CHAPLAIN OF PROGRESS: THE ROLE OF PROGRESS AND EVOLUTION IN LYMAN ABBOTTS JUSTIFICATION FOR AMERICAN EXPANSION IN 1898-1900

CALEB LAGERWEY

HONORS HISTORY THESIS CALVIN COLLEGE GRAND RAPIDS, MI DECEMBER 2012

CONTENTS

I. INTRODUCTION A. Uncle Sam B. The Outlook II. BIOGRAPHY A. Brief Biography B. Abbotts Death III. HISTORIOGRAPHY A. Abbott as Evolution Writer B. Abbott as Political Clergyman C. Abbott as Social Gospel Preacher D. Synthesis IV. IMPORTANCE OF PROGRESS A. Abbotts Context B. Abbotts Writings C. Other, Similar Voices V. PROGRESS AND RELIGION A. Protestant American and Catholic Spain B. Missions and Missionaries C. Other, Similar Voices

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17

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VI. PROGRESS, GENDER, AND RACE A. Darkness and Manliness B. Anglo-Saxons and Civilization C. Self-Government and Barbarism D. Native Americans and African Americans E. Other, Similar Voices VIII. PROGRESS, GOVERNMENT, AND NATIONALISM A. American Democracy B. American Virtues C. American Citizenry D. Other, Similar Voices IX. CONCLUSION

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40

48

Lagerwey 1 Introduction On page seven hundred eleven of the July 23, 1898 issue of the Outlook, there appeared a curious parable. In it, Uncle Sam was strolling through city streets with a young boy and girl when he saw a gang of ruffians mistreating and mugging a helpless child. The boy at Uncle Sams side urged Uncle Sam to intervene, assuring him that victory was assured. The girl was more hesitant, however, and pleaded with Uncle Sam to mind his own business, to avoid injury, and to walk away from the situation altogether. Uncle Sam vacillated briefly, then ran in to help the poor child and, though receiving a bloody nose and tattered clothes, scattered the bullies. Uncle Sam then asked his two companions what he should do with the rescued child. The boy wanted to take the child as a new servant, but the girl again wanted Uncle Sam to leave the child alone. Uncle Sam did neither, telling the children that he had rescued the defenseless child in order to improve his life, not to enslave him or leave him to be attacked again. The girl asked if the child was to be taken home with Uncle Sam, and he deflected the question; the girl asked Uncle Sam if he would force the attackers to compensate him for his ruined clothes, but Uncle Sam refused, insisting that he had money enough to replace his clothing.1 The meaning of this strange story begins to take shape within the larger context of the article, the encapsulating issue, and the contemporary events. The larger article explains that this parable illustrates the position of the Outlook concerning the current crisis of what the United States should do with its new territorial possessions, particularly Cuba.2 The subsequent article, entitled War for Profit, criticized policies of indemnities and claimed that the United States had made war on Spain, not for material gain, but for justice, liberty, and humanity.3 Looking
1 2 3

The Issues Restated, Outlook 59, no. 12 (July 23, 1898): 711. The Issues Restated, 711. War for Profit, Outlook 59, no. 12 (July 23, 1898): 712.

Lagerwey 2 at the first pages of the July 23, 1898 issue that reported global news, the geo-political context for the parable comes into sharper focus: the United States had just captured Santiago, Cuba, during the latest bout of fighting in the Spanish-American War.4 A fierce debate was raging within the United States, raising several questions about the war and its aftermath. Among the foremost of these questions were the following: should the United States have intervened in Spanish territories in the first place, and given that it already had, what should it do with the conquered peoples and territory? 5 This context helps crystalize the editorial comments contained within the story. Uncle Sam, in typical fashion, represented the actions of the nation as a whole, particularly in the synecdoche of President William McKinley. The boy represented the extreme imperialists who sought American domination over foreign territories for aggrandizement and personal gain. The girl stood for the isolationists who eschewed any American intervention in foreign affairs and certainly did not approve of holding or supporting overseas colonies. The poor, helpless child symbolized Cuba in this article, although a larger view of Outlook articles suggests that the child could have been the Filipinos as well, especially when given the applicability of the parable to the situation in the Philippines. The ruffians were Spain, identified by their oppression and exploitation of the helpless victim, Cuba. With the actors identified, the history from the viewpoint of the Outlook takes shape: the United States of America as led by President McKinley and pulled in opposite directions by the two polarities of foreign policy, waited before finally acting in Cuba for the sake of humanity. After soundly defeating the Spanish with minimal casualties, the United States needed to decide

4 5

The Surrender of Santiago, Outlook 59, no. 12 (July 23, 1898): 701. The Issues Restated, 710-711.

Lagerwey 3 what to do with the its newly conquered territories. It chose a moderate positionestablishing protectoratesrejecting the two extremes of exploitive colonization and complete withdrawal. These protectorates served a dual purpose of keeping the countries within the American sphere of progressive civilizing without giving natives the full responsibilities of self-government that would have come with becoming official American territories.6 Another interesting feature of the story is that the rescued child was completely silent throughout the events. Not once was he consulted or given a chance to voice an opinion: rather, the adult in the story, Uncle Sam, decided his fate. The implication was that conquered peoples, as represented by the rescued child, were immature and unready to decide their own fate or to rule themselves. The parable thus taught a paternalist view toward newly conquered groups that needed the civilization of Christian America, whether or not they actually wanted it. This article and the parable it contains is one useful example for examining the thinking of Lyman Abbott, the esteemed minister and the editor of the Outlook from 1876 to 1922. During its peak under Abbotts direction, the Outlook was an exceptionally influential voice of New England Protestantism that spoke to tens of thousands each week through its news columns and editorials. The Outlooks focus on issues of imperialism, nationalism, and race helps to illuminate Abbotts views on issues of progress during that era, and the papers influence therefore shines light on that eras American Protestantism at large. Abbot was the editor-inchief for the Outlook and his hand guided the editorial rudder for the periodical; although he was not the only editor for the Outlook, he was still the controlling member who, after thorough discussion, made the final decision as to the Outlooks position. As one member of the editorial staff was alleged to have remarked, there were many voices at the editorial board meetings,
Benjamin James Wetzel, Onward Christian Soldiers: Lyman Abbotts Justification for the SpanishAmerican War, Journal of Church and State 54, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 422.
6

Lagerwey 4 but only one vote that really mattered.7 Thus, examining Outlook editorials and weekly news summaries can give excellent insight into opinions of Lyman Abbott as a public intellectual. More generally, as other historians have noted, Abbott spoke along with a broader range of liberal and progressive American Protestants, such as Theodore Roosevelt, who advocated empire as a sign of the progress of the United States as a nation under Gods direction, as a way of maintaining its vitality, and as a away of fulfilling its Christian obligations to promote Christian and democratic civilization among less socially and culturally developed peoples. Although the events of the Spanish-American and Filipino-American Wars stretched over several years and involved numerous political decisions, Abbott stayed consistent in his views: Evolution and Progress meant that the United States of America had a benevolent duty and a Providential destiny as a highly evolved and progressive nation to uplift and civilize the nations under its care that were inferior in race, gender, religion, and government. In consistently trumpeting these views, he both reflected and fostered ideas that shaped American policies and attitudes in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. Biography Lyman Abbotts life coincided with the period of great transition for the United States that occurred between the antebellum period and the years after World War I. Born in Roxbury, Massachusetts on December 18, 1835, Abbott was the third of four sons that Jacob and Harriet Abbott would raise, although Harriets death during the birth of Lymans youngest brother Edward in 1843 meant that Lyman grew into his adolescence without a mother. After the attending a college preparatory school run by his Uncle Charles, Abbott enrolled, at the age of
Ira V. Brown. Lyman Abbott, Christian Evolutionist: A Study in Religious Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953): 213. See also Benjamin James Wetzel, A Scourge and Minister: Lyman Abbott, Liberal Protestantism, and American Warfare, 1861-1920. (Masters thesis, Baylor University, 2011): 47. Both Brown and Wetzel assume Abbott hand or approval for most Outlook editorials, a logical assumption, especially when the articles followed similar patterns and contained consistent opinions on related issues.
7

Lagerwey 5 fourteen, in New York University where his older brothers both attended. After graduating, he briefly joined his brothers law firm and married his second cousin Abby Francis Hamlin.8 Soon after, Abbott met the esteemed preacher Henry Ward Beecher, who was the pastor of Brooklyn, New Yorks famous Plymouth Congregational Church. Beecher would gradually become a large influence on Abbotts life and beliefs, and Abbott biographer Ira V. Brown credits Beecher with a crucial role in persuading Abbott to enter the ministry. Subsequently, in March of 1860, after selling his stake in the Abbott brothers law firm and engaging in a selfdirected seminary course that involved correspondence with learned preachers, Lyman Abbott became a licensed minister in the Congregationalist denomination. He spent the years of the American Civil War as the pastor of a Congregationalist church in Terre Haute, Indiana.9 During Reconstruction, Abbott left his Terre Haute congregation and took on a new role as executive secretary for the American Union Commission, an association formed to help refugees of both colors in the post-war South. The organization later changed its name to The American Freedmans Union Commission, and Abbott continued working with it until 1869, when it was disbanded in favor of public institutions of charity. After this work ended, Abbott relied on writing and editing to supply income for his family, publishing several books and editing Harpers Magazine. In 1876, however, he attained a lasting job working as associate editor for the Christian Union with its founder Henry Ward Beecher. Abbott retained that position for the next forty-six years, and it would give him his widest influence and his greatest claim to fame.10

8 9

Brown, Lyman Abbott, 1-11, 16-18.

Brown, Lyman Abbott, 20-23, 25. For extensive coverage of Abbotts views of the American Civil War and the parallels between that war, the Spanish-American War, and World War I, see Wetzel, A Scourge.
10

Brown, Lyman Abbott, 38, 41-42, 48-49, 53, 65-66.

Lagerwey 6 When Abbott joined the journal in 1876, its circulation was less than 15,000, partially because of an adultery scandal that had tarnished Beechers reputation. In October of 1881, Beecher retired from the magazine and named Abbott as his successor.11 Once Beecher passed away in 1887, Abbott also took up Beechers reins by becoming the pastor at the venerable Plymouth Church. In 1893, the Christian Union changed its name to the Outlook, and during that decade, Abbott enjoyed a modestly successful career as the author of two books on evolution, The Evolution of Christianity and The Theology of an Evolutionist, in 1892 and 1898, respectively. Both examined themes of progress and theology, and they helped to establish Abbotts reputation as an intellectual synthesizer. Soon, however, preaching, writing, and editing a rapidly growing weekly proved too much work for Abbott, so he resigned the Plymouth Pulpit in 1899 to focus on his writing and editing. His efforts paid off: in the following years, the Outlook grew in circulation to over 100,000 paid subscribers, and his books sold between five and ten thousand copies each. The Outlook also added former president Theodore Roosevelt to its editorial board in 1909, giving the Outlook twelve Roosevelt articles a year plus additional authority for its masthead.12 Abbott officially parted ways with Roosevelt in 1914 after a disastrous endorsement of Roosevelt for the 1912 presidency tarnished the Outlooks ostensibly non-partisan stance, but the two remained acquaintances and each continued to think highly of the other.13 Years later, in celebration of Lyman Abbotts seventieth birthday, Roosevelt wrote in to the Outlook to express his congratulations and admiration.14
11 12 13 14

Brown, Lyman Abbott, 69, 77, Wetzel, A Scourge, 14-15. Brown, Lyman Abbott, 212-213; Wetzel, A Scourge, 16.

