Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis



The Founding brothers of our nation being Hamilton, Burr, Jefferspm,Franklin, Washington, Adams and Madison they all made it through challenges that made our nation the way it is today. This would make them heros. Founding Brothers shows the leadership that this country has. The founding brothers of this country would be the heros and also the leaders. Being a part of this nation shows that everyone believes in what these people did for this counrty. The historical part