surveys only the fifty or so years that began with John Brown’s raids in Kansas and Harpers Ferry in the 1850s and ended with the U.S. Army’s defeat of the Philippine independence movement at the dawn of the twentieth century.Kazin doesn't think so. Continue reading here.
Still, the collective bloodshed during that period surpassed that of any similar span in American history: 600,000 combined deaths in the Civil War, followed by hundreds of murders committed by the Ku Klux Klan and other white vigilantes during Reconstruction, multiple assaults by police and state militias to squelch labor uprisings, the military’s crushing of resistance by Indian tribes on the Great Plains, and then the brutal war across the Pacific to secure America’s first overseas colony. Fellman’s grisly narrative, stuffed with self-justifying statements by the perpetrators, certainly establishes a record of inhumanity that most celebrators of American liberty and progress minimize or ignore.
But was all or even most of this violence “terrorism”?
THE WAR LOVERS: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898, by Evan Thomas, and THE IMPERIAL CRUISE: A Secret History of Empire and War, by James Bradley are reviewed today in the New York Times.