Theodore Roosevelt, Lyman Abbott A Tribute by Theodore Roosevelt, Outlook 132, no. 10 (November 8, 1922): 414-415. The original article from 1905 was initially published privately and later republished after Abbotts death along with other tributes.

Lagerwey 7 The Outlook continued successfully post-Roosevelt, and Abbotts major contributions in later years included a serialized version of his memoirs entitled Reminiscences, in 1915, as well as Silhouettes of My Contemporaries, a 1921 series of mini-biographies of important men that Abbott had known in some fashion during his lifetime. Abbott had a gift for touching the common people when he gave lectures or delivered sermons, but he also moved in high academic, political and intellectual circles as exemplified by his inclusion of figures such as Roosevelt and Beecher. This duality, especially when combined with Abbotts nontraditional theological training, gave him a particular ability to explain and promulgate, rather than innovate.15 As he got older and weaker, Abbotts ability to contribute regularly to the magazine decreased, as did his stamina for public lecturing. He battled respiratory problems for many years, and by late 1922, it was clear that his end was near.16 The latest issue of the Outlook for November 1, 1922 was already partially on the presses when the word arrived at the offices at 361 Fourth Avenue in New York City: Lyman Abbott, who at this point had been editor-in-chief for forty-six years of this widely-read weekly, had passed away in his New York City home at the age of eighty-seven. The editors, who wanted to respect the spirit of their beloved colleague, avoided any departure from the normal course of publication and thus asked their readers for understanding as they wait[ed] until [the] next week to give to his friends, known and unknown, a record of his life and of the tributes which marked his passing.17 The magazine included a brief tribute to Abbot in that issue, but as promised, a great many more articles and paragraphs of tribute appeared in the next issue in

15 16 17

Brown, Lyman Abbott, 235; Wetzel, A Scourge, 16. Brown, Lyman Abbott, 229, 232; Wetzel, A Scourge, 17 Outlook 132, no. 9 (November 1, 1922): 356-359.

Lagerwey 8 November.18 The Outlook devoted fifteen pages in that issue to articles about Abbott and published several long essays in Abbotts honor from close relatives, shorter tributes from friends and past associates, and blurbs from many American press companies.19 These tributes demonstrated the scope and magnitude of Lyman Abbotts influence within American religious and intellectual culture during his long career. Simply glancing at the sources for the tributes gives a sense of his impact: the Outlook re-published a 1915 tribute from former United States president Theodore Roosevelt and it included tributes from eminent newspapers such as the New York Times and the New York Herald. Roosevelt praised Abbott for being one of those men whose work and life give strength to all who believe in this country, and the New York Herald recalled Abbotts ability to convey his valuable opinions to the entire intellectual public.20 During a memorial service later that week, Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin remarked, Measured by the number of people he reached, Dr. Abbott was unquestionably the greatest teacher of religion of this generation.21 Later evaluations of Abbotts life confirmed his influence and widespread appeal. Abbotts one biographer, Ira V. Brown, likewise showcased Abbotts importance through testimonials by the dozen, and added that Abbott directly reached several hundred thousands of people through his work as a minister, lecturer, author, and editor. Abbott was something of a national patriarch by the time of his death, and according to Brown, he was no less than a modern oracle to thousands of follows.22 As preacher at the prestigious Plymouth Avenue
The terms journal and magazine can be used interchangeably for the Outlook since it contained characteristics from both publication formats, as suggested by Wetzel in A Scourge and Minister, 45.
19 20 21 22 18

Outlook 132, no. 10 (November 8, 1922): 404-421. Outlook 132, no. 10 (November 8, 1922): 415. Quoted in Many Honor Memory of Lyman Abbott, New York Times (November 1, 1922). Brown, Lyman Abbott, 240, 2.

Lagerwey 9 Congregationalist Church, Abbott reached hundreds weekly though his sermons. He also spoke at many colleges around the country, published books that sold between five and ten thousand copies, and edited the Outlook that, at its peak, sold about 125,000 copies a week.23 The paper was therefore a prominent news source for Protestant ministers and laypeople all over the United States. As Brown explained, Abbott was not famous for his innovation or invention in the intellectual realmhe possessed an extraordinary ability to see which way the wind was blowing, and he seldom attempted to beat against itbut rather for his ability to spread ideas.24 Abbott was a quintessential Gramscian organic intellectual who communicated and legitimated ideas from intellectual and political elites to the literate masses, in this case, middle and upper class Anglo-Protestants.25 Even before Browns biography, William Warren Sweet, in his book on influential American Christians, echoed this sentiment, writing that [Abbott] possessed that ability, amounting almost to genius, of appraising and setting forth the findings of scholars, and in applying them in a practical way. Sweet also claimed that no religious leader in modern America [had] exercised a more abiding influence than [had] Lyman Abbott and that under Abbotts direction, the Outlook was soon recognized as one of the most influential journals in America.26 Abbotts moderate distillation of complex ideas to a general public thus provides a useful method of insight into Americas intellectual and cultural milieu during the SpanishAmerican and Philippine-American Wars.
23 24 25

Brown, Lyman Abbott, 117-119, 140. Brown, Lyman Abbott, 234.

Antonio Gramsci, The Formation of the Intellectual, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001), 1138-1143. William Warren Sweet. Makers of Christianity: From John Cotton to Lyman Abbott. (New York: Henry Holy and Company, 1937): 333, 320, 326.
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Lagerwey 10 Historiography The amount of scholarly literature that devotes serious attention to Lyman Abbott is disproportionately low given the extraordinary influence attributed to him both by both his peers and from later commentators. In addition, while scholars have recognized Abbotts importance in several specific areas, until recently, they have failed to do serious study of his writings and influence or to begin a synthesis of his writings and theology. After the period immediately surrounding his death, Abbott was primarily mentioned in church history literature, occupying a chapter in Sweets aforementioned book on important leaders in American Christianity.27 Once personal memories of Abbott began to fade, historians began to examine him in three broad categories. The first position explored Lyman Abbott as a reconciliator par excellence between evolution and liberal Christianity. The second showcased his political thinking, often focusing on the three major wars that the United States was involved in during his lifetime, namely the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and World War I. In the early 1990s, in conjunction with the rise of history that dealt with historically marginalized groups, the third position dealt with Abbotts role with the Social Gospel and racial issues, particularly since Abbott was a self-proclaimed defender of rights for peoples under the care of the United States whom he considered to be underdeveloped. The evolutionary approach emerged in the post-World War II era: it was in 1953 that Abbotts first and only full-length biography appeared, written by Ira V. Brown and entitled Lyman Abbott: Christian Evolutionist; A Study in Religious Liberalism.28 This biography is crucial in its synthesis of sources that chronicle Abbotts life, but as others have noted, it lacks a

27 28

Sweet, Makers, 320-333. Brown, Lyman Abbott.

Lagerwey 11 clear thesis and only deals with Abbotts nationalism and political influence in passing. As the title suggests, Brown was more interested in Abbott as a church figure and thus as an archetype for Christian liberalism.29 Brown also wrote two journal articles discussing Abbott, Lyman Abbott: Christian Evolutionist and Lyman Abbott and Freedmens Aid, 1865-1869. The former was simply a precursor to the biography and thus addressed the same issues, and the latter detailed Abbotts work for education reform in the South during Reconstruction.30 The first is useful in outlining Abbotts evolutionary thinking, and the second takes an occasional glance at Abbotts racial views, but they both still lacked a larger synthesis about Abbotts opinions and did not include his political reasoning. A 2008 article by Mark A. Kalthoff discussed Abbotts role in synthesizing Christian faith with evolutionary science along with preacher Henry Ward Beecher and scientist Joseph LeConte. This article highlighted importance of an evolutionary worldview for Abbott, though again its focus and length prevented a more thorough synthesis with politics or foreign affairs.31 This essay seeks to build on the work of Brown, Kalthoff, and others to sketch out a more complete picture of Lyman Abbott, particularly his evolutionary thinking, which provides a helpful way to connect the various topics that consistently marked his writing. Particularly useful in the study of evolutionary thinking during the fin de sicle is the 1945 book by Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915. In it, Hofstadter outlined the process by which Darwins theories about survival of the fittest were

29 30

Wetzel, A Scourge, 3.

Ira V. Brown, Lyman Abbott: Christian Evolutionist, New England Quarterly 23, no. 2 (June 1950): 218-231; Ira V. Brown, Lyman Abbott and Freedmens Aid, 1865-1869, The Journal of Southern History 15, no. 1 (February 1949): 22-38. Mark A. Kalthoff, Optimistic Evolutionist: The Progressive Science and Religion of Joseph LeConte, Henry War Beecher, and Lyman Abbott, Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith 60, no. 2 (June 2008): 84-94.
31

Lagerwey 12 taken from their ostensibly neutral position in the biological world and applied vigorously to the social realm: different branches of thought came out of Darwins writing, and many of them included scientifically-informed laymen such as Lyman Abbott, who sought to apply evolution to Americas dealings with foreign peoples. Despite recognizing that Abbott was influential, Hofstadter included but a few sentences about Abbott, preferring to keep his argument about original thinkers, not popularizers such as Abbott. This essay will supplement Hofstadter by focusing on Abbott and then synthesizing Abbotts views on evolution with political views on imperialism. 32 It will also show that the evolutionary thought articulated by Abbott and people who thought like him was less influenced by Darwin than other strains of nineteenth century evolutionary thought. The second substantial category of literature about Abbott began to appear around the same time. A 1940 dissertation at the University of Chicago entitled The American Churches and the Spanish-American War covered some of Abbotts foreign policy views during that time period, although Abbott was one clergyman among many treated in the paper.33 Another dissertation from Messiah College in 1964, American Christian Thinkers and the Function of War, 1861-1920, looked at the three wars of note during Abbotts lifetime and mentioned Abbott occasionally, although again he was included as one among contemporary voices.34 A 1973 article by Winthrop S. Hudson on clergy and the nation in Church History is perhaps the best example of how Abbott could illuminate a popular movement in American society, though
Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1945). Hofstadter does have a chapter on evolution and imperialism, but while it does provide useful insights into general use, it fails to mention Abbotts important influence. William Archibald Karraker, The American Churches and the Spanish-American War (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1940). Darrel E. Bigham, American Christian Thinkers and the Function of War, 1861-1920 (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1970).
34 33 32

