Description
- Abstract:
- "The Wages of Empire" asserts that white union workers found the material, cultural and psychological “compensation” of racist privilege through their support of U.S. imperialism at the turn of the 20th century. It begins, ironically, with labor’s prominent role in an immensely popular anti-colonial grassroots “sympathy movement” towards Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain. Yet working-class “sympathizers” saw Cuba’s revolution through the prism of their own concerns about the dissolution of the “artisanal republic” and the ascendancy of industrial capitalism that betrayed America’s republican past. For organized labor, the dissertation argues, ‘Cuba’ was foremost a metaphor. Sympathy meetings were forums to validate working-class nationalism and to issue bitter recriminations against their domestic foes, especially “Wall Street” and federal authorities who workers accused of supporting Spain. This dissertation corrects the claims of previous scholarship that white workers were reluctantly pulled into war against Spain. It shows that the majority of the labor movement called for intervention into Cuba, literally “rallying to the flag” following the declaration of war. Their exaltation of the war-effort proceeded as public displays of patriotism revolving around flag-raising ceremonies that abounded with symbolic paeans to sectional and social reconciliation. After the war, as it appeared America would acquire an overseas empire, many union workers remained anti-colonialist because they feared competition or association with nonwhites in Cuba, the Philippines, and beyond. By 1902, however, labor’s anti-imperialism had waned, in part because the Insular Cases guaranteed that the newly colonized would not have U.S. citizenship or immigration rights. Labor subsequently supported the nation’s determination to build the Panama Canal and other expansionist projects. White union workers thus came to endorse imperialism once they were assured that skilled white labor would retain racial and class privileges at home and abroad. Immigration restriction, a share in economic growth, racial segregation, job opportunities, and preferential employment – these were the material, cultural, and psychological “wages” of empire.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2012)
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Hoskins, Kevin A.,
"The Wages of Empire: Labor and American Colonialism, 1895-1905"
(2012).
History Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0125QZ6
