Opening a New Frontier
The US Senate has twice decided to make a mighty empire out of the first, and sometimes faltering, modern experiment in Democracy. Both occasions were marked with treaties. The first came with the ratification of a treaty to end the Spanish-American War, which stretched America to the far ends of its bordering oceans with the inclusion of several Pacific and Caribbean island archipelagos. The second came more than a century later, with the refusal to ratify a United Nations treaty to establish a permanent colony on Mars representing all of Earth’s nations.
At both occasions, Senators spoke out against the evils of empire, the impossibility of governing a place so far away (for the Philippines seemed about as far away as Mars in 1898), and the dangers of stretching Uncle Sam too thin, lest he go the way of Romulus and Remus. And at both occasions the perhaps less reasonable but more impassioned cries of American exceptionalism and a growing vision of Manifest Destiny won out.
The emotions of men, it would seem, are better influenced by rhetoric than reason.
When the McKinley administration submitted its peace treaty to the Senate for advice and consent, the debate quickly centered on Spain’s cession of the Philippines and other archipelagos to America. Many Senators voiced concern over the legitimacy of ‘liberating’ the islands from Spanish tyranny only to be quickly under America’s equal control. Some were satisfied with a shift in nomenclature: The Philippines would be an American ‘territory’ or ‘protectorate,’ but never a ‘colony.’ Others held firm as anti-imperialists and said governing a foreign country against its consent was a “despicable violation” of the Declaration of Independence.
Senator George Hoar from Massachusetts was concerned for the safety of American administrators. “We can spill no more American blood on the islands,” he said. But all of the rebellions had been crushed, it seemed, and who would govern if not the American liberators? As one Senator said, “Savages left to themselves do not know liberty.”
Speaking for the first time in the Senate chamber, thirty-seven year old Albert Breckenridge of Indiana earned fame with a single speech. “The Philippines are ours forever,” Breckenridge said. “The flag has never paused in its onward march. Who dares halt it now – now, when history’s largest events are carrying it forward? And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either, or from the mission of our race as trustees under God. He has made us adept in government that we administer government among savages.”
It was settled with a close vote. Fifty-six were needed, two-thirds of eighty-four, and fifty-seven were counted.
Under the nationalist jingoist exceptionalist rhetoric, a dark and pressing economic reality lurked in the subtext. Amidst the turmoil of the 1890s and the recent depression, increasing numbers of Americans demonstrated frustration with the growing economic inequality. Jacob Coxey and his army, and Eugene Debs and his Pullman strikers, assembled and rallied and marched against Teddy Roosevelt’s “malefactors of great wealth,” the robber barons and the exceedingly wealthy. The Framers designed the Senate as a protection against the people’s power for situations like these. Congress’s lower house was to be elected not by the people, but by the states, which was meant to anchor the government against popular fluctuations, the turbulences and follies of democracy. The Framers feared the people for another reason – they were rich and educated, and possessed property, and they knew that most people were not rich, educated, or property-owners. James Madison wrote that, “Those who labor under all the hardships of life will secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings,” and he feared they might soon greatly outnumber those people they might envy, the wealthy. More than half a century before Marx, Madison and the Founders created the Senate as a safeguard against a popular socialist uprising. And at the close of the Spanish-American war, the Senate voted to protect property rights through an unusual method: The opening of a new frontier with the creation of an American empire.
The frontier, with its promise of free land, acts as a pressure release valve to stave away revolution and preserve class inequality. What does it matter if other people are rich, so long as you can find a plot of land and call it your own? Your tiny kingdom, where you reign supreme? And maybe even a launch point for greater things, a place to lay the cornerstone to your own empire of amassed riches and awesome power? Why, yes – other people are rich, but with your plot of land and a plan, you could very soon become one of them. And if not you, then your sons and daughters would surely take their rightful place among the richest of the rich. Your name would be great yet – this is the promise of the American frontier dream. Without the economic energy and pure freedom spirit of the frontier, America’s political and social institutions would stagnate and face increasing internal pressure to become something perhaps unrecognizable, un-American. America must expand or die. Everyone in the large room with the semi-circle of desks facing a dais, everyone seated at the intricately carved desks or observing from the theater seats in the gallery above, could sense it. They could sense it with the Philippines, and they could sense it again with Mars.