Lagerwey 13 Hudson also limited any detailed analysis of Abbott by placing him alongside other preachers of the day.35 The 2011 dissertation by Matthew McCullough gave scholars a recent example of political writing that included Abbott among fellow clergy, covering some of Abbotts religious and political views on the Spanish-American War from the perspective of Civil Religion [and] Messianic Interventionism. But, since its purpose was more political than social, evolution does not make an appearance in the study.36 All four studies are useful building blocks for the historians interested in Abbott and his thinking, but their broad foci precluded any in-depth study of Abbotts views. What their topics do suggest, however, is the clear influence that Protestant clergy enjoyed during Abbotts time: the existence of numerous studies of clerical thought and of its influence on public policy during that era lends creditability to the influence of a popular minister such as Lyman Abbott. In more recent years, other historians have paid attention to the role of clergy in politics during the era of the Spanish-American War, although some have neglected Abbott, even when he would have been an ideal example for their approach. For instance, Susan K. Harris 2011 study Gods Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902, while very useful in framing the view of Christians in the United States toward the Philippines, failed to mention Abbott at all and only quotes the Outlook once despite using other Christian periodicals of the time.37 Andrew Preston, in his 2012 book on the influence of religion on warfare and diplomacy in the United
Winthrop S. Hudson, Protestant Clergy Debate the Nations Vocation, 1898-1899, Church History 42:1 (March 1973): 110-118. Matthew McCullough, My Brother's Keeper: Civil Religion, Messianic Interventionism, and the Spanish-American War of 1898 (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2011). Other useful studies that examine Abbotts wartime rhetoric during the later World War I include Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003) and Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms: The Role of the American Churches and Clergy in the World War I and II, with some Observations on the War in Vietnam, rev. ed. (Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1969). Susan K. Harris, Gods Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines, 1898-1902 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
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Lagerwey 14 States mentions the scope of Abbotts influence. Prestons overall thesis is that religion has played a large role in politics and diplomacy simply because so many Americans believed in it and its applicability to politics and policy, including international relations and foreign policy as to force diplomatic elites to make allowances for and adjustments to sentiment from below, even when they wanted to ignore popular opinion and pursue their own policy.38 Preston then devoted several paragraphs to Abbotts political views, remarking that Abbotts position on the Spanish-American was particularly striking and worth examination because he was one of the most influential journalists of the time, thus showing the effects on foreign policy Lyman Abbott had during the time.39 This study will build on the work done by Preston, Hudson, and McCullough by synthesizing politics with theology and social evolutionary theory. Equally important to Abbotts thinking were ideas about gender. In the Summer/Fall 2010 edition of Fides et Historia, Colin B. Chapell provided a thorough synthesis of Abbotts views on religion, gender, race, and self-government. His work built some of its commentary on gender on Kristin L. Hogansons book Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. Hoganson does not mention Abbott directly, but Chapell convincingly shows the trends she highlights existed in Abbotts writings as well.40 The same goes for Gail Bedermans Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917: Bederman argues that issues of masculinity and race were intertwined during the Progressive era, and Chapell again directly
38 39

Preston, Sword, 9.

Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012): 214. Colin B Chapell, The Third Strand: Race, Gender, and Self-Government in the Mind of Lyman Abbott, Fides et Historia 42, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2010): 27-54; Kristin L. Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
40

Lagerwey 15 connects her ideas to Abbott. The present essay owes much to Chapell and will incorporate his excellent work on race and gender into Abbotts framework of evolutionary change during the events covered in Hogansons book. The third area of literature about Lyman Abbott is connects him to the Social Gospel movement. Ralph E. Lukers The Social Gospel in Black and White as well as Ronald C. White' Jr.s Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel, both from the early 1990s, criticized Abbott and those like him in the Social Gospel movement who, though wellintentioned at times, helped to perpetuate Black disenfranchisement in the American South through insisting that Blacks could earn the right to vote as a race only when they had proven themselves to be intellectually and socially civilized according to Protestant, white standards. Luker and White helped expand on the ideas of race in Chapells article, but since politics was not particularly pertinent to their topics, they did not discuss Abbotts wartime writings. They both briefly mentioned the idea of Social Darwinism, but neither connected Abbott to evolution or evolution to Cuba or the Philippines, as this essay will do.41 In addition to Chapells article, other recent explorations into Abbotts thinking have been more successful in both covering his political views and in integrating multiple avenues of approach.42 Among them is the excellent 2011 masters thesis by Benjamin Wetzel, entitled, A Scourge and Minister: Lyman Abbott, Liberal Protestantism, and American Warfare, 1861-

Ralph E. Luker, The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885-1912 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1991); Ronald C. White,, Jr. Liberty and Justice for All: Racial Reform and the Social Gospel (1877-1925) (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990); Abbott is also mentioned in Robert R. Roberts, The Social Gospel and the Trust-busters, Church History 25, no. 3 (September 1956): 239-257, but his article is not particularly germane to this paper.
42

41

Chapell, The Third Strand.

Lagerwey 16 1920.43 Wetzel explores Abbotts thinking in careful detail, arguing that Abbotts conflation of the secular and the sacred was a major factor in his views on the three major American wars during his lifetime. This conflation happened in four areas, all of which Abbott applied to the Spanish-American War era. The first and second were political matters: Abbott was convinced that God had called the United States of America to a special role as his chosen people, giving them an historical mission to bring American liberty to other peoples who lacked the political freedom and true Christianity (Christian republicanism) of the United States.44 The third and fourth were more spiritual and cultural: Americans had a calling to bring Christianity and Christian civilization to formerly Spanish territories in order to move closer to the imminent Kingdom of God. Wetzel does a thorough job of incorporating Abbotts theology and politics with biography, and his final argument about the Kingdom of God suggests a progressive view of history that this essay will tie in with Abbotts writings on evolution. Historians have only recently begun to give Abbott his due attention and importance. Building on this modest but growing body of scholarship, this paper will explore the evolutionary mindset further and tease out its implications for the other reasons behind Abbotts support for the war.45 It will make notable use of Ira V. Browns book, which remains the

Benjamin James Wetzel, A Scourge and Minister: Lyman Abbott, Liberal Protestantism, and American Warfare, 1861-1920. (Masters thesis, Baylor University, 2011); see also Wetzels accompanying article that covers roughly the same material as his thesis third chapter: Benjamin James Wetzel, Onward Christian Soldiers: Lyman Abbotts Justification for the Spanish-American War, Journal of Church and State 54, no. 3 (Summer 2012): 406-425.
44 45

43

Wetzel, A Scourge and Minister, 76.

Beyond the major works noted above, other studies briefly mention Abbott or the Outlook. Notable examples of works that briefly reference Abbott directly or indirectly through the Outlook include Oscar M. Alfonso, Theodore Roosevelt and the Philippines, 1897-1909 (New York: Oriole Editions, Inc., 1974); Donald K. Gorrell, The Age of Social Responsibility: The Social Gospel in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920 (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1988); David Healy, US Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the 1890s (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970); William R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); Julius W. Pratt, Expansionists of 1898: The Acquisition of Hawaii and the Spanish Islands (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1959); Ronald C. White, Jr., The Social Gospel:

Lagerwey 17 greatest source of biographic detail because of Browns unique access to what limited written diaries and letters Abbott left behind. What still remains to historians is Abbotts extensive public writings in books, sermons, pamphlets, and the Outlook. The goal of this paper is not to add grand discoveries to Abbotts biography or even to any of one of these categories of inquiry; rather, this paper seeks to further the synthesis of the approaches that started in the late 2000s. Thus, this paper will not break entirely new ground, but will supplement the existing literature by synthesizing separate sources and shedding new light on Abbott himself by using his evolutionary thought to show the connection between the diverse component he passionately defended and promoted in the Outlook, sermons, and books. Importance of Progress The evolutionary worldview, particularly as articulated in social terms, pervaded much intellectual thought during the 1890s, especially among liberal Protestant clergy such as Lyman Abbott. Historian Richard Hofstadter details the rise of Social Darwinism, the social offshoot of evolution, as the liberalization of theology opened previously unquestionable tenets of belief to influence from science. Liberal leaders, who as a part of the Social Gospel movement took aim at the perceived evils of an industrialized nation, also took hope from evolution because its ideas of progress to higher levels of being confirmed the eventual success of their mission: social reform was a part of an inevitable progress toward a better order on earththe Kingdom of God. Highly respected liberal clergymen Walter Rauschenbusch, Washington Gladden, and Francis Greenwood Peabody as well as Lyman Abbott all wrote about the importance of having an evolutionary framework when dealing with world issues. They also spoke on the reconciliation of evolution to Christianity to maintain the cultural authority of American
Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976). All of these have their uses in framing the issues surrounding Abbott, but most give him a cursory mention.

Lagerwey 18 Protestantism. In an age where sciences reputation grew yearly, Abbott and his fellow liberal clergy had a personal investment in explaining religion in evolutionary terms, for if they failed, their voices would cease to carry cultural gravitas.46 An important part of this system of thinking for moderates like Lyman Abbott was civilizations gradual progress through struggle. They saw evolution as a way to explain social progress on a grand scale, but they departed from the teaching of Herbert Spencer since they also thought change would not happen through laissez-faire survival of the fittest, but rather through a mediated program of controlled and inclusive progress. Theirs was still a conservative reform movement since it argued that the United States should neither stagnate as suggested by more conservative clergy nor undergo radical change as advocated by some socialist ministers; rather, reform, though inevitable and desirable, needed to come slowly and gradually.47 Abbotts pulpit and literary career were no exceptions to his focus on evolutions applicability, and he turned science toward religious, social, and political theory. Like his Plymouth Church predecessor Henry Ward Beecher, Abbott was preacher, not a scientist, who nevertheless wrote several widely read books reconciling evolution and Protestant theology. The Evolution of Christianity appeared in 1892, followed by Christianity and Social Problems and The Theology of an Evolutionist in 1897.48 The books were intended to bring the words and thoughts of Christian scholars [and to] correlate and interpret them for the non-scholastic and

46 47

Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 11-16.

Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 88, 86-88. It is difficult to place Abbotts belief system precisely within the complicated scholarship regarding evolution and Social Darwinism. For the purposes of this essay, evolution is primarily the type as defined and articulated by Abbott himself. Lyman Abbott, Christianity and Social Problems (1897, repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1899); The Evolution of Christianity (1892, repr., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1900); The Theology of an Evolutionist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1897).
48

Lagerwey 19 non-professional reader. 49 All three books outlined Abbotts espousal of evolutionary change throughout human history and formed the foundation for Abbotts eventual support for the Spanish-American War. He was tenacious in his beliefs about evolution, and where others rejected science to hold on to rigid doctrine, Abbott instead sought to convince Americans that the new theories about evolution were compatible with the Christian faith.50 Abbott was even willing to be flexible in his theology and to restate the principles of the Christian life in terms of an evolutionary philosophy.51 Abbotts basic arguments about evolution also objected to the atheism of some evolutionary theorists, and Abbott was quick to announce that he was not an atheistic materialist. Rather, he was an evolutionist in the style of Joseph LeConte since he defined evolution as continuous progressive change by means of resident forces, as the orderly development of life from lower to higher forms, and as the doctrine of growth applied to life.52 This view of evolution was a complicated amalgam of Lamarkian theory, [natural] selection, and vitalism meant to be a worldview applied to all areas of life.53 Although as a minister Abbott did not claim to be an expert in biology, he thought that he as a minister ought to be a special student of the moral life and thus oughtto be able to pass judgment on the question whether and how far evolution explains the history of progress by which the individual man, his literature, his history,
49 50

Abbott, The Theology, vi-vii.

