together the movements produced a firm belief that expansion of the American
system brought benefits to conquered and conquerors both. When to these con-
siderations was added the desire to secure foreign markets for American goods
and capital, a desire that increased with advancing industrialization, the temp-
tation to empire grew irresistible.

At the end of the nineteenth century America succumbed. In the war with
Spain the United States acquired an overseas empire, of which the most signifi-
cant part was the Philippine archipelago. Americans took the Philippines for the
same reason men have long taken wives (and women, when given a choice in the
matter, husbands): they were attractive and available. For a decade economic
expansionists had pointed to the islands as a staging area for the penetration of
the China market, and navalists eagerly eyed Philippine harbors and fuel
resources. The fight with Spain, although triggered by events in the Caribbean,
gave these covetous souls an opportunity to grab the Philippines. Grab they did.

The imperialists' coup touched the still-connected anti-imperialist nerve in the
American body politic and set off an impassioned debate over the exportability
of democracy and other American institutions, over America's role in the world
and over the very meaning of the American experiment. The anti-imperialists
lost this round: in 1899 the Senate approved a treaty with Spain annexing the
Philippines to the United States.

But anti-imperialism did not die. If anything it grew stronger as Filipinos dis-
played a violent aversion to American rule, waging an anti-imperial war that
brought out, to a greater degree than most wars, the worst in both sides. By the
time American troops suppressed the resistance, Americans had lost all desire to
extend the American writ further, to find another Philippines. One was plenty.

For nearly half a century the Philippines rested at the fulcrum of America's
ambivalence toward empire. To which side the balance tipped often depended
on who held power in Washington. Republicans usually displayed confidence in
the value, to Americans and Filipinos alike, of American possession of the islands,
and when the party of Lincoln--the irony was lost on neither Democrats nor
Filipinos--controlled the government in Washington the ties binding colony to
metropolis generally stayed tight. Democrats, by contrast, commonly looked on
the colonial relationship as corruptive of both the United States and the Philip-
pines. Retention of the islands, Democrats believed, contradicted American ide-
als and prevented the natural development of Filipino society. Periods of Dem-
ocratic rule normally brought a loosening of imperial bonds, to the point of
independence in 1946.

The situation regarding the Philippines, however, was never quite as straight-
forward as this first approximation suggests. In the United States, special interests
disrespected party lines in lobbying for favored treatment. Philippine legislation
regularly produced unlikely alliances among conservatives and liberals, Repub-
licans and Democrats. Matters were more complicated still in the Philippines,

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