The Anti-Imperialists on True Patriotism

The Anti-Imperialist League played an interesting, if somewhat overlooked, role in U.S. political history. Founded as a result of the illegal and brutal takeover of the Philippines by the U.S. government after the Spanish-American war, the group supported the idea that such military adventurism stood in conflict with the ideals of liberty and self-determination. Interestingly enough, these men who denounced big militarism were those on the political right, that is, they also favored free markets, free trade, and generally limited government. They recognized that it was intellectually dishonest to favor limited government at home and support big government abroad. Some notable members included Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, Grover Cleveland, John Dewey and William Lloyd Garrison.

Moorfield Storey, a member of the group, is a most fascinating historical figure. He was a lawyer and a noted civil rights leader in the late 19th Century, and the founder of the NAACP. Consider Storey's words in April 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, for it was these sentiments that animated his and so many others' anti-imperialist work:
 

"This Club [the Massachusetts chapter of the league] never met under circumstances more calculated to create the gravest anxiety in every patriotic man than tonight, and by patriotic man I do not mean him who measures his country's greatness by the extent of her territory, the size of her armies, the strength of her fleets, or even by the insolence with which she tramples upon her weaker neighbors, but him who knows that the true greatness of a nation, as of a man, depends upon its character, its sense of justice, its self-restraint, its magnanimity, in a word upon its possession of those qualities which distinguish... the highest type of man from the highest type of beast."

Consider also, the words of Carl Schurz, another league member and the first German-born member of the U.S. Senate.
 

"The man who in times of popular excitement boldly and unflinchingly resists hot-tempered clamor for an unnecessary war, and thus exposes himself to the opprobrious imputation of a lack of patriotism or of courage, to the end of saving his country from a great calamity, is, as to 'loving and faithfully serving his country,' at least as good a patriot as the hero of the most daring feat of arms, and a far better one than those who, with an ostentatious pretense of superior patriotism, cry for war before it is needed, especially if then they let others do the fighting."

These men realized something profound, namely, that true patriotism does not exist where there is a clamoring for the military force of one's nation to be cast in the direction of every far corner of the world. Patriotism does not exist where childish egotists who, in their lust for blood and power and self-affirmation, insist that the nation's true strength lies in its brutality, and who conjure up an endless parade of invisible "enemies" and insist this brutality be exercised in their direction.

Patriotism exists where men with level heads resist these cries for violence, because war violates the most basic of nature's laws, and man's very humanity. Patriotism exists where a man, despite the mocking of his bellicose compatriots, says no to his state and to it's wars because wars financially and morally bankrupt nations, and are an assault on the very qualities and ideals that make humankind superior to beasts.