Dawn M. Digrius, The Un-Heretical Christian: Lynn Harold Hough, Darwinism and Christianity in 1920s America, Methodist History 49, no. 4 (July 2011): 223-224.
51 52 53

Abbott, The Evolution, 4-5. Abbott, The Evolution, 3, 9; Abbott, The Theology, iii, 176.

Kalfthoff, Optimistic, 89. This Lamarckianism meant that inferior peoples could still adapt and rise to equal level with the more advanced peoples of the earth, although that process would take a long time. For more on Lamarck applied to racial evolution, see Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980): 141.

Lagerwey 20 his social and political organisms, have come to be what they areThe result of my study has been a conclusion, very gradually formed, that the history of that process is best expressed by the world evolutionAnd this opinion has been confirmed by Bible study.54 This substantiated view was extremely important for Abbott, for it gave him the self-assurance to preach and teach many people about his particular view of evolutionary progress as applied to many different areas of life. This continuous, orderly progress was the result of hard-fought battles similar to Darwins ideas of natural selection, but Abbott was convinced of the eventual victory that would culminate in the Kingdom of God through the work of God. He saw the hand of God at work in historyhistory was the interpreter of Gods redeeming workand with LeConte saw the resident forces in nature as God.55 Even the horrors of a World War could not dampen his insistent theme of inevitable progress. In The Twentieth Century Crusade (1918), Abbott argued: He who believes that history is anything more than merely a series of accidental happenings, who believes that there is any continuity and coherence in history, who believes in any ordered social evolution, should find it difficult to believe that this march of the century toward liberty will be haltedHe who believes that God is in his world, that above all earthly plan and purposes there is One who gives to his children their ideals and inspires them with their courage, and that history is in very truth the working out of his plan for his children, will find despair for the world impossible.56 Abbott later praised the American democracy for its Christian combination of patient waiting coupled with high endeavor that both trusted Gods plan for its national history while realizing
54 55

Abbott, The Theology, 8.

Lyman Abbott, The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth: A Sermon Preached at the Diamond Jubilee of the Congregational Home Missionary Society, Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass., May 14, 1901 (Boston: The Congregational Home Missionary Society, 1901): 8; Abbott, The Evolution, 8; Lyman Abbott, America in the Making (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911): 43. Lyman Abbott, The Twentieth Century Crusade (New York: MacMillan Co., 1918): 99. It is interesting to contrast Theodore Roosevelts disillusion after WWI with Abbotts continued belief in progress, particularly because Roosevelt lost his son Quentin in the war, whereas Abbotts son Theodore served and survived.
56

Lagerwey 21 its calling to action to avoid decay. 57 God is making America, declared Abbott, but God works through men, [so] if America is to be made, it must be made by Americans.58 Thus, when Abbott addressed contemporary social problems and called for Christian action, he was both preaching a jeremiad for action and against decline as well as a hopeful message of assured victory. In this, Abbott was a quintessential American Protestant for his time, echoing historian Andrew Prestons observation that Christians in the United States at that time believed in a progress that meant the general improvement of society as well as balancing personal freedom with social obligation that led to overseas mission[s] to reform the worldthough sometimesat the barrel of a gun.59 Abbotts views on evolution can therefore be seen as a driving force behind his desire for the progress in religion, humanity, and government that would help to justify the United States actions in the Spanish-American War. Abbott fostered these ideas in his readers, but his thinking built on and reflected the theories of other thinkers from that era who also used evolutionary ideas to justify American expansion. One such writer was John Fiske (1842-1901), a popular writer of history and philosophy who often synthesized Darwinism and history. Fiske argued in the pages of Harpers New Weekly Magazine that history showed how Darwins laws of survival of the fittest and natural adaptation governed relations between people groups as humanity continuously civilized and industrialized in ways that coincide[d] precisely with that of the doctrine of

Abbott, The Evolution, 8; Lyman Abbott, The Rights of Man: A Study in Twentieth Century Problems (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1901): 359-360; Abbott, America, 41. Several other authors also commented on Abbotts optimism: see Hutchison, The Modernist, 186; From the New York Times, Outlook 132, no. 10 (November 8, 1922): 417.
58 59

57

Abbott, America, 4. Preston, Sword, 13.

Lagerwey 22 evolution.60 Future President Theodore Roosevelt also wrote on similar topics, arguing that the America needed to expand in order to keep its national vitality, for a race must be prolific, [since] there is no curse so great as the curse of barrenness.61 Nothing less than evolutionary survival was at the forefront of Roosevelts thinking as he delivered numerous speeches, arguing that the United States must be strong and vigorouselse its wisdom will come to naught and its virtue be ineffective.62 A final example of popular evolutionary thought was the Reverend Josiah Strong, author of the best-selling book Our Country, who, like Fiske and Roosevelt, argued for an expanding America: human progress follows a law of development, Strong thought, and the United States was clearly the consummation of human progress.63 Seen in this context, Abbott represents one important, thought not unique, voice in articulating the importance of evolutionary thinking on the issues of his day. Progress and Religion Evolutions idea of change over time applied to Christianity as well, so Abbott was a constant advocate for the progressive, liberal Christianity called the New Theology by its supporters. Since Christianity needed to be constantly adapting to fit with scientific and social advances, it could not rest on theological tradition and declare Gods revelation to be complete.64 Abbott placed evolution upon a pedestal above most of the traditional doctrine of his time,
John Fiske, Manifest Destiny, Harpers New Monthly Magazine 70 (March, 1885): 578. For more on Fiskes evolutionary thinking, see Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 151-153. Theodore Roosevelt, Social Evolution, in vol. 13 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1926): 226. Theodore Roosevelt, The Duties of American Citizenship in vol. 13 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1926): 281. For more on Roosevelt, see Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 151-169 and Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race, 141. Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Current Crisis, rev. ed. (New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1891): 216. For more on Strong, see Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009): 108-109.
64 63 62 61 60

Abbott, The Evolution, 4.

Lagerwey 23 arguing that evolution invalidated the traditional notions about the historical Fall and Biblical infallibility. To Abbott, being modern and scientific seemed to be a more worthy goal than preserving orthodoxy for its own sake.65 This first of all allowed his evolutionary framework to influence all areas of his life without any orthodox religious compunction. Another significant example of Abbotts evolutionary thought as applied to Christian theology was his rejection of original sin. Evolutions suggestion that humanity grew out of lesser forms and lesser animals suggested to Abbott that there was no original state of goodness from which humanity fell in the Garden of Eden. Rather, he regarded human sin as an atavism, a reversion to animalism.66 Abbott thought that all people still had within them a part of their beastly past, and that life was a struggle against that beast on behalf of the sons of God that humans were called to be. The same applied to Christianity: the Christian faith still contained traces of its pagan roots, and true Christians needed to struggle to purify the faith from trace influences from its pagan past.67 Abbott thus could justify moral crusades against forms of Christianity he deemed to be archaically pagan. Roman Catholicism in particular drew Abbotts ire because of its unwillingness to modernize according to his standards; the fact that Americas enemy, Spain, was Roman Catholic thus gave Abbott one type of ammunition for his moral crusade during the war. He identified Roman Catholicism with the Roman Empire, contrasting Roman government for the sake of the governors with the Hebraic commonwealth that progressed throughout history to become the American democracy of his time in which government existed for the good of the

See, for example, Lyman Abbott, The Need of a New Theology, The American Journal of Theology 1, no. 2 (April 1897): 460-464.
66 67

65

Hutchison, The Modernist, 186. Abbott, The Theology, 31-49; Abbott, The Evolution, 7-9.

Lagerwey 24 governed.68 Spain also demonstrated its inferior religion through its military failures: after Spains sound defeat at the hands of the United States at the naval battle of Santiago on July 3, 1898, Abbott reasoned the victory came from Americas commitment to education and liberty. The Spanish, by contrast, lived under ecclesiastical imperialism as embodied by the Inquisition and the Spanish Armada and thus their failures during the war provedhow utterly Spain had failed to keep up with the progress of the age by keeping its found[ation] on the Inquisition and on the duty of common men to accept without question the thought of their superiors.69 Abbotts coverage of this event clearly demonstrated his religious, evolutionary hierarchy: the Roman Catholic Church, with its repression of religious and social liberty, was holding the entire nation of Spain back from progressing as a whole, keeping Spain a second-rate power. Abbott criticizing Spain for failing to read the Scriptures properly or to civilize their country with advanced infrastructure, both of which were part and parcel of an advanced, Christian civilization like the United States, for where the open Bible has gone, just in that ratio the civilization has gone [and] where there has been no Bible, there has been no civilization.70 In Abbotts judgment, because the Spaniards still left the Bible half open, and the country half light and half dark, they invalidated their rights to govern the colonies of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Philippines.71 During the war, Abbott asked rhetorically, Shall the Spanish or the American idea prevail?the free and progressive civilization of the Anglo-Saxon, or the sterility

Lyman Abbott, International Brotherhood Applied to the Conduct of the United States in the Philippines, Outlook 61, no. 15 (April 15, 1899): 866.
69 70

68

Abbott, The Rights, 28; Santiago, Outlook 59, no. 10 (July 9, 1898): 610.

Lyman Abbott, The Secret and the Revealed Things, in The Life That Really Is (Brooklyn, NY: R.G. Brown Publishers, 1898): 6.
71

Abbott, The Secret, 6.

Lagerwey 25 and decay of the Spaniard?72 That quote brings up additional justifications for American intervention that this paper will discuss later, but it also clearly demonstrated Abbotts firm belief in his advancing/decaying dichotomy in comparing the two countries and their respective religions.73 Abbotts analysis left little doubt as to which was the most progressed governmental form, and by linking Spain with Roman Catholicism and the Roman Empire, he was sending a clear message that Spain was evolutionarily left in the ancient past; America and its Protestant democracy was advanced and the fittest form of government and religion. Historians Andrew Preston explains: American Protestants associated their faith with the hallmarks of material progressand with a general improvement of society.74 Therefore, since the Spanish had been left behind in the evolutionary progress of Christianity, they forfeited any right they had to help improve less advanced societies. In the April 23, 1898 edition of the Outlook, an editorial entitled Why War? gave a list of grievances against Spain on behalf of Cuba that mirrored the colonists complaints in the Declaration of Independence. For Abbotts readers, the connection would have been clear: a nation forfeited the right to govern over other peoples when it abused its charges and failed to secure their rights and liberties.75 Only a progressive and evolutionarily advanced nation of civilized Protestants such as the United States could be entrusted with the noble task of helping to advance others since they had first properly progressed themselves and could now fully safeguard liberty and rights for others as well.

72 73

The Presidents Speech, Outlook 58, no. 6 (April 16, 1898): 953.

Abbotts distaste for Catholics led him, like many of his time, to largely discount the Catholics in America and to homogenize America into a Protestant nation. See, for example: Preston, Sword, 12-14.
74 75

Preston, Sword, 12-13. Why War? Outlook 58, no. 17 (April 23, 1898): 1004-1005.

