Swift, Morrison I.

Anti-Imperialism [Cover title].

Los Angeles: Public Ownership Review, 1899. 7 ” x 5 ”. Stapled wrappers. Pp. 64. Very good: wrappers lightly worn and foxed; a few leaves faintly creased at edges.

This is an important polemic against United States expansionism written at the onset of the Philippine-American War.

Morrison I. Swift was a prominent anarchist author and activist who had served as president of New York's Hobart College and built up the library there. He worked with the settlement movement in Philadelphia and New York and was credited with leading every major demonstration of the unemployed in Boston between 1894 and 1914. He organized cooperatives in Los Angeles and Washington state and was regarded as a “socialist of the extreme type.”

The present work was written at the dawn of the Philippine-American War and argued that the islands' annexation was “so gross a departure from American principles . . . that it is well to probe down to its real cause. Three motives are offered to sanction the change: Blessing for the peoples absorbed, Duty to the World, and Markets.” Swift addressed the historical irony and impact of each, covering slavery, the “robbery and progressive extermination” of the American Indian, “the voice of American capitalists who grasped the Hawaiian government and insolently claimed to represent the population” and more. He urged for immediate independence of the islands, lest “rapacious commercialists . . . pronounce the doctrine of total savage depravity . . . [and] go about saving the souls of the natives whose bodies the capitalists will break.”

A scathing, crucial work on capitalism and colonialism. OCLC shows 21 holdings in the United States and one in Britain. Very good. Item #9400

Price: $300.00