And the perceptive Senators could see the logical end to current trends – automation would lead to mass unemployment and growing inequality that would again threaten those property rights the Framers intended the Senate to conserve.
So when a UN treaty was presented before them, they knew it was time for a new frontier. But they saw a problem with the UN treaty – to be a true frontier, the space would have to be uniquely American. The treaty pussyfooted around the 1967 Outer Space Treaty forbidding sovereignty claims on any celestial body and instead structured the colony as a unified planetwide project. Each of the signing countries would support the terraforming effort, and eventually each would send a small number of colonists to the red planet turned green.
Not but one Senator said the word ‘frontier’ or articulated exactly the current economic situation and trends that necessitated a release valve, but a growing number of Senators turned reservationists for one reason or another. Senator John Hill from Iowa voiced concerns about the treaty article that would bind the US to drastic action if any colonist, from any country, was in danger or if the colony needed supplies. “I’d be comfortable spending billions to spare American blood,” he said, “but no other.”
Senator Henley Gibson from Tennessee warned the body about the unequal expenditure of resources to terraform the planet and establish the colony. “The biologic and engineering tech – it’s ours. The rocketry? Ours. They expect us to go to Mars and to bring them with us on our backs.”
Some Senators, like Carl Schurz from Washington, understood the importance of going to Mars and defended the UN proposal as the best possible solution. “We should go to Mars, but we can’t go unilaterally,” he said. “It’s against international law to claim property rights on another planet. And besides – the project of terraforming is too big for us to do alone.”
Senator Jean Carlisle from Ohio took this a step further and pushed for a full-on breach of the treaty. “We must go! Just beyond the red planet are asteroids with illimitable deposits, deposits of nickel, cobalt, and gold. We planted a flag on the moon, but it was a symbolic flag. Let’s plant a real flag on Mars! The treaty will go at some point, why not now? Why let it stop us now, at this crucial moment in history? Let’s plant a flag!”
The debate raged on like this for weeks, with the Senate gallery packed full of spectators watching the greatest debates since the League of Nations was defeated. There appeared to be no end in sight. The Senate seemed in contenance and deportment like a single mind equivocating between two mutually exclusive, yet equally valid, options.
Then Abbott Caro Lodge, a thin and normally quiet Senator from Massachusetts rose to the dais with a giant stack of papers to present his great compromise. All signing countries would cooperate in the terraforming effort and all participant countries would be given a plot of land, a colony site, proportional to their effort. In other words, countries would not be forbidden from engaging in cooperative colonies, an attractive proposition to small nations lacking resources, but neither would they be compelled to cooperate, attractive to big countries like America. The Lodge Amendment would, of course, scrap the old space treaty and allow claims of sovereignty on celestial bodies. At first, only the land plot on Mars would be permitted, but any perceptive analyst could see that this was a huge blow to the treaty’s long term integrity, from which it might not recover.
The Lodge Amendment quickly passed, and the revised treaty was ratified and sent back to the UN. The American Delegate to the UN, Daniel Gilman, made fast work of demonstrating to the body America’s commitment to the Amendment and the necessity for US involvement. The UN debate centered around the 1967 treaty. Among others, England, Israel, and Russia all made impassioned speeches supporting the American position. The substance of their speeches was the same: When the 1967 treaty was written, the space age was in its infancy (neither small steps nor giant leaps yet taken), and the prospect of a permanent planetary outpost was nowhere near realistic. The treaty then was little more than abstract idealism combined with Cold War paranoia. Now, with a real, specific, and concrete proposal before them, the UN delegates had to realize that things were different. And the treaty had to evolve with the times. With only minor aesthetic revisions, the UN treaty passed, Lodge Amendment intact, and humanity was officially headed skyward like never before.