 1899, characterized himself as a “reluctant imperialist.”[10] The same might also be said of Taft. When Schurman announced that he could no longer continue with the work, McKinley persuaded Taft to drop his anti-imperialist feelings and help in the work of administering the islands.[11] Elihu Root, at least, understood that Taft might appreciate a good career opportunity, and Taft used his leverage to secure the chairmanship of the second commission in February 1900, as the price of participation in what we now call “nation-building.” Root stressed duty and obligations to the Republican Party and the nation as reasons for Taft accepting membership on the commission:

You have always had your platter up. You have caught the offices that have fallen; you have had an easy time; you have done good work enough but now you have an opportunity to serve your country. You are at the parting of the way and the question is whether you are going to take the easy or the heavy task.[12]

In other words, the party was now calling in its dues. Taft’s feelings about the wisdom of the Spanish-American War and his opposition to the annexation of the Philippine Islands cannot, however, have been very deeply felt. If so, they were overridden by his sense that this was an opportunity to move upward politically, perhaps even toward the Supreme Court.

Sweating it Out in the Philippines

The tropical climate of the Philippines was always a major occupational hazard for Taft. He sweated a great deal, probably not much helped by wearing a Western-style business suit. With the severe discomfort of prickly heat and its accompanying itching, the budding pro-consul by 1903 had discovered the relative comfort, during the summer, of removing the seat of civil government to Baguio City, about twelve hours’ travel time into the mountains outside Manila. To justify the cost of that move, Taft spoke of “a place with a climate not unlike that of the Adirondacks, or Wyoming in the summer” that would make it possible to more easily function for ten months in Manila, curtail the need for vacations in America, “reduce the number who go invalided home,” and serve as a place where “Filipinos of the wealthier class” might also vacation rather than taking the now-frequent visits to China and Japan.[13] Later Taft would also be hospitalized for the various problems associated with amoebic dysentery. No doubt these health problems were all part of what Rudyard Kipling had referred to as “the White Man’s Burden”!

Some of Taft’s adventures in the deepest tropics were downright comical. At one point he was touring some of the outer islands with a delegation including Congressman Henry A. Cooper of Wisconsin, chairman of the influential House Insular Affairs Committee, which was charged with writing important legislation for the Philippines. Cooper described an attempt to get “Big Bill” off the boat in a situation where there was no loading platform and the level of the boat deck was not the same as that of the dock. A number of Filipino dock workers attempted to hold a ladder as the not-so-agile Taft made his way down it, the ladder teetering over the water. It was comparable to a scene from a “Keystone Cops” film and not at all what might be called pro-consul splendor.[14]

By the time Taft arrived in the islands in 1900, the Philippine Insurgency was in full swing. As one might expect with two strong personalities, there were soon problems between Taft and General Arthur MacArthur, the army’s commander in the Philippines. Students of Southern history can appreciate something of their differences. The army, like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson at the conclusion of the War for Southern Independence, was willing to accept those insurgents who had laid down their arms and taken an oath back into participation within the system. Taft and the civilian authorities, however, were more like the Radical Republicans in wanting to create a Filipino participation that would readily accept an American definition of the colonial relationship because it understood that its legitimacy rested upon American power.[15]

Lesson one about empire might be that you have to be very careful about blundering into colonial rebellions that are also internal civil wars or revolutionary social situations. The situation in the Philippines, of which America’s “benevolent imperialists” were essentially in “blissful ignorance,” was not unlike the American Revolution, which, as Carl Becker put it long ago, was not only about home rule, but who would rule at home. The British found themselves in a colonial rebellion that also involved an internal struggle within the colonies.

After the Civil War, the South manifested many of the same tendencies. While Northern forces finally withdrew from occupying the South after 1877—twelve years after the war’s end—the United States did not promise eventual independence to the Philippines until 1917; then, in 1934, make it a definite ten years hence; and, because of the intervention of World War II, not fulfill that promise until July 4, 1946. From Taft’s perspective, our “Little Brown Brothers” could never have been ready for independence in such a relatively short period of time.

In view of our continued efforts in the twentieth century to help others with respect to self-determination—as long as their understanding of that term reflects an acceptance of doing things our way (something of a contradiction in concepts, of course)—it might be useful to reflect on these rival philosophies of encouraging and inducing social change in other societies, what today many rather statist-oriented sociologists call “state building capacity,” that is, the ability of a bureaucracy to change a society.

In Western civilization, perhaps the first discussion of this issue came when the Jesuits and the Franciscan-Dominicans faced the question of relating to social change in another society, as the West began its extensive intercourse with China in the centuries after Marco Polo. The Jesuit approach was to work with the mandarin elite and to relate in terms of what was seen as somewhat similar concepts, such as Tien-Heaven. The Dominican idea was to take the hard-core, undiluted word to the masses. Unfortunately, the squabbles between the Christians and complaints back to Rome caused the emperors, in essence, to throw out Western religious ideas altogether.

The American approach in the Philippines was a rather eclectic mix of these philosophies. We offered widespread education to what we saw as the “inferior” masses, but we coupled this early on with working with a conservative native elite that had worked as comprador-scalawags with the Spanish, rather than attempting to assimilate more of the nationalists-revolutionists.[16] By 1901, the Philippine Insurrection had been dampened by the capture of its leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, and Taft had been installed as the civil governor of the islands, a position in which he served, despite several severe illnesses, until his recall to Washington in 1904 to become secretary of war. By that time, he had established himself as one of the prime architects of American “state-building.”

