June 26, 2010
Congressman Peter Roskam
150 S. Bloomingdale Road, Suite 200
Bloomingdale, IL 60108
Dear Congressman Roskam,
As a former American history teacher, you must know about the American Anti-Imperialist League. In case you are not, it was formed in November, 1898, by patriotic Americans concerned that the US had embarked on a colonial policy in the aftermath of our made up war against Spain launched seven months earlier. After acquiring Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines from a quickly vanquished Spain, Uncle Sam overdosed on the allure of empire and reneged on giving the Filipinos their freedom, inspiring them to revolt and suffer hundreds of thousands of casualties before they bowed to our glorious might. Disgusted with this moral bankruptcy, the American Anti-Imperialist League dedicated its energies to promoting the anti-imperialist message through lectures, public meetings and publications.
I suppose if you were representing Illinois’ Sixth District back then, you would dismiss these folks as the “far left move-on crowd” (no dot com suffix in those days, Congressman), having realized that your Congressional career depended on supporting the military industrial complex of the late nineteenth century, regardless of its waste of treasure and blood. But the folks you would be slamming were the likes of Mark Twain, who when he wasn’t writing some of the greatest literature in American history, served as the League’s Vice President from 1901 to 1910; Carl Schurz, first German born American to serve in the US Senate (and revered enough to have a Chicago High School named after him) and Moorfield, Storey. Mr. Storey, a pitifully unheralded American patriot, was, in addition to being a ferocious opponent of American imperialism, an accomplished lawyer, President of the American Bar Association, and though white, first President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (now that is a resume to aspire to). Other notable members or supporters of the League included industrialist Andrew Carnegie, labor leader Samuel Gompers and social activist Jane Addams.
Another founding League member was Edward Atkinson, a New England cotton mill entrepreneur and head of Boston Insurance Company, who in his spare time, was an ardent abolitionist before becoming an ardent foe of imperialism. Atkinson lobbied the War Department (what a truthful name) for a list of soldiers serving in our murderous occupation of the Philippines in order to send them antiwar writings. Even more inflammatory, Atkinson proposed a law that legislators advocating needless war be immediately conscripted into service of such wars. Senators, commensurate with their lofty status, would become officers, while mere Congressmen (that’s you, Mr. Roskam) would be assigned to command brigades. The direct benefit of such legislation would be to prove the sincerity of aggressive war advocates by their enlistment; and indirectly, to remove such advocates of needless violence from positions of power.
I dwell at length on these forgotten heroes of peace because two centuries later they are sorely missed in our insane atmosphere of endless war that is costing trillions of borrowed dollars and hundreds of thousands of senseless deaths. You should study and then channel these men and women who didn’t view war as an avenue to wealth and endless political power, but as the greatest scourge to mankind and the nobility of what America should stand for. Sadly, they were ignored by the majority of Americans in 1898, intoxicated on the prospect of imperialistic glory. Today the majority is simply too numb to resist your war games in a society rotting away from these self destructive wars as well as the Wall Street banksters who made our wealth disappear in virtual financial schemes, and the myopic oil barons who have unleashed an endless volcano of oil that is surely destroying the Gulf.
Regardless of the damage you have so capably enabled these past forty-one months, there is always opportunity for redemption. Now that you are informed about the nineteenth century Anti-Imperialist League, how about forming one for the twenty-first century. The field to start one is wide open; most of your colleagues are oblivious to its history much less interested in re-creating it. Yet, there is no more important work to be done to reverse the slide of America to third rate status from bankrupting and morally degenerate war. If you need an example of where you are leading America to, just review the Soviet Union’s implosion from unchecked militarism. We watched them self destruct trying to subdue Afghanistan only to take their place in the dunk tank known as the “graveyard of empires”.
And if you spearhead a modern Anti-Imperialist League, you, like Carl Schurz, may get a local high school named after you too.
Respectfully,
Walt Zlotow
IL 6th District Resident