Lagerwey 26 This dismissal of the legitimacy of Roman Catholic Christians gave Abbott and others like him another, higher reason to intervene on behalf of Spains benighted colonies. United State control over Cuba and the Philippines would mean an opportunity to Christianize the Filipinos in the correct, Protestant tradition despite their pre-existing Catholic faith. In a sermon preached on April 3, 1898, Abbott declared that the war would only be just if the United States entered it that [it] may set a people free for their own Christian development.76 This religious liberty formed an important part of Abbotts political reasoning, explored later in this paper, but the Christian development was an important part of evolutionary theological progress: for it was only if Cubans and Filipinos gradually became Protestants that they could rise out of archaic Catholicism that had so long held them back under Spanish rule. It was up to American missionaries to carry out this task: Abbott insisted that Americans were an elected people of God uniquely called to be a light to the nations of the world and a salvation for all humanity.77 This echoing of John Winthrop was one form of evolutionary justification, but Abbotts espousal of Christian missions carried with it a subtler form of progress. As Andrew Preston explains, American missions were inherently progressive since almost by definition, missionaries were expansionists; many were also nationalists.78 Christianity by its very evangelical nature sought to bring all peoples and nations together under the banner of the Kingdom of God, and Abbott saw the growth of American Protestantism as a key instrument of advancement toward that Kingdoms consummation.79 Preston also mentions

Lyman Abbott, The Meaning of the War, in The Life That Really Is (Brooklyn, NY: R.G. Brown Publishers, 1898): 10.
77 78 79

76

Lyman Abbot, Problems of Life (New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1900): 91. Preston, Sword, 132. Abbott, Christianity, 30.

Lagerwey 27 the cosmopolitan vision of Christianity that for Protestant missionaries [meant] a globalist, expansionist mindset [that] was deeply ingrained because of the simple fact of theirinherently expansive faith, territorially, demographically, and ideologically. Protestant missionaries were some of the earliest advocates for American interventionism that overturned traditional notions of isolationism in the name of Christian charity.80 For Abbott, this pattern appeared in 1896 with calls for involvement in the conflict between Turks and Armenians and later with the initial hints of the Cuban crisis to come as rebel groups began another uprising against their Spanish colonizers. Abbott later reflected that the right, the duty, of a strong nation to interfere for the protection of the weak, oppressed, and suffering people [first] burned itself into the heart of America, though the story of Armenian outrages and subsequently lead to American intervention after the release of the Proctor report that detailed Spains abuse of the Cubans.81 It was not enough for the advanced Protestant Christians to rest on their laurels; to Abbott, they had a responsibility to uplift the poor and oppressed wherever they could. This call to intervention for the sake of humanity helped to coalesce American support for intervention in Cuba. Preston argues that the clear humanitarian crisis and Americas subsequent impulse to intervene was actually the greatest, decisive factor in bringing the United States into conflict with Spain, and Abbotts reasons fall into line with this theory.82 When justifying possible invention in Cuba in April of 1898, Abbott wrote It isa Christian duty to accept the sword Excalibur, when divine Providence puts it into our hands, for the whole world belongs to the Christian who cannot abandon part of the world, but rather must

80 81

Preston, Sword, 181.

Lyman Abbott, The Armenian Question, Outlook 54, no. 23 (December 5, 1896): 1036-1038; What To Do About Cuba, Outlook 53, no. 6 (February 8, 1896): 234; Abbott, The Rights, 258.
82

Preston, Sword, 211.

Lagerwey 28 take the world and consecrate [it] to the service of God.83 Abbott later reflected in his Reminiscences that the real occasion of the [Spanish-American] War was the report of Senator Proctor, of Vermont, on the conditions which he found exiting in the island; it aroused in the country a storm of humanitarian indignation which proved irresistible.84 As a member of the Social Gospel movement at home, Abbott was impatient with those whose faith did not produce action, as is evident in his book Christianity and Social Problems. Likewise, his ideals of progress fit right in with support of foreign missions, for American Protestant missions werean international extension of the Social Gospel, itself a faith-based wing of the Progressive. 85 Although more of Abbotts humanitarianism came from civic principles of government than explicitly religious language, the two were often the same, and both came from his evolutionary worldview. Progressivism, missions, and imperialism all originated from a similar source in the American imagination: a belief in progress, he argued. Consequently, only Protestants from the United States could properly direct since their ideas alone were both American and Christian.86 His justification for intervention did not end with religious rhetoric, however, since Abbott was a firm believer in extending lessons on progress from domestic issues to those in foreign lands. Abbott was not alone in his use of evolution in religion and religiously inspired politics, for many other popular writers melded together ideas of Protestant supremacy with American

The Presidents Message, Outlook 58, no. 16 (April 16, 1898): 953; Conquering the World, Outlook 59, no. 7 (June 18, 1898): 417-418.
84 85 86

83

Abbott, Reminiscences, 437. Preston, Sword, 211; 177. Preston, Sword, 180; Brown, Lyman Abbott, 203.

Lagerwey 29 expansionism. John Fiske was an important voice in this area. He gave a speech Manifest Destiny, originally published in Harpers New Monthly Magazine in 1885, over twenty times across the United States. In it, Fiske argued that conflicts between England, France, and Spain pitted Protestantism against Catholicism and Englands eventual triumph proved Protestantisms higher and sturdier political life that was clearly destinedto take the lead in the world.87 Reverend Josiah Strong also added his voice, remarking that Protestantism was a pure spiritual Christianity coming from the highest Christian civilization that divinely commissioned [an adherent] to be, in a particular sense, his brothers keeper.88 Strong later wrote: Surely, to be a Christianand an American in this generation is to stand on the very mountain-top of privilege.89 Beyond Fiske and Strong, many Americans during Abbotts era agreed that Science and religion seemed to point in the same direction: Progress and Providence were one.90 Therefore, Abbotts concern for evolution and religion, though especially pronounced and articulated, also reflected a larger trend in society that regarded Protestant Christianity as the apex of spiritual evolution. Progress, Gender, and Race When Abbott called for action by the United States for the cause of evolutionary social and religious progress, he often spoke using racial and gendered language, contrasting white American manhood with the feminine and childlike qualities of less advanced peoples such as African Americans and Filipinos. As articulated by historian Colin B. Chapell, Abbotts conceptions of government and their racialized, gendered prerequisites were additional areas in
87 88 89 90

Fiske, Manifest, 584. See also, Lears, Rebirth, 107. Strong, Our Country, 208-210. See also, Lears, Rebirth, 107. Josiah Strong, The New Era; or, The Coming Kingdom (New York: Taylor & Francis Co., 1893): 354. Lears, Rebirth, 108.

Lagerwey 30 which Abbott applied broad ideas of evolution.91 As shown in Gail Bedermans book Manliness and Civilization, thinkers in Abbotts day were often concerned with racial fecundity and masculinity, for imperial expansion was an arduous task designed not only to assist those who were less masculine or racially inferior, but also to ensure the continued growth of masculine races such as the Anglo-Saxons who would carry out this mission, allowing the race to exercise its manly traits against lesser, and presumably more savage, races.92 Since these biases were common during that era, much of Abbotts writing on the subject is assumed and subtle: sometimes prejudice showed in his espousal of Anglo-Saxon superiority or in descriptions of other races, but often it was more explicit as Abbott declared other races to be less advanced and less manly. Abbott defined evolutionary progress for each race based on its color, and to him all Europeans were close to equal at the top of the evolutionary pyramid. Whiteness signified [to Abbott] the pinnacle of human development, Chapell explains, whereas dark-skinned peopleswere less evolved humans and as immature gendered being inferior to whites and thus incapable of self-government.93 An example that displays Abbotts racial categories in both subtle and overt comes from his January 2, 1898 sermon entitled The Secret and the Revealed Things. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the Bible, Abbott encouraged his listeners to envision the world in four categories that corresponded in equal measure to both the advance of the Bible and to the advance of civilization. These areas were shaded one of four ways: blackbrownlighter brown[or] pure white. The racial pattern suggested by this color

Chapell, The Third, 29. Chapells article in Fides et historia was a large influence on this section, and I owe much to him.
92 93

91

Bederman, Manliness, 184-206. Chapell, The Third, 30.

Lagerwey 31 scheme becomes even more explicit when Abbott identifies countries on the mental map: India, China, and Africa are the dark places without the Bible or civilization; Spain and Russia have clouded colors, half-opened Bibles, and second-rate civilizations; Protestant England and America are the pure white areas with open Bibles, free governments, and highly advanced civilizations. 94 Abbotts racial hierarchy was clearly outlined in this sermon, and he followed this paradigm to justify the involvement of the United States in the Spanish colonies since God called the highly evolved United States to replace a half-civilized Spanish rule with their advanced civilization that would best lift the poor, uncivilized Cubans and Filipinos up out of barbarism.95 The Jekyll-like opposite of this barbarism was the evolved, advanced civilization of the Anglo-Saxons that, for Abbott, comprised the core of Americas national identity and gave the nation its mandate to care for lesser peoples. For Abbott, the United States was a clear AngloSaxon country possessing a longer history of civilization evolution and progressing far beyond other nations that had only recent begun their slow climb out of cultural darkness; notable American leaders who guide [Americas] destinyhave been, with very few exception, AngloSaxon men.96 While occasionally obscuring direct claims on biological superiority, Abbott made it plain in his writings that since racial ascendancy could be measured by proximity to God and degree of civilization, the Anglo-Saxon race was the highest race on earth because of its

Abbott, The Secret and the Revealed Things, in The Life That Really Is (Brooklyn, New York: R.G. Brown Publishers, 1898): 6. Lyman Abbott, The Presidents Speech, 953; Lyman Abbott, The Duty of the United States, in Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, edited by Isabel C. Barrows (New York: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1902): 37-42.
96 95

94

Abbott, The Duty of the United States, 37.

Lagerwey 32 Protestant faith and civilized society.97 Abbott measured races according to civilization, and civilization in turn proceed[ed] [from] political liberty, Christian ethics, [and] Anglo-Saxon energy.98 Again, the evolutionarily advanced government model of the Hebraic Commonwealth found its modern day form in Anglo-Saxon America, as the United States as a part of this Anglo-Saxon race was to confer [its] gifts of civilizationon the uncivilized peoples of the world.99 Since evolution took place over many years, Abbott credited AngloSaxon advancement to many years of English growth, long centuries of education, and long ancestries [of] a Christian faith and a Christian blood. Long paths of growth like this made it unrealistic to expect a Cuban or Filipino Government to embrace the principles of liberty at once.100 Clearly, inferior races in the newly conquered territories could not be trusted on their own and required American guidance. Abbotts racial thinking thus placed Anglo-Saxons at the zenith of racial evolution and relegated the Cubans and Filipinos to low places from which they could climb only with American help. Evidence of this paternalistic view toward conquered peoples appears throughout Abbotts writings. Abbott outlined his national development model in an Outlook editorial The New Duties of the New Hour when he described the history of the United States in four eras. As a child, the United States was a colony; as an adolescent, it won its independence as a selfgoverning constitutional republic; as a young adult, maturing, it freed its slaves; and as a fully

Lyman Abbott, The Secret of Character, in The Life That Really Is (Brooklyn, New York: R.G. Brown Publishers, 1898): 11; Lyman Abbott, The Duty and Destiny of America, in The Life That Really Is (Brooklyn, New York: R.G. Brown Publishers, 1898): 19; Abbott, The Rights, 263. Lyman Abbot, The Basis of an Anglo-American Understanding, North American Review 166, no. 498 (May 1898): 520.
99 98

97

Abbott, The Rights, 263, 272-273.