A second lesson of empire is that such systems of power require a large bureaucracy to carry out imperial policies and that, once in place, it is difficult to dismantle them. Thus, by early 1902, there were already 2,777 American civilian bureaucrats in the Islands, a majority over the 2,697 Filipinos, but this did not include the numerous American teachers in the Philippines or the large contingent of soldiers in the army of occupation needed to maintain “order.”[17] The key bureaucratic institution with respect to American colonialism was the Bureau of Insular Affairs, or B.I.A., not to be confused with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Created early in December 1898 as the Division of Customs and Insular Affairs, the organization by 1902 had evolved into the B.I.A., functioning as a part of the War Department in a number of other areas of intervention such as Santo Domingo, Haiti, Nicaragua, even Liberia and elsewhere. As Secretary Root put it, the B.I.A. was performing “with admirable and constantly-increasing efficiency the great variety of duties which in other countries would be described as belonging to a colonial office.”[18] Except, of course, Root didn’t mention that the American equivalent was under the control of the military.

As one might expect, as with any bureaucracy, there was never any shortage of new tasks in which to prepare the natives for self-government at some point in the distant future. The importance of the bureau is indicated by the fact that its chief was raised first to brigadier and then to major general by 1912. As we shall observe later, the B.I.A. was deeply involved in the whole currency exchange question, which later became the linchpin of the American empire.

All of these colonial ventures, of course, offered career opportunities not only for the military but also for budding American progressive-oriented public administrators, newly schooled in American universities in the science of politics and thus ready to explain the virtues of democracy to those less fortunate souls in Asia. In one report, Taft even suggested that the civil service in the Philippines was less corrupt than back in America, and he may well have been right! When these administrators returned from the Philippines and other of our colonial possessions, they could then turn their attention to making American government less corrupt and to expanding its size and power—noble endeavors, indeed!

Among the social problems in Filipino society under Spanish rule—apart from the numerous languages, religions, tribes, and ethnic groups inhabiting the islands—was the lack of opportunity for the native elite. Given the church’s role in administering Spanish colonialism, the Philippine revolution in the 1890s was directly related to the closing-off of increased entry into, and mobility upward within, the church hierarchy for able Filipinos. This occurred as several orders were curtailed in Europe and Spanish priests were sent to sinecures in the islands.[19] The so-called Friar Lands, the extensive holdings of the church in the Islands, was one of the major areas of contention in the Philippine situation. Taft visited the Vatican in an effort to help settle this question, and, although unsuccessful in the short run, this did later lead to the church’s disposing of the greater portion of these lands. That meant the Filipinos would have access to these vast land holdings.

There is not space here to detail all of Taft’s actions during his four years of “empire-building” in the Philippines. Then, and later as secretary of war and finally as president, he never seemed to understand that you have to allow your comprador-scalawag to have legitimacy and credibility before his own people. Taft’s papers and the files of the B.I.A. are filled with letters in which he seemed never to comprehend his conservative Filipino friends’ explanations that some of their public words should not be taken literally as “anti-American,” but as necessary to retain their credibility in the face of attacks by nationalists such as Manuel Quezon. Or as Franklin Roosevelt put it so succinctly from an “empire man’s” perspective, speaking of Trujillo, although applicable to any number of American comprador-Scalawags, “He may be an SOB, but he’s our SOB!”

We perhaps shouldn’t judge Taft too harshly, however, in his inability to understand that one could be pro-American and a Filipino nationalist as well. In the 1940s and after, John Foster Dulles and numerous other American policymakers couldn’t fathom the notion that Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh, among others, could be both nationalists and communists at the same time and could conceive of Chinese or Vietnamese national interests outside of the Soviet Union’s own rather nationalistic version of “international communism.”

We ought to welcome that failure on Taft’s part, because it allowed the anti-imperialists, the Democrats (many were both, such as Cordell Hull), and the Filipino nationalists to advance the agenda toward a more rapid promise of eventual Philippine independence than men like Taft could ever have accepted. The British, in India and elsewhere in Asia, were infuriated that nationalists like Gandhi immediately asked, if the Americans could move the Philippines so rapidly toward independence, why could not the British do likewise?

From a longer historical perspective, one of Taft’s greatest policy failures with respect to the Philippines was in 1908 and after, when he refused to allow the publication of Captain John R.M. Taylor’s five-volume History of the Philippine Insurrection, which still can be found in galley proofs in the National Archives, although it was published some years ago in a limited edition in the Philippines. He blocked the publication to keep from embarrassing some former Filipino leaders, such as Emilio Aguinaldo, who were now cooperating with the United States.[20]

Taft and the Panama Canal

By the time Taft returned to Washington to assume his duties as secretary of war, the United States had acquired another possession, the Panama Canal Zone. Most Americans are familiar with Teddy Roosevelt’s observation that while Congress debated, he “took” Panama. While some opponents of Empire—such as Moorfield Storey, president of the Anti-Imperialist League—protested against Roosevelt’s blatant action, it ultimately fell to bureaucratic administrators like Taft to actually oversee the building of the canal.[21]

