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And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.
– Mark Twain, quoted in the New York Herald, Oct. 15, 19001
Part of the impetus for the American intervention in the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century came from, as President William McKinley himself said, a desire to “civilize and Christianize” the Filipinos.2 Historians of American imperialism have therefore rightly highlighted the religious dimension of support and opposition to Gilded Age expansion, but there remains the need for a study of how American atheists and other freethinkers—those who rejected Christianity—responded to the question of U.S. involvement overseas.3 Historians have charted the anti-imperialist movement in the United States, but they have typically neglected the irreligious motives that led some individuals to oppose expansion.4 An examination of freethinkers’ views about imperialism would respond, in part, to the call of the historian Jeremy Rich, who writes, “[i]f one is to move beyond a hagiographic approach to the history of American religious scepticism, it will be necessary for scholars to find how freethinkers engaged with major issues in American cultural life.”5 Certainly the debates surrounding American imperialism signaled an important moment in American cultural life, as Americans began to contemplate what, if any, their role should be on the global stage.
Mark Twain, the novelist and social commentator, seems an obvious starting point to this investigation. Twain was one of the most prominent critics of American intervention abroad and historians have identified how, at the turn of the century and toward the end of his life, Twain expressed vocal criticisms of Christianity and organized religion. Susan K. Harris's recent book, God's Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898–1902, considers Twain as “the man who embodies the conflicting assumptions held by most white Americans” about the American turn to empire.6 Yet in Harris's reading, the dominant discourse at the turn of the century assumed the superiority of white American Protestants, who had a divine mission to uplift the backward races of the world. At the same time, however, many who believed in this American exceptionalism were confronted with the reality of an American foreign policy that seemed...