Abbott, The Duty and Destiny of the United States, quoted in Dr. Abbott on Expansion. New York Times. January 27, 1899); Abbott, The Duty of the United States, 37, 38.

100

Lagerwey 33 grown, adult nation, the United States had earned the God-given duty to free other oppressed people outside its own borders.101 While contradicted a strict, Spencerian laissez-faire survival of the fittest, this paradigm fit well with Abbotts Lamarckian understanding of evolution and progress since the more advanced had a duty to assist and protect those who had yet to evolve. This charge fell to America in its dealings with inferior races after the Spanish-America War. Abbotts gendered pre-judgment manifested itself in the parable mentioned at the beginning of this essay where the Cubans and Filipinos are illustrated as a poor, defenseless child who needs the protection of the United States, portrayed as the vigorously masculine Uncle Sam.102 In his book The Rights of Man, Abbott wrote that surely America could not simply abandon races just emerging from childhood, for the United States had a calling to be their guardians and tutors.103 The book often depicted inferior peoples as children, in illustrations and words, because both women and children were inherently not as manly and therefore deserved the protection of the stronger man.104 Because of this, the United States needed to interfere in places like Cuba and the Philippines. In justifying expansion and hegemony, Abbott often tied capacity for self-government to masculinity, requiring American intervention where peoples lacked manliness.105 Abbott was adamant that the most important gift to impart to recently conquered territories was not wealth, but manhood: the United States had pledged [its] word to give them self-government as fast as they are prepared for it, and manhood suffrage [meant] manhood first and suffrage

101 102 103 104 105

The New Duties of the New Hours, Outlook 59, no. 4 (May 28, 1898): 335. The Issues Restated, Outlook 59, no. 12 (July 23, 1898): 710-711. Abbott, The Rights, 102. Chapell, The Third, 45-46; Hoganson, Fighting, 10-11, 6-69, 202. Chapell, The Third, 46.

Lagerwey 34 afterward.106 This manliness did not appear overnight, however, since it was the product of evolutionary processes that took time when moving races from near-animal states to masculine, advanced stages. Democracy, according to Abbott, is the emergence of man from a state of pupilage toward the state of manhood that requires a long apprenticeship of obedience.107 In a December 3, 1898 Outlook editorial, Abbott urged the United States to seek the enfranchisement of a before subjugate people and their preparation for selfgovernment [although] such a transformation must necessarily be gradual [for] Cubans and Filipinos cannot be carried from a condition of absolute despotism to a condition of absolute liberty without being carried through all the intermediate stages. The process by which the Anglo-Saxon people have become a free people can be greatly accelerated, but the process cannot be dispensed with altogetherThe child may grow to manhood rapidly, but manhood comes only through growth.108 This again was reflective of Abbotts view that evolution, not revolution, was the correct road to civilizational progress.109 The United States would thus need to stay in Cuba and the Philippines for extended periods of time, because the people there lacked the proper masculine traits to qualify for manhood suffrage, the type of self-government that Abbott only conferred upon those he deemed evolved enough to warrant the title of man. In The Theology of an Evolutionist, he stated the evolutionary principles behind his racialized and genderized thinking: Man is an animal [and] he has ascended from a lower animal. Whether the whole human race has so ascended is not absolutely certainbut wherever the race came from as a race, there is absolutely no question that every individual of the race has passed through animal stages in reaching manhood.110
106 107 108

PeaceAnd After, Outlook 59, no. 11 (July 16, 1898): 664; Abbott, Reminiscences, 424, 438. Abbott, The Spirit of Democracy, 24, 183.

The Open Door, Outlook 59, no. 14 (December 3, 1898): 806-807. See Hoganson, Fighting, 50-53, 135-138 for additional arguments on why gendered arguments often equated femininity and childishness, especially since they were both considered polar opposites of the manliness necessary for evolved peoples to govern themselves.
109 110

Abbott, The Rights of Man, 127-129. Abbott, The Theology of an Evolutionist, 32-33.

Lagerwey 35

Since Filipinos and Cubans had not reached the state of manhood necessary for selfgovernment, Abbott clearly saw the conquered races as inferior beings that were less masculine and more animal, in desperate need of assisted evolution from the advanced civilization of the United States. Abbotts mixture of racial typology, gendered language, and civilizational evolution came out of a longer pattern of social assumptions solidified through his work for humanitarian organizations. Abbotts early, first-hand experience with people he considered to be less evolved occurred in the years after the Civil War when he worked for The American Freedmens and Union Commission in helping blacks in the Reconstruction South.111 His second experience was with Native Americans through his participation in the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, an annual meeting of missionaries, educators, and philanthropists who tried to protect Indians from exploitation and who later expanded after the Spanish-American War to include other dependent races.112 Indeed, Abbott often mentioned the Indian, the Negro, the foreign immigrant, the Porto Rican [sic], the Hawaiian and the Filipino in the same passages as he discussed Americas distinct duty toward these so-called dependent or subject peoples.113 To Abbot, American racial expansion, always for the purported good of the inferior races, started in the North American continent and continued west and south over the Pacific and Caribbean. Abbotts work with formerly enslaved African Americans led him to characterize the race as the great childlike race in this country, one that was hardly [into its] period of infancy
111 112

Brown, Lyman Abbott, 37-50; see also Brown, Lyman Abbott and the Freedmens.

Walter L. Williams, United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation:: Implication for the Origins of American Imperialism, The Journal of American History 66, no. 4 (March 1980): 814; Philip Garrett, Opening Address, in Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, 1898, ed. by Isabel C. Barrows (Boston: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1898): 11.
113

Abbott, The Duty of the United States, 41; Abbott, America, 187.

Lagerwey 36 only fifty years after slavery.114 For example, Abbott supported the ideas of Booker T. Washingtons The Future of the American Negro (1899) over W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk (1903). When reflecting on those books, Abbott explained that African Americans should not be ambitious for social equality, or industrial equality, or political equality, or any kind of equality, but rather they should be ambitious to be men, and trust that in time the manhood will make for itself a place.115 Here, as in other writings, Abbott stressed racially determined manhood suffrage that could only evolve gradually. Abbott later directly compared African Americans to the Cubans and Filipinos in the December 24, 1898 issue of the Outlook in a passage that deserves quotation at length: The argument borrowed from the experience of the past, that tropical peoples are incompetent to administer self-government, cannot be contemptuously disregardedwhat we have experienced in the attempts at self-government of the negro race in this country, lends some confirmation to [this] contention[For] to throw into the current of human life a people without either religious or civil education, who have lived for centuries under despotism, in the expectations that they will straightway govern themselves justly and wisely, is like intrusting [sic] a community of children to selfgovernment without guidance or guardianship.116 In this passage, Abbott again used an analogy about race and gender by comparing dependent peoples to children, and he then used the precedent of limiting African American suffrage based on inferior evolution in the areas of religion and government to argue for governmental control over the tropical peoples of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Cuba. Likewise, the post-1898 Abbott often had Americas newfound possessions at the forefront of his mind during the Lake Mohonk Conferences that met primarily to discuss Native Americans. In a 1902 speech on The Duty of the United States, Abbott explicitly compared

114 115 116

Abbott, American in the Making, 170. Two Typical Leaders, Outlook 74, no. 4 (May 23, 1903): 214-216. Expansion: One Step at a Time, Outlook 59, no. 17 (December 24, 1898): 997.

Lagerwey 37 the two groups. First, when Anglo-Saxon pioneers first arrived in America and encountered aboriginal peoples, they found here a people who in all the elements of civilization, in all elements of Christian culture and character, were their inferiors. Abbott next added Africans and the newly conquered Spanish and Malay peoples to the list of inferior peoples and then asked: What is the duty of a Christian, educated people, inheriting from a long ancestry a Christian faith and a Christian blood, what is their duty when they are set down under the same flag, within the same territory, side by side with the Indian, the Africathe Spanish-American, and the Malay?117 He later answered his own question by saying the United States must govern them in their [own] interest for the purpose of making [them] at the earliest possible moment self-governing, just like the wise father governs his child so that as far as possible the child can learn to govern himself.118 This single example is but a sample of passages where Abbott mentions both Native Americans and the newly conquered peoples from the SpanishAmerican War as being deficient in race and gender and thus needing remedial governing from the fully-evolved, masculine United States. This mixture of gender, race, religion, and progress was not unique to Abbott, as shown in both the writing of historians of the era and of prominent intellectual contemporaries of Abbott. Historians agree that during Abbotts time, questions of race and gender prominently impacted American national thought. Susan Harris asserts that Americans from Abbotts time worried about having their national destiny diverted by any influx of racially different races as shown in the frequent overlap of Congressional discussion about Native-American and Philippine affairs [that were] further signs of Americans uneasiness about racial purity.119
117 118 119

Abbott, The Duty of the United States, 38. Abbott, The Duty of the United States, 39. Harris, Gods, 18.

Lagerwey 38 Richard Hofstadter points out that many thinkers from that era used natural selection as a vindication of militarism or imperialism, often citing Darwins writings about the likelihood that backward races would disappear before the advance of higher civilization.120 Jackson Lears agrees, for during this time of American expansion, Missionaries and race theorists came together more easily in the rhetoric of empire [as] Protestantism and Progress marched forward together, fulfilling the imperial destiny of Anglo-Saxon civilization.121 In addition, several prominent contemporaries of Lyman Abbott illustrate just how pervasive this racial, engendered thinking was during the debates over the wars. Albert Beveridge, a Senator from Indiana, argued passionately on the Senate floor for the racial duty of the Anglo-Saxon United States to stay in the Philippines. In the Outlooks parable, one could make the assumption that the boy stood for Beveridge, as he mentioned the material advantages of American expansion far more than Abbott did. Expansion offered increased new sources of supply, and a chance to conduct the mightiest commerce of history.122 Still, the deepest question at stake during the debates over Philippines annexation, Beveridge concluded, was elemental and racial: God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. [Rather], He has made us the master organizers of the word[and] given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth[we Americans must] not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee of God, of the civilization of the word.123

120 121 122

Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 146-147. Lears, The Rebirth, 107.

Albert Beveridge, The March of the Flag, in Modern Eloquence, Vol. 11: Political Oratory, A-Bur, ed. by Thomas B. Reed (Philadelphia: John D. Morris and Company, 1903): 15.
123

Cong. Rec., 56th Congress, Session 1, 1900, 33, pt. 1: 704-711.

Lagerwey 39 To Beveridge, like Abbott, Americas divine mandate was also a racial mandate to progress and evolve not only themselves, but also others under the jurisdiction of the United States.124 John Fiske and Theodore Roosevelt provide other excellent examples of Abbotts contemporaries voicing similar sentiments about evolution, race, and gender. Fiske, in his Manifest Destiny speech, argued for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race because of its high birthrate and advanced, industrialized civilization.125 Theodore Roosevelt, in many speeches, added a muscular version of racial nationalism that warned against los[ing] the virile, manly qualities, and sink[ing] into a nation of mere hucksters.126 For Roosevelt, evolutionarily advanced nations were the one possessing the most manly traits, but, as historian Gail Bederman put it, Roosevelt feared that if American men ever lost their virile zest for Darwinistic racial contests, their civilization, would soon decay. If they ignored the ongoing racial imperative of constant expansiona manlier race would inherit their mantle of the highest civilization.127 In his comparison of nations, Roosevelt claimed an essential manliness of the American character that enabled their national success to contrast with the character of Cubans and Filipinos who needed American help to be freed from their chains of savagery and barbarism.128 In helping childlike races to racial manhood, particularly in war, Americans would also strengthen and maintain their own racial virility. Abbott agreed: The shock of war awakens the Nation from its lethargy [and] summons it to heroic self-sacrifice [while] set[ting] its pulses beating with

124 125 126

Harris, Gods, 25. Fiske, Manifest Destiny, 578-90.