Roosevelt’s outlook on law, or the lack thereof which characterizes the movement toward empire, was revealed in a cabinet meeting shortly after the acquisition of the Canal Zone. The president preached on at length, justifying his reasons for taking Panama and offering the usual moral arguments about saving Western civilization—always a sure warning that one is about to be presented with a justification for yet another government intervention! In any event, Roosevelt turned to then-secretary of war Root and asked, “Well, Elihu, have I justified myself?” to which Root, a conservative and realist in foreign policy, replied, “Yes, Teddy, you certainly have! You were accused of seduction; you have proved conclusively, you were guilty of rape.”[22]

Conceding Taft’s role in the building of the canal, as one historian has put it perhaps a bit too strongly, Roosevelt could brag that he “took” the Canal Zone, but Taft could have responded, “But I built the Canal.”[23] Here again, what needs to be recognized is the bureaucratic dimension of “empire-building.” Roosevelt fully understood the importance of Taft and Root in making policies and in administering the growing imperial edifice that McKinley had begun and that he had also carried forward. He was profuse in his praise of both men. “If only there were three of you!” he exclaimed to Taft, “Then I would have put one of you on the Supreme Court . . . one of you in Root’s place as Secretary of War . . . [and] one of you permanently as Governor General of the Philippines.”[24]

The building of the canal has legitimately been described as one of the great engineering triumphs of the world, made possible by the subsequent virtual elimination of yellow fever.[25] But moral and legal considerations, such as Moorfield Storey’s, aside, Americans have seldom questioned whether building the canal really made good economic sense.

Those arguing for more government intervention have always had a “gut” understanding that Americans are “suckers” for anything that has a technologically challenging dimension to it. The French couldn’t build a canal, but we could! If somebody else was able to build the “bomb,” they must have stolen the “secret” from us! If “they” have unmanned space vehicles, then we can and should build manned ones, or perhaps a space shield which, after the expenditure of $60 billion dollars and counting, is still far from reality.

Recall that at the time of the canal debate in 1978, that great patriotic presidential candidate, Ronald Reagan was almost accusing President Jimmy Carter of treason for daring to negotiate a treaty that would take down the American flag in the sacred Canal Zone before the end of this century. Reagan claimed to be for capitalism, along with motherhood and apple pie, but fundamentally he was just a late-twentieth-century “jingoist” and socialist. The building of the canal was one of the greatest socialist endeavors in American history, and its operation shows how an imperial bureaucracy’s interests, with the passage of time, can become institutionalized.

In 1855, the Vanderbilt interests constructed a railroad across the Isthmus of Panama that operated until the canal opened in 1914, paying a nice dividend to its investors through all the years of its existence. Today, of course, in an age of shipping and railroad containerization, we have more than a dozen such railroad “bridges” from Canada southward, linking trade between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

Most Americans are unaware that, due to cave-ins, etc., we have dug out more dirt between 1914 and today than we excavated in originally building the canal. The dig-out of 1975, when one of the hills collapsed into the canal, cost American taxpayers $175 million. The canal has always been an American taxpayer subsidy to the shipping industry, especially the American one, and has never paid for itself.

One could say, as Theodore Roosevelt did, that it was all for the benefit of Western civilization, but in the late 1970s, when this writer last checked, the major canal users were Japanese ships hauling iron ore from Brazil to Osaka to build Toyotas and other such items needing steel. But on February 8, 1904, when the Japanese sprang their brilliant surprise attack on the czarist Russians, Theodore Roosevelt was among those Americans applauding the Asians’ clever use of “pre-owned” battleships, as if they had somehow joined Western civilization! Obviously, we didn’t see things the same way on December 8, 1941, and it was rather ironic that the U.S. was still indirectly subsidizing Japan through the canal in the 1970s and after.

Indeed, the only major entity that made a true market analysis of the canal in 1978 was not Ronald Reagan but Forbes magazine, that “tool” of the capitalists, pointing out how much cheaper in most cases railroad bridging was than paying a unionized crew to sail down south, wait to move through the lock system where there was a growing shortage of water from Lake Gaitan, and then sail back north with the cargo.

One suspects that had we never built the Canal, another railroad or two would have sprung up to compete with the Vanderbilt business before the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department would have gotten around to accusing the Vanderbilt interests of maintaining a monopoly, but one can never be certain about such things!

The only viable argument for America’s twentieth-century “canal socialism” was a military one, which captured Theodore Roosevelt’s public relations fancy after the battleship Oregon was forced to sail “around the Horn” as clipper ships had done sixty years before. That viability, however, began to erode after 1945, as aircraft carriers replaced battleships, and our largest warships thus could not navigate the canal, even though their support ships could do so.

Unlike our relatively quick departure from the Philippines, we have associations in this country consisting of hundreds of retirees from the canal bureaucracy, many of them generations of “Army brats” born and raised there. It is understandable, more so than with Reagan in 1978, that as time to relinquish the canal approached, they had emotional difficulties in dealing with the reality of this particular example of bureaucratic socialism. Environmental problems aside, if there is no hidden American financial subsidy into the twenty-first century, it will be interesting to see how long the canal can “compete” with railroad bridging.

