Reflex Actions: Colonialism, Corruption and the Politics of Technocracy in the Early Twentieth Century United States

Abstract

In August 1898, a forty-two year old political scientist at Princeton University, a conservative Southern Presbyterian with a somewhat provincial air, was brought suddenly to the edge of an intellectual and political crisis. Woodrow Wilson had tracked events of the previous months closely as the United States defeated Spain in Cuba and at Manila Bay, and found himself perplexed. He took out his memorandum pad and at the top of a page wrote: ‘What Ought We to Do?’ Beneath, he unspooled a meditation on the recent war and its potential impact on American life. ‘A brief season of war has deeply changed our thought,’ he reflected, ‘and has altered, it may be permanently, the conditions of our national life.’ With the armistice with Spain on the horizon, and the United States moving towards the control of a far-flung colonial empire in the Caribbean and Pacific, Wilson noted to himself: ‘We cannot return to the point whence we set out. The scenes, the stage upon which we act, are changed. We have left the continent which has hitherto been our only field of action and have gone out upon the seas, where the nations are rivals and we cannot live or act apart.’ Before too long, Wilson had gathered a confident sense that this wider ‘field of action’ meant good things for American political institutions, but in mid-1898, he found himself at a puzzling crossroads.1