Theodore Roosevelt, The Law of Civilization and Decay, in vol. 13 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1926): 259-260.
127 128

Bederman, Manliness, 186. See also pages 184-190; Hoganson, Fighting, 143-145.

Theodore Roosevelt, National Duties, in vol. 13 of The Works of Theodore Roosevelt, national ed. (New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1926): 469-470, 478. See also Bederman, Manliness, 188.

Lagerwey 40 a new if not certainly higher life.129 Surrounded as he was by these currents of race, gender, and evolution, Abbott presented a typical view for an American concerned with progress related to the foreign nations associated with the Spanish-American War. Progress, Government, and Nationalism The final piece of Abbotts evolutionary thinking about the Spanish-American War was intricately connected to his thoughts on race, gender, and religion. Abbott was like many of his fellow Americans when he claimed, There is no other country that compares to America in its application of this principle of self-government, and this statement, when viewed in the light of Abbotts extensive writings, takes on additional meaning in the implied assumptions entailed in it about why the United States was so skilled at its self-government.130 Abbott, like many of his contemporaries, believed that God, through evolution, had blessed the United States with many gifts. Since the United States was at the pinnacle of national and governmental evolution, it possessed a certain duty and destiny toward the rest of the world, especially its newly conquered territories after 1898.131 The mixture of advanced characteristics including democracy, civic institutions, and advanced citizenry formed the basis for the evolutionary ascendance of the United States. These traits led Abbott to support the United States policy of expansion and conquest during and after the Spanish-American War. Although Abbott left the connection between nationalism and evolution veiled, his prodigious writing on evolution gives the words of his more political work additional meaning
129 130 131

Lyman Abbott, Some Advantages of the War, Outlook 59, no. 8 (June 25, 1898): 461. Lyman Abbott, The Duty and Destiny of America, 5.

Many of Abbotts speeches and sermons from the era use the phrase duty and destiny when referring to the calling of the United States. See, for example, Abbott, The Duty and Destiny of the United States, quoted in Dr. Abbott on Expansion, New York Times. January 27, 1899; Abbott, The Duty of the United States, in Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, ed. by Isabel C. Barrows (New York: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1902): 37-41; Abbott, The Duty and Destiny of America, in The Life That Really Is (Brooklyn, New York: R.G. Brown Publishers, 1898): 1-20.

Lagerwey 41 that clearly suggests his evolutionary worldview. As mentioned earlier, Abbotts notions of progress led him to describe an historic process by which the pagan world was gradually transformed into Christendom, the forces of imperial Rome into the imperfectly Christianized forces of the Republic of the United States.132 Although Abbott never claimed completely moral character for the United States, he used the phrase gradually transform to suggest the evolutionary quality of the governmental change. Even later revelations of civilian massacre on the Philippine island of Samar and the use of the water curea torture technique in which a victim was held down, his mouth pried open with a piece of bamboo or a rifle barrel, and dirty or salty water poured down his throat until the stomach swelled to the bursting pointby American soldiers could not dampen Abbotts assurance that the United States was doing Gods work.133 It was unjust and irrational to condemn the American army and the American leaders in the Philippines for the sporadic cases of cruelty that did not detract from Americas responsibility of authority in the Philippines.134 Even highly evolved creatures occasionally experienced atavism, Abbott explained, so the proper reaction to sin was not wholesale condemnation, but rather renewed vigor toward the noble task of advancing Christianity in its highest forms. In his earlier work on evolution itself, Abbott gave a clearer example of his evolutionary approach to the political arena when he proclaimed: the evolutionist insists that the processes of life are always from the simple to the complexfrom the family, through the tribe, to the nation; from the paternal form of government, through the oligarchic and the aristocratic, to the democraticthe evolutionist sees a steady progress from lower to higher forms of life.135
132 133

Abbott, Christianity, 30.

Gregg Jones, Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of Americas Imperial Dream (New York: New American Library, 2012): 241-247, 209-210. 134 Politics or Public Business, Outlook 71, no. 2 (May 10, 1902): 105-107.
135

Abbott, The Evolution, 6-7.

Lagerwey 42

Democracy was the outcome of a long historical process [and] the result of the political evolution of eighteen centuries, and accordingly, this form of government reached its most perfect form in the United States of America.136 Abbott thus had a clear evolutionary hierarchy for government, with democracies reigning supreme. In his book Christianity and Social Problems, Abbott made a related argument for evolutionarily supremacy of the American political and social system by stating that the consummation of Christian progress will not be attained until, among other things, Christianity [is substituted] for barbarism.137 As shown earlier in this essay, Abbott equated the Protestant Christianity found in American with advanced civilization. Thus, in a speech to the Lake Mohonk Conference in 1901, Abbott explained the Christianity/barbarism dichotomy by applying evolution and by using the terms civilization, barbarism, and higher civilization to justify the many areas of recent American expansion, claiming, Barbarism has no rights which civilization is bound to respectThe function of the higher civilization is not to extirpate the old, not to subjugate the old, and it certainly is not to leave the old to take care of itself. The higher civilization is to convert the oldThere is to be intellectual and moral civilization, whether men like it or whether they do notIt is the duty of the Government of the United States to assume all the responsibilities which its authority imposes upon itin Cuba, in Porto Rico, and in the Philippines [where] we are fighting for the liberty of the people protected by justice and defined by law.138 This quote summarized Abbotts stance on the entire mission of the United States in the former Spanish colonies in evolutionary terms. Abbott saw their civilizations as old and lower as compared to the newer and higher civilization of Anglo-Saxon America. When combined with other Abbott quotesabout evolution mean[ing] ordered progress; development from poorer to
136 137 138

Abbott, The Rights of Man, 315. Abbott, Christianity, 267. Abbott, Fundamental, 112-113.

Lagerwey 43 richer, from lower to higher, from less to greaterthis quotes takes on the additional significance of evolutionary theory that Abbott and his readers would have attached to his political and social argument.139 Abbott thus supported the American intervention in former Spanish colonies because the American civilization was on a quasi-religious crusade to convert the barbaric aboriginals and uplift them to the highly evolved standards of American, Christian civilization. Abbotts elevation of democracy would cause him to disregard the legitimacy of the Spanish government since it was an autocratic monarchy inferior to the higher American system of republican democracy and to disregard the Filipino government because they as a people were not advanced enough to rule themselves. When added to the racial and gendered stereotypes explored earlier in this essay, Abbott had a clear evolutionary system for justifying American hegemony over Cuba and the Philippines. Especially in the Philippines, Abbott was adamant that the locals were unready for self-government or even franchisement within the American democratic system, for certainlythe function of the higher civilization[was] not to leave the old to take care of itself.140 Writing after the war, when claiming that democracy [was] for a people in its manhood, Abbott stressed the correlation between evolutionary advancement and self-government. The implication was obvious: the United States was the most advanced nation because there [was] no other country that compare[d] to America in its application of this principle of self-government.141 In contrast, the newly conquered peoples were races just emerging from childhood who still needed intervening education in order to properly progress

Abbot, The Hope That Is In Me, in The Life That Really Is (Brooklyn, New York: R.G. Brown Publishers, 1898): 5.
140 141

139

Abbott, Fundamental, 112. Abbott, The Duty and Destiny of America, 5.

Lagerwey 44 from a primitive or tribal condition of government to a self-governing democracy.142 Here, American intervention was necessary because of the national duty to guide and instruct the lesser-evolved races on proper governing techniques and their accompanying civil institutions. These civil institutions found their quintessence in the United States of America. Abbott articulated the civic superiority of America often during his writings, and after the SpanishAmerican War, he appealed to them as reasons why the United States needed to stay in the Philippines and in Cuba. The United States should confer just government in its newly conquered territories, and to Abbott just government meant an adequate return for the taxes levied, civil and religious liberty, and some system of universal education free from ecclesiastical control.143 Elsewhere, Abbott described the government America was to impart as protecting justice, equal rights, free education, and civil and religious liberty.144 The Outlook repeated these themes of justice, liberty, and education during the time of the SpanishAmerican War and later over questions of American duty in the conquered territories.145 The mere fact that the United States was to impart its civic institutions suggested the evolutionary paradigm of progress and advancing civilization. Abbott later in 1901 wrote a book entitled The Rights of Man: A Study in Twentieth Century Problems in which he solidified the connection between evolution and republican virtue. Democratization connected modern theology, democratic government, industrial capitalism, and public education: the broader support and benefit a movement provided, the more advanced and laudable it was in Abbotts mind. Americas departure from Roman Catholicism, European
142 143 144 145

Abbott, Rights, 101-102.. Lyman Abbott, Terms of Peace, Outlook 59, no. 14 (August 6 1898): 813. Lyman Abbott, The New National Policy, Outlook 59. no. 7 (June 18. 1898): 415. See, for example, Lyman Abbott, PeaceAnd After, Outlook 59, no. 11 (July 16, 1898): 663-664.

Lagerwey 45 monarchy, medieval feudalism, and elitist schools all signified the progress embodied in the Protestant, democratic, capitalist United States of America that educated all its citizens fairly. To Abbott, America represent[ed]fundamental principles [of civil society] better than any nation now represents them, and better than they ever have been represented by any nation in the past.146 In the same book, Abbott listed the United States at the end of a list of countries that mark[ed] successive steps in the progress toward that unity of the human race which has been the ideal of poets and the vision of dreamers since the world began to think, clearly indicating place the America at the evolutionary pinnacle of nations.147 This advanced state gradually brought the United States into a larger, interconnected role in world affairs as the right, the duty of a strong nation to interfere for the protection of a weak, oppressed, and suffering people burned itself into the heart of America until suddenly [Americans] were awakened to the fact that outrageswere being perpetrated at our very door [in Cuba].148 Clearly, for Abbott, the evolutionarily progressed state of the United States could not leave it complacent, but rather compelled it to action on behalf of less developed nations. This perspective was far from unique, for Abbott followed such notable Americans as Abraham Lincoln when he characterized the United States as a Christian nation with an extraordinary history of progress that predicated an extraordinary future in exceptional service to God.149 Abbott proffered this national evolutionary schema when justifying American expansionism, for a great trust did God lay upon the American peopleof helping to work
146 147 148 149

Abbott, Christianity, 32-61, 196. Abbott, Christianity, 254. Abbott, Christianity, 258.

Abbott, The Duty of the United States, 37; for more on Americas chosen status, see McCullough, My Brothers Keeper, ix-xi; Pratt, Julius W. The Large Policy of 1898. The Mississippi Historical Review 19, no. 2 (Sept. 1932): 219-42; Preston, Sword, 135-136.