Taft and Cuba

Taft’s policies toward Cuba, both as secretary of war and as president, also reflect his role in the emergence of the American empire. It is, of course, impossible to assess how his experience as governor general in the Philippines, virtually an “oriental potentate” in the view of some anti-imperialists, affected his administrative style both in the cabinet and in the presidency. But recall that the major reason for what became a campaign for empire at the turn of the century was the American crusade to “free” Cuba from the cruel yoke of the Spanish Empire, a crusade that ultimately included the Philippines and Puerto Rico as well.[26]

From the standpoint of many Cuban revolutionaries then, and certainly a number of Cuban historians since, the United States had moved toward war with Spain precisely because it perceived that the revolutionists were on the verge of victory. From the American perspective, a radical revolution with strong black participation and support, not only might pose a challenge to the United States’s hegemony in the Caribbean, but it was certainly not a good example for a society bent on establishing a post-Civil War segregationist policy at home.

By the time McKinley led the nation toward a declaration of war against Spain, the Congress had passed the Teller resolution, disclaiming “any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction or control” over Cuba except for its pacification.[27] The motives for the resolution were varied, ranging from Southerners who did not wish to see more “inferior” peoples incorporated into the American union; to agriculture interests, such as the sugar producers in Colorado represented by Senator Henry Teller; to idealistic Americans who genuinely believed that the United States should support movements for self-determination around the world.

In the aftermath of the war itself, as Taft was making his decision to head the Philippine Commission, events were also moving forward in Cuba. As with the Philippines, a decision had been made to retain a “standing army” there as a means of insuring stability, law and order, on the assumption that the Cuban revolutionaries were incapable of doing so.[28] The inevitable social clashes between Cubans and members of this “Gringo” occupying force, were not unlike those between southerners and the northern occupation forces some three decades earlier in the United States. It greatly enhanced feelings of Cuban nationalism and self-determination much as had British occupation of Boston after 1774. Before the Spanish-American War, there had for years been a segment of American planters and conservative Cubans that favored annexation by the United States to keep the more radical elements of the island under control. The occupation had the effect of rather quickly muting expressions of that view.

American policy ultimately took form in the Platt Amendment, authored by Senator Orville Platt of New York, a member of the imperialist group. The Platt Amendment clearly reflected the outlook of another New Yorker, Secretary of War Elihu Root, who had written the guidelines for American rule in the Philippines. Its provisions effectively made Cuba a protectorate of the United States, providing for United States intervention if deemed necessary.

It took the election, and reelection, of several constituent assemblies before a vote accepting “la Emienda Platt” was secured. The ensuing problems with those arrangements carried over into Taft’s years as secretary of war and as president, and as a major factor in the ongoing tensions that have characterized Cuban-American relations for decades. American troops left after the acceptance of the amendment but would return in the years ahead as support to colonial administrators. It is impossible to explain the continued, if declining, appeal of socialist dictator Fidel Castro to the Cuban people outside of this massive American military, political, and economic intervention in Cuba through the twentieth century. That nationalistic, anti-imperialist, social cement, which this country continues to reinforce, is about the only appeal Castro has left.

Since some Filipino leaders also advocated a protectorate as preferable to annexation, the Cuban experience suggests there would also have been problems with the Philippines, although of a different kind, from the resulting insurgency and ensuing American colonial rule. It was not long before the United States was presented with complaints from American business interests that the Cuban government was discriminating against them. American officials had to make it clear they would not intervene in that instance, but this revealed the difficulties inherent in any protectorate relationship.

In 1906, the United States had to intervene again in Cuba. By that time, Taft was serving as secretary of war and Root had moved on to secretary of state. Since the latter was on an extended goodwill tour of Latin America, Taft was dispatched to Cuba to deal with a situation in which President Estrada Palma threatened to resign unless the United States intervened to help him maintain law and order in the face of growing discontent.

Roosevelt and Taft were extremely interactive during these formative years of the empire, but they held very different views about law and governmental powers, as revealed with respect to the crisis in Cuba. A letter to Taft is indicative of Roosevelt’s views about the presidency and illustrates what has become the norm for the modern presidency:

If it becomes necessary to intervene I intend to establish a precedent for good by refusing to wait for a long wrangle in Congress. You know as well as I do that it is for . . . the enormous interest of this Government to strengthen and give independence to the Executive in dealing with foreign powers, for a legislative body, because of its very good qualities in domestic matters, is not well fitted for shaping foreign policy on occasions when instant action is demanded. Therefore, the important thing to do is for a president who is willing to accept responsibility to establish precedents which successors may follow even if they are unwilling to take the initiative themselves.[29]

Taft was a good subordinate and usually went along with the president’s expansion of the executive powers, but his decision to preserve the constitutional continuity of the Palma government again demonstrated the differences between the two Americans that would become increasingly evident once Taft assumed the presidency As Roosevelt wrote:

Upon my word, I do not see that with Cuba in the position it is we need bother our heads much about the exact way in which the Cubans observe or do not observe so much of their own Constitution as it does not concern us. . . . Neither do I understand why the fact that [the] government is not within the Constitution as you state, would alter your control of the situation for pacification.[30]

The politically astute Roosevelt understood that Americans had grown tired of the burden of neo-colonial interventionism. Having been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the president was already looking for more heroic areas of challenge. It was the legalistic Taft who was left to deal with the problems of empire. Actually, he was more sympathetic to the liberals in Cuba, describing the conservative Palma in a letter to Mrs. Taft as “a good deal of an old ass,” but he ended up supporting the Cuban president.[31]

