The Early Days of American Imperialism

"the United States was entering the third year of a war to establish colonial rule in the Philippines, and Howe's rousing vision of a sacred national struggle didn't quite fit the moment. "Mine eyes have seen the orgy of the launching of the Sword," Twain began. "He is searching out the hoardings where the stranger's wealth is stored." The rest of the verses deal in similar substitutions: a bandit gospel for a fiery gospel; instead of truth and God, lust and greed go marching on."

"Twain's satire worked because it exposed the hypocrisies of America's first embrace of an overseas empire at the turn of the 20th century. Advocates of intervention spoke confidently of spreading democracy; Twain and other anti-imperialists answered by holding those professed ideals up against the anti-democratic reality of conquest and violence. This pattern of argument would persist through the Iraq War. The guiding questions were always around what we really believed we were doing in other countries-spreading democracy,"

Mark Twain rewrote Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic" in 1901 to satirize America's turn toward overseas empire, replacing sacred imagery with greed and lust. The satire targeted U.S. conquest in the Philippines and exposed contradictions between professed democratic ideals and anti-democratic realities of violence and subjugation. Anti-imperialists used such contrasts to criticize interventions and questioned whether the United States sought to spread democracy or to exploit foreign peoples for national interests. The pattern of holding stated ideals against actions continued into later conflicts like the Iraq War. Recent events in Venezuela signal a new era in which leaders dispense with democratic pretense.

Read at The Atlantic