Lagerwey 46 outthe [American] principles of justice, equal rights, free education, and civil and religious liberty, throughout the world.150 This was the appropriate response to being evolutionarily gifted; therefore Americans must guide these [Filipino] people to their establishment of institutions like our ownnot necessarily in detail, but in fundamental principles, Abbott argued.151 These passages show that, for him, Americas unique government and liberties meant that it had a duty to expand and to propagate its form throughout the world. This evolutionary ascendancy was also partly due to Americas citizenry. According to Abbott and his contemporaries, only certain groups could be trusted with the power of democracy. Susan Harris, in highlighting a general trend of the era, explains: The pattern of association in [speeches of the era] link racial hierarchies to religious affiliations, which in turn are linked to patterns of values and behaviors that give evidence of those values. The result is an ongoing loop: race, religion, and appropriate practices all point to each other in a continuous round of association, creating the foundation for the national narrative that linked Christianity, whiteness, liberties, and capitalism, and bundled the whole under the rubric civilization.152 Harris highlights a rule for government that Abbott followed closely: only after proving itself to be an evolved, progressive civilization could a people-group such as the Filipinos claim the ability and therefore the right to self-government. Groups that had yet to move forward evolutionarily, lacking civilization and still embodying too much barbarism, could not be trusted to rule themselves, especially if they came from races just emerging from childhood or from societies that, in all elements of Christian culture and civilization, were inferior to those

150 151 152

Lyman Abbott, The New National Policy, 415. Lyman Abbott, The Duty and Destiny of the United States. Harris, Gods, 77.

Lagerwey 47 of the self-governing nations of the West.153 As Harris shows, however, this proof of civilization was complicated: In the late nineteenth century, capacity for citizenship was predicated on both biology and behavioral practices. The biology was whiteness, specifically racial descent from what was commonly known as Anglo-SaxonTo this was grafted Protestantism, a categoryenhancing race with a set of values that came to be seen asthe right biocultural mixto produce particular kinds of citizen-subjects.154 Thus, as shown by Harris, the issue of self-government is a crucial issue for the study of evolutionary social theory. Abbott agreed, formulating a mixture of racial and civil characteristics that established capacity for and possession of the evolutionarily advanced civilization necessary for self-government and autonomy. Failing to possess these characteristics left nations vulnerable to injustices that forced the hand of the humanitarian United States to intervene. Abbott applied these criteria to the rule of the United States over conquered peoples in formerly Spanish territories, providing further proof of the pervasiveness of evolutionary thought in his support for the war and its aftermath. Abbott was not alone in his espousal of a special, high status for the United States, one that gave it unique privileges and responsibilities in the realm of world affairs. A supreme example is Josiah Strong, whose best-selling book, Our Country, gave statistical rationales for American superiority, claiming that the United States was the consummation of human progress and a place that may reasonably expect to develop the highest type of Anglo-Saxon civilization.155 Senator Albert Beveridge likewise insisted that since the Almighty Father endowed [the United States] with giftsand marked [Americans] as the people of His particular

See, Abbott, The Duty of the United States, 37-38; Abbott, Fundamental Principles, 111-114; Abbott, The Rights of Man, 101-102.
154 155

153

Harris, Gods, 77-78. Strong, Our Country, 216.

Lagerwey 48 favor, the United States had a mission to perform [and a] duty to discharge to the other nations of the earth.156 Historian H.W. Brands has demonstrated the breadth of similar sentiments, claiming that Americans of Abbotts era refused to accept the evidence of decline from the closing of the frontier [that] heralded the end of the age of American uniqueness and instead placed the United States at the apex of historical development and predicted the imminent Americanization of the earth.157 Matthew McCullough, in his discussion of the United States as a messianic figure during the era of the Spanish-America War, cites many different Christian figures of many different denominations to reach his conclusion that a remarkable number of Christian leaders agreed that the United States must play the role of Christ in the world.158 To them, expansion into new territories was inevitable yet still an act of charity for the good of local people. Abbott thus was not alone in his views, and as an influential pastor and editor, he commanded attention from the nations Protestant establishment when he spoke of the evolutionary ascendancy of the United States and its subsequent duty toward Cuba and the Philippines. Conclusion Abbotts rhetoric of evolutionary change was by its very nature optimistic, but that did not preclude human agency. Abbott declared the movement of human progress which goes on from generation to generation [to be] a divinely inspired and ordered movement, and he coupled

156 157

Albert Beveridge, The March, 225.

H.W. Brands, Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992): 10.
158

McCullough, My Brothers Keeper, 40.

Lagerwey 49 this sentiment with his equally firm belief that God is making the American, but God works through men. If the American is to be made, he must be made by Americans.159 God was still in overall control of the battles of social evolution, however, for despite Abbotts rejection of the Calvinist idea of predestination in individual salvation, he occasionally employed the idea of election to describe the United States.160 In his sermon, The Meaning of the War, given on May 15th in the midst of the Spanish-American War, Abbott proclaimed that the American people, throughout their unique history, had been an elect people favored by God.161 In the Outlooks coverage of American naval victories over the Spanish, Abbott insisted that the guns of [the Battle of] Santiago began when Anglo-Saxon and Spanish civilizations parted company in the sixteenth century, one working forward toward the Kingdom of God, the other blocking its progress and victory was assured since the beginning of time since the eternal law of God [is] thatthey who fight on Gods side fight a winning campaign. Americans should thank God on Thanksgiving in 1898, insisted Abbott, not because he is on our side, but because he has inspired America to be on his side.162 God assured victory and sided with the United States as it fought for his Kingdom and for his purposes. Gods preparation for American victory had used the gradual processes of evolution to ensure that progress and growth happened at the correct rates and in the correct areas such that, when the Cubans and Filipinos cried out for humanitarian relief, the strong arm of the United States would be ready to be sent on Gods errands of liberty and justice.163

159 160 161 162 163

Abbott, America in the Making, 43, 4. Wetzel, A Scourge and Minister, 49. Abbott, The Meaning of the War, 1-2. Thanksgiving for Victories, Outlook 59, no. 11 (July 9, 1898): 667. Thanksgiving for Victories, 667.

Lagerwey 50 It was this humanitarian errand that Abbott summarized in next issue of the Outlook, wherein lay the parable mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Given the context of Abbotts evolutionary and political thought, the story clearly takes on additional meaning. It was the grown-up, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon, male Uncle Sam who had a duty to intervene and save the poor, helpless Cuban or Filipino child who was racially inferior, less educated, only nominally Christian, and otherwise incapable of self-government or democracy. The Spanish abusers were hardly any better, being less advanced themselves and thus untrustworthy caretakers of inferior peoples. The Spanish-American War therefore provides an excellent case study with which to examine Abbotts evolutionary thinking writ large just as Abbott provides a biographical case study for American intellectuals during that the same time period. Recent historical scholarship has shown a resurgent trend toward studies of American empire, particularly its international beginnings in 1898, often spurred by the recent, equally contentious humanitarian crusades in the Balkans and Iraq.164 Given the pertinent lessons the story of 1898 has to tell, some recent historians have wisely focused on Abbott and on the useful example he can be toward furthering understanding of the time. What this study has shown in particular areas, Abbott biographer Brown has stated more generally: Abbott was a prosaic interpreter who dealt with the large changes of imperialism and evolution which demanded a recasting of public opinion and therefore who deserves the attention of historians because he represented the main currents of American religious thought and had a remarkable talent for

In addition to the recent monographs, theses, and books cited previously in this essay, recent examples of renewed scholarly and popular interest in topics related to the beginnings of American empire during the SpanishAmerican War include the following: Evan Thomas, The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898 (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2010); James Bradley, The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009); Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: Americas Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006); Fabian Hilfrich, Debating American Exceptionalism: Empire and Democracy in the Wake of the Spanish-American War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

164

Lagerwey 51 bridging the gap between the aristocracy of the mind and the thought of the masses. 165 In short, Abbott was thus a quintessential Gramscian organic intellectual. Given the recent parallel examples of high-minded American imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the need for historical inquiry into 1898 has only increased in recent years.166 Historians wishing to understand the roots of American Exceptionalism would do well to pay closer attention to Abbott and writings during his era.

165 166

Brown, Lyman, viii; 1; 238. Wetzel, A Scourge and Minister, 119-120.

Lagerwey 52 BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources Lyman Abbott Abbott, Lyman. America in the Making. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911. . The Basis of an Anglo-American Understanding. North American Review 166, no. 498 (May 1898): 513-521. . Christianity and Social Problems. 1897. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1899. . The Duty and Destiny of the United States. Quoted in Dr. Abbott on Expansion. New York Times. January 27, 1899. . The Duty of the United States. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, edited by Isabel C. Barrows, 3741. New York: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1902. . The Evolution of Christianity. 1892. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1900. .The Kingdom of Heaven on Earth: A Sermon Preached at the Diamond Jubilee of the Congregational Home Missionary Society, Tremont Temple, Boston, Mass., May 14, 1901. Boston: The Congregational Home Missionary Society, 1901. . The Life That Really Is. Brooklyn, New York: R.G. Brown Publishers, 1898. . Problems of Life. New York: Dodd, Mead, and Company, 1900. . The Rights of Man: A Study in Twentieth Century Problems. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1901. . The Theology of an Evolutionist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1897. . The Twentieth Century Crusade. New York: MacMillan Co., 1918. Outlook. New York: Outlook Publishing Company. Primary Sources Others Beveridge, Albert J. The March of the Flag. In Modern Eloquence, Vol. 11: Political Oratory, A-Bur, edited by Thomas B. Reed, 224-243. Philadelphia: John D. Morris and Company, 1903. Fisk, John. Manifest Destiny, Harpers New Monthly Magazine 70 (March, 1885): 578-90.

Lagerwey 53

Garrett, Philip. Opening Address. In Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, 1898. Edited by Isabel C. Barrows, 10-11. Boston: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1898. Roosevelt, Theodore. The Works of Theodore Roosevelt. National ed. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1926. Strong, Josiah. Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Current Crisis. Rev. ed. New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1891. U.S. Congress. Congressional Record. 56th Cong., 1st sess., 1900. Vol. 33, pt. 1. Secondary Sources Abrams, Ray H., Preachers Present Arms: The Role of the American Churches and Clergy in the World War I and II, with some Observations on the War in Vietnam. Rev. ed. Scottsdale, PA: Herald Press, 1969. Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Bigham, Darrel E. American Christian Thinkers and the Function of War, 1861-1920. PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1970. Bradley, James. The Imperial Cruise: A Secret History of Empire and War. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009. Brands, H. W. Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Brown, Ira V. Lyman Abbott and Freedmens Aid, 1865-1869. The Journal of Southern History 15, no. 1 (February 1949): 22-38. . Lyman Abbott: Christian Evolutionist. New England Quarterly 23, no. 2 (June 1950): 218-231. . Lyman Abbott, Christian Evolutionist: A Study in Religious Liberalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953. Chapell, Colin B. The Third Strand: Race, Gender, and Self-Government in the Mind of Lyman Abbott. Fides et Historia 42, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2010): 27-54. Digrius, Dawn M. The Un-Heretical Christian: Lynn Harold Hough, Darwinism and Christianity in 1920s America. Methodist History 49, no. 4 (July 2011): 223-240.

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