Taft and Antitrust

Although the major focus here is on Taft’s involvement in the bureaucratic expansion of government into the empire abroad, it would be remiss not to mention one of the areas in which he continued that same approach at home: antitrust policies. It was Taft who bureaucratized the whole area of antitrust, adding considerably to the government’s staff of trustbusters. Where Roosevelt had precipitated a few confrontations to gain publicity and had negotiated with businessmen at a personal level, Taft initiated far more cases and sought to legally rationalize what was essentially an irrational procedure.[32]

Taft’s Foreign Policy—Not Dollar Diplomacy, but Currency Exchange

While Taft’s early career, and even into his presidency, was associated with the development and administration of the emerging American colonial empire, during his years in the Oval Office he also initiated what was known as “dollar diplomacy,” supposedly the substitution of “dollars for bullets.” At first glance, this would appear to be an improvement over the water torture and other such methods used in the subjugation and acquisition of outright colonial possessions.

While a number of studies have explored dollar diplomacy with respect to China, Mexico, Nicaragua, and several other nations, in the view of this writer, they seemed to have missed the mark in understanding the larger dimensions of Taft’s policies—which were, in fact, precursors of what would become the main thrust of American foreign policy for the rest of the century.[33]

The only historian to fully grasp the link between the American empire’s evolving domestic policies and its emerging foreign policies, known under Taft as dollar diplomacy, was the great Austrian economic theorist and economic historian, Murray N. Rothbard. At the time of his death, Rothbard had begun not only to develop a reinterpretation of the origins of imperialism but to fit its development into the whole banking and currency question in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.[34] His analysis suggests that what has been termed dollar diplomacy cannot be understood outside of the framework of elite bankers, lawyers, and policymakers who were pressing for a central banking system that was ultimately known as the Federal Reserve and that was virtually in place by the time that Taft left office early in 1913. As Rothbard observed:

The years shortly before and after 1900 proved to be the beginnings of the drive toward the establishment of a Federal Reserve System. It was also the origin of the gold-exchange standard, the fateful system imposed upon the world by the British in the 1920s and by the United States after World War II at Bretton Woods. Even more than the case of a gold standard with a central bank, the gold-exchange standard establishes a system, in the name of gold, which in reality manages to install coordinated international inflationary paper money.[35]

Even before the turn of the century, a number of American intellectuals, including Brooks Adams, Henry Adams, Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, were involved in justifying some kind of expansionism, economic imperialism, and even colonialism, if necessary, to sustain the nation’s prosperity. Thus, as Rothbard pointed out, “what would later be called the ‘Leninist’ theory of capitalist imperialism . . . was originated not by Lenin but by advocates of [American] imperialism.”[36]

It would be difficult to improve upon Rothbard’s summation of the thesis developed by these Americans, later popularized by the English economist John A. Hobson and subsequently modified by Lenin:

The idea was that capitalism in the developed countries was “overproducing,” not simply in the sense that more purchasing power was needed in recessions, but more deeply in that the rate of profit was therefore inevitably falling. The ever-lower rate of profit from the “surplus capital” was in danger of crippling capitalism, except that salvation loomed in the form of foreign markets and especially foreign investments. New and expanded foreign markets would increase profits, at least temporarily, while investments in undeveloped countries would be bound to bring a high rate of profit.[37]

Thus, a program of imperialism was necessary to open up these countries to both American products and investments. The writer who first put forward this view, based upon the erroneous assumption of David Ricardo and others “that the rate of profit is determined by the stock of capital investment” rather than “by the time preferences of everyone in society,” was the economic writer Charles Conant.[38]

Conant saw the Philippines as the opening wedge to American access to the markets of Asia. Along with other statist advocates of empire, he argued that internally the nation would have to be transformed to make its operation as “efficient” as possible. This, of course, meant a vast centralized concentration of power along the lines of Czarist Russia, including an amending of the Constitution to greatly expand the powers of the executive in the formulation of foreign policy.[39] Given such a program, if Theodore Roosevelt had not existed, it would have been necessary to invent him.

Perhaps equally important, as Rothbard describes in detail, these ideas were embraced by a number of economists in the newly emerging economics profession, such as John Bates Clark and Edwin R.A. Seligman of Columbia University and Arthur Twining Hadley of Yale. The outright colonialism and war in the Philippines posed a problem for some of these academics like Hadley, but none disagreed with the way in which such an agenda would increase the role of the economist in policymaking.

At the same time that Taft was going out to head up the administration of the Philippines, the American Economic Association (A.E.A.) was busy carrying out its own colonial “burden,” publishing a volume of Essays in Colonial Finance, almost half of which was underwritten by five corporate sponsors who all had a stake in the emerging empire. Thus, as Rothbard comments, not only was the A.E.A. “wholeheartedly in favor of the new American empire,” but economists “were willing and eager to play a strong role in advising and administering the empire, a role which they happily filled.”[40]

In less than a decade after the splendid little adventures of 1898—what with a bloody and costly insurrection in the Philippines and the anti-imperialist critics—the politicians and the public had come to see the “burden” of colonialism as not a very good bargain. Even protectorates and continued interventionism, such as in Cuba, were costly, and politicians like Roosevelt had found them less appealing.

