Republic or Empire? The Philippine Question

The Story

Published in the white heat of 1899, as the ink was barely dry on the treaty that handed Spain’s empire to the United States, this is the great anti-imperialist gathering of voices — William Jennings Bryan opening the case, and behind him Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Gompers, Carl Schurz, George F. Hoar, David Starr Jordan, Benjamin Tillman and some forty more, each arguing whether a republic could keep an empire and stay a republic. Bound up with it are the raw documents of the moment: Admiral Dewey’s dispatch, Aguinaldo’s proclamations, the treaty itself, and photographic plates of Manila and Luzon that most readers of 1899 had never seen. Our copy wears the handsome ¾-leather dress of the subscription binding — black spine and corners, five gilt-lettered raised bands, green cloth boards — rubbed and honestly worn at the ends, but whole and tight in the hand, all 762 pages between the boards. A frontispiece portrait of Bryan carries his printed facsimile signature. A genuine artifact of the argument America had with itself at the turn of the century.

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