My Turn: Forces of imperialism marching on

By CARL DOERNER

Published: 03-13-2023 4:10 PM

In the U.S., the term imperialism is used mainly to describe the behavior of others, like the British, but it has been alive here in the U.S. throughout our history.

In February 1941, Time and Life magazines publisher Henry Luce launched criticism of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. “World War 2,” he argued, “was the result of the United States’ immature refusal to accept the mantle of world leadership after the British Empire had begun to deteriorate,” he wrote. “In the same manner that the United States had conquered the West, the U.S. could subdue, civilize, and remake international relations.”

Once freed of the Republican isolationist yoke that Luce’s fellow Republicans held on him until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt did vigorously pursue a plan bound to increase U.S. presence in the world. It was one that brought with it the label, an “American Century.” But Roosevelt had something entirely different in mind than power: self-determination of peoples of the world, an end to colonialism, and the creation of the United Nations. His vision was quite the opposite of Luce’s imperialism.

Of course, advance of the American Century was what Luce had had in mind — a dominating, directing, militarily controlling U.S. presence in the world. With Roosevelt’s death before the end of the war and the ascension of less competent Harry Truman to the presidency, Roosevelt’s vision of a just and peaceful postwar world was largely abandoned. Instead, the United States implemented a grand strategy that historian Stephen Wertheim has fittingly termed “armed primacy.”

There was a deliberate effort by business, intelligence, and the military to preserve the dominant national role that warfare had allowed them to acquire, to set a course that would lead to creating commands and building bases around the world from which to project power. There was even a Space Command. President Truman’s joining with colonialist, Soviet-detesting Winston Churchill in hostility to Soviet Premier Josef Stalin enhanced this development. The argument was this was about “defense.”

The Department of War title was replaced by Department of Defense.

While serving in the Navy near Tokyo after the war’s end, a seaman of my acquaintance had a Japanese girlfriend. He learned that during the war she lived quite near the great Yokosuka Naval Base at Tokyo. He said to her, “You must have survived a lot of bombing.”

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She said the base was never bombed. It was a very good one and Americans wanted to use it after the war. Here, quite apart from politics, was cooperation between the services to empower their global aspirations.

While the label American Century was applied to the era of U.S. global dominance following World War II, it might better have been fastened to the outcome of U.S. ambitions at the beginning of the 20th century — to acquisitions from the Spanish-American War.

The 27th U.S. president, William Howard Taft, put this striving to acquire territory succinctly. “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.”

There is much our children do not learn about in school. There is a whole lot more they will never hear about if radical, Trump adherent, white supremacist Republicans continue their assault on books and truth in state legislatures and at school board meetings.

Despite the brutality of Eisenhower administration agents Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA Director Allen Dulles visited upon the world — for starters, the overthrow of the democratically elected governments of Iran and of Guatemala, and the murder of Congolese President Patrice Lumumba — by the end of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency he seemed to grasp and articulate what had been happening to our country on his watch.

Present was a body of industry lobbyists, intelligence agents and generals wanting to maintain the profit and power they had acquired during the war and to remain in control of government. In his farewell address, he blew the whistle on them.

President John F. Kennedy heard it and tried to alter the nation’s course, but those arrayed against him had grown too strong. They hired assassins who shot him down in Dallas.

Bound by a common purpose, this informal cabal beats on, excited to gain wealth and wield power through conflicts they fashion — as in Ukraine, or maybe China.

Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian currently editing his new work, “Breaking the Silence: Revisioning the American Narrative.”

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