The groups that really benefitted from imperialism were the burgeoning bureaucracies that included such seemingly-diverse groups as the military and its associated contractors; the B.I.A. within the military; all the administrators and business interests associated with such undertakings as the Panama Canal; the banking interests; especially those pushing for a central banking system; the newly emerging public administrative class seeking jobs both here and abroad; and their academic mentors building such programs in the universities, the economics profession which saw a leadership role for itself in the empire, and the various religious groups that early on had pushed for an imperial involvement. This emerging situation meshes rather nicely with the interpretation of imperialism developed by Ludwig von Mises and will be discussed in greater detail below.

What Rothbard cogently demonstrated was that, even with the problems inherent in colonialism and neo-colonialism, the imperialist theorists, especially Conant, understood that control of money, of the currency, was essential. With respect to Asia, this had been evident before the Industrial Revolution in the West and had made the latter’s manufactured goods cheaper than those of India or China. But Asia also had many luxury items, ranging from silk to jade, and a number of raw materials and spices such as tea to trade to the West. For centuries, the East had drained specie from the West, and the latter was always searching for new products or techniques to redress the balance. What the British had discovered a century before was that Indian opium was a wonderful means to change the terms of the trade with China.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, despite its political humiliations, the economies of nations such as China were far from dead, and the monetary system was still soundly based upon silver. The acquisition of colonial possessions gave the imperialists an excellent opportunity to advance their currency exchange schemes. Rothbard offers an excellent description of how this was carried out in the newly acquired Puerto Rico, where the Spanish had already begun to debase the currency in 1895.[41]

The Philippines presented a greater problem because that country, like much of the Far East, was “happily using a perfectly sound silver currency the Mexican silver dollar.”[42] With Taft already in the Philippines, Secretary of War Elihu Root, who sometimes functioned as J.P. Morgan’s personal attorney, got the B.I.A., America’s military colonial service, to hire none other than Charles Conant, the theorist of empire, to devise a currency scheme for the islands.

At the heart of his plan was a debased new silver coin. The seigniorage profit that the U.S. Treasury obtained from this debasement was deposited in a New York bank, where it then functioned as a “reserve fund” for the debased silver currency being minted in the Philippines. As Rothbard concludes: “Thus, the New York funds would be used for payment outside of the Philippines instead of as a coin or specie. Moreover, the U.S. government could issue paper dollars based on its new silver reserve fund.”[43] It took several years for this plan to be approved by Congress, but by 1903 these inflationary blessings of imperialism were being passed on to our “little brown brothers” in the islands. Naturally, a whole host of economists and social scientists was necessary to carry out this policy, including Carl C. Piehn, Bernard Moses, and David P. Barrows of the University of California, as well as Edwin W. Kemmerer of Cornell. Most of these ideologues of Empire went on to write scholarly treatises on America’s role in bringing Western ideas of civilization and liberty to the Filipinos.[44]

Rothbard also describes how the effort to carry out this kind of currency scheme was developed, with varying degrees of success, in a number of countries within the American imperial sphere, including Mexico, China, Cuba, and Panama.[45]

From the perspective of this exploration of the role of Taft, it is important to note that he was in a central position within the bureaucratic policymaking apparat during these years to move things along to fruition, from the Philippines to the War Department, and then, as president. As Rothbard describes these developments, it was during Taft’s presidency that the work on moving from these currency plans abroad to the Federal Reserve at home was virtually put in place, with the final phase beginning in 1911.[46]

Toward an Austrian Interpretation of Empire

Taft’s career, both before and during his presidency, illuminates the role of bureaucrats and bureaucracy in the development of that kind of centralized statism known as imperialism and empire. Ideologues and various economic, religious, or other interests may initiate the process, but as the state becomes involved, the structure and process become heavily bureaucratized with groups whose agendas are quite different. Unlike the businessman’s need to make a bottom-line profit, even if often with the help of government, a bureaucrat’s prime goal is to extend his own power and influence within the system.

Taft’s opportunism manifested itself in his moving from an opponent of empire to one of those bureaucrats who carried out and expanded the system. Hannah Arendt was correct. There is a certain banality to that kind of evil! Bureaucrats only carry out rules and orders, but often with a vicious kind of efficiency.

In a number of his works, Ludwig von Mises touched upon imperialism, often in a critique of Marxist interpretations of that phenomenon. His work that most closely parallels the description of bureaucracy and imperialism as discussed here is Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War.[47] As cited above, Murray N. Rothbard has added greatly to our understanding of these developments.

These early twentieth-century efforts at empire through currency manipulation find their lineal descendants today in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As the battle over empire continues into the twenty-first century, the task of Austrian economists and historians will be to continue to show the continuity of the policies to those of the past. The evolution of the imperial presidency has been a part of that story, but it is only one part of a whole civilization’s evolution toward statism and empire.

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[1] For some of the classical reading of the Americans of that generation, see H. Trevor Coulburn, The Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, reprint, 1998).

[2] John Adams, Novanglus Letters, 1775, cited in William Marina, Egalitarianism and Empire (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1975), p. 7.

[3] See, for example, Amaury de Riencourt, The Coming Caesars (New York: Coward-McCann, 1957).

[4] Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Imperial Presidency (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973). It is simply foolishness to suggest that only the presidency has become, somehow, imperial. The whole American system has become imperial, including the Congress, the judiciary, and larger society itself. At the core has been a shift toward statist, positive law, by a large part of the society and away from either supernatural or natural law.

[5] Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press, 1979).

[6] Edwin A. Miles, “The Whig Party and the Menace of Caesar,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly XXVII, no. 4 (1968): 361–79.

[7] Marina, Egalitarianism and Empire, p. 9.

[8] Amaury de Riencourt, The Soul of China (New York: HarperCollins, 1958), pp. 33–34.

[9] Address before the National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C., November 14, 1913, cited in Donald F. Anderson, William Howard Taft: A Conservative’s Conception of the Presidency (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1973), p. 7.

[10] Kenneth S. Hendrickson, “Reluctant Expansionist-Jacob Gould Schurman and the Philippine Question,” Pacific Historical Review 36 (November 1967): 408–10; Jacob Gould Schurman, Philippine Affairs, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1902).

[11] In Taft’s own mind, he may still have considered himself an anti-imperialist, simply carrying out American rule in the most “benevolent” way possible. Mrs. Taft apparently considered her husband, “the most active anti-imperialist of them all.” Quoted in Morrell Heald and Lawrence S. Kaplan, Culture and Diplomacy: The American Experience (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1977), p. 151 (emphasis added). Chap. 6, “Conscience and Consciousness in the Philippines: The Imperial Impulse, 1898–1903,” pp. 124–58, discusses these events in detail.

[12] Quoted in Anderson, William Howard Taft, pp. 6–7.

[13] Quoted in Charles Burke Elliott, The Philippines: To the End of the Commission Government; A Study in Tropical Democracy (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1917), p. 295.

[14] See the Diaries of Henry A. Cooper (1899–1908) (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society).

[15] To my knowledge, the parallels between the Filipino Revolution and the aftermath of the American Civil War have not been much commented upon, but see Renato Constantino, A History of the Philippines (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975) and Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Manila, 1975). The latter was the Introduction to Captain John R.M. Taylor’s Philippine Insurrection Against the United States, 5 vols. (Manila: University of the Philippines 1975). Constantino notes that the Filipino Katipunan Society, which marked the emergence of the revolutionary movement toward independence, was very aware of the insurrectionary efforts of the Ku Klux Klan in the American South during and after Reconstruction, and stressed the “K” common in both names in talking and writing about the Klan. While late-twentieth-century “politically correct” writers in the United States might find this difficult to grasp, Filipino revolutionaries understood that, at its most fundamental level, the Klan was part of a Southern insurrectionary movement against Northern colonialism.

[16] The author was reminded of these enormous ethnic and class divisions when he lectured in the Philippines under the auspices of the U.S. Information Service in 1981. After a talk before 1,500 businessmen at the Mikati Business Club, a group rather like the New York Chamber of Commerce, because of my Spanish last name, a former economics minister and Harvard Ph.D. in economics invited me to lunch at his club, an incredibly opulent and elegant building out of late-nineteenth-century Europe, where all the wives seemed to have just returned from shopping sprees in Madrid and Paris. He assured me the Spanish had endured the Americans, the “brown” Filipinos, the “yellow” Japanese, and then the Filipinos again, but would continue to prosper and endure in the islands. Their club reminded one of the Big Five Club in Miami, a consolidation of the clubs in Havana, which excluded a mulatto such as Fulgencio Batista, who never challenged those rules even when he governed Cuba.

Later this writer learned that the whole junket away from his position with the Joint Economic Committee in Washington had been concocted as an opportunity for American diplomats to liaison with the Aquino leadership. As he lectured on about Reaganomics, and other such arcane subjects, our state department personnel used the occasion to assure the Filipino dissidents that Vice President George Bush’s “under the influence” recent rash embrace of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos was a violation of their advice, and that our policy really was in the process of changing! So much for the notion that Vice President Dan Quayle was the only “loose cannon” in the later Bush administration.

[17] Onofre D. Corpuz, The Bureaucracy in the Philippines (Manila: University of the Philippines, 1957), p. 178. There is a vast literature discussing various aspects of the U.S. effort at “state-building” in the Philippines. In addition to the two-volume study of W. Cameron Forbes, cited in the next note, see for example, Joseph Ralston Hayden, The Philippines: A Study in National Development (New York: Macmillan, 1935); Charles B. Elliott, The Philippines: To the End of the Military Regime, with a Prefatory Note by Elihu Root (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1917), idem, The Philippines: To the End of the Commission Government (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1917); Peter W. Stanley, A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899–1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); Bonifacio S. Salamanca, The Filipino Reaction to American Rule, 1901–1913 (The Shoe String Press, 1968); and Garel A. Grunder and William E. Livezey, The Philippines and the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951).

[18] W. Cameron Forbes, The Philippine Islands (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1928), vol. 1, p. 136. It is interesting that, for a nation that prides itself on a separation of civil government and the military, the military was from the beginning so involved in administering all of the territories that the United States had acquired, directly or indirectly, as a result of the Spanish-American War. Not only the Philippines, but also Puerto Rico, Guam, Panama, and even Hawaii and Cuba, along with military interventions in areas ranging from China to Haiti, came under the province of the War Department. As Anderson remarked, Taft “was a de facto colonial secretary,” Taft, p. 13.

[19] For a discussion of the role of elites in the revolutionary process, see, William Marina, “The American Revolution and the Minority Myth,” Modern Age (1976); and idem, “Revolution and Social Change,” The Literature of Liberty II (1978), pp. 1–39.

[20] In the 1930s, after Taft’s death, Captain Taylor was still trying to get the work published in case the U.S. Army should ever find itself engaged in another guerrilla insurgency in Asia. The irony is, of course, that the United States did get involved in the suppression of another anticolonial insurgency in Asia, in Vietnam from 1945 until 1975. The ultimate American victory in the Philippines was aided enormously by the facts that the Filipino elite was divided within itself and that Filipino nationalism had not developed into the kind of movement that would sustain a “people’s war.” Conditions were quite different in Vietnam.

[21] Storey’s anti-imperialist critique of Theodore Roosevelt’s actions was contained in a small pamphlet entitled, The Recognition of Panama (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1903). For a more extended discussion of the Panama question at that time, see William Marina, “Opponents of Empire: An Interpretation of American Anti-Imperialism, 1898–1921” (doctoral dissertation, University of Denver, 1968).

[22] Recounted in Philip C. Jessup, Elihu Root II (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, [1938] 1964). Much of the material in this section is taken from William Marina, “From Rape to Seduction: Panama and the Shifting Strategy of the American Empire,” Reason (January 1978): 33, 35, 38, 50. What could not be anticipated, however, in 1978, was that in 1989 President George Bush would again turn to interventionist “rape” in Panama on a scale that made Theodore Roosevelt appear as a rather “modest imperialist.” The Pentagon has yet to formally acknowledge that perhaps 4,000 Panamanians were killed in the effort to abduct President Manuel Noreiga and try him for drug trafficking. Critics have suggested that the manner in which this was done, as well as the nature of his trial, were intended to cover up American involvement in such activities.

[23] Anderson, William Howard Taft, p. 18.

[24] Ibid., p. 12.

[25] On the building of the Canal, see David McCullough. Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977); and William Friar, Portrait of the Panama Canal: From Construction to the Twenty-First Century (New York: Graphic Arts, 1999).

[26] Under Spain, Puerto Rico had representatives in the Cortes. In bringing the island “the blessing of liberty,” the U.S. has allowed observers to the Congress.

[27] The American promise of independence to Cuba in 1898 had influenced the Filipinos to believe they could obtain a similar promise, but for American policymakers, “independence” always included intervention, whenever that was deemed necessary.

[28] Most Cuban historians long ago concluded that the U.S. intervened in 1898 to prevent a victory of the revolutionaries over Spain.

[29] Roosevelt to Taft, September 17, 1906, in Theodore Roosevelt Papers (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress).

[30] Ibid.

[31] To Helen H. Taft, September 17, 1906, in ibid.

[32] A good summary of the bureaucratic expansion of antitrust under Taft is chap. 8, “A ‘Nonreform’: The Antitrust Crusade,” in The Presidency of William Howard Taft, Paolo E. Coletta (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973).

[33] See, for example, Walter and Maria V. Scholes, The Foreign Policies of the Taft Administration (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1970); Coletta, The Presidency of William Howard Taft; and Anderson, William Howard Taft. Unfortunately, the great revisionist historian, William Appleman Williams, in his well-known, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: Delta Books, 1962), p. 68, mentions Taft rather briefly in moving from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson.

[34] Murray N. Rothbard, “The Origins of the Federal Reserve,” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 2, no.3 (Fall 1999): 3–51. The discussion of imperialism and currency exchange covers pp. 19–35.

[35] Ibid., p. 19.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., p. 20.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Ibid., p. 21, citing David Healy, U.S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge of the 1890s (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), pp. 202–03.

[40] Ibid., p. 25.

[41] Ibid., p. 26.

[42] Ibid., p. 27.

[43] Ibid.

[44] Ibid., pp. 27–29.

[45] Ibid., pp. 29–35. Rothbard remarks about the possible role of the currency struggle as a factor on the Mexican Revolution and the need for further research on this question. The same is true with respect to China. The Revolution broke out there, also in 1911, over the issue of railroad funding. The Western powers pushed for foreign funding through the central government which could more easily be controlled. Many Chinese favored decentralization and their own funding through the provincial governments. Sun Yat-sen was at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver raising funds when the revolt broke out, and he had to hurry home to put himself at the head of the revolutionary surge.

One is reminded of railroad funding in the United States and the coming of the Civil War. Modern supplysiders such as Jude Wanniski are still fighting this battle with respect to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. See Jude Wanniski, The Way the World Works (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1998), especially the chapters dealing with “The Building of Empires,” “The Breakdown of Bretton Woods,” “The Third World on the Laffer Curve,” and “Experiment in Puerto Rico.”

[46] Ibid., pp. 35–51.

[47] (Spring Mills, Penn.: Libertarian Press, 1985). Rothbard’s discussion of the Bureau of Insular Affairs in the development of American empire is suggestive of the need for a thorough study of the way in which the military planners and bureaucrats in that organization helped to administer the empire. In working in the Military Section of the National Archives many years ago and helping to construct an index to the ninety-six reels of microfilm of the Philippine Insurgent Records, which is still in use there, this author had a chance to read through huge amounts of the records of the B.I.A. As one might suspect in such a bureaucracy, there is no “smoking gun” revealing the extent to which this organization shaped policy, but there was no doubt that the staff was aware that presidents might come and go—Wilson might replace Taft, for example—but the continuity of American imperial policy would carry on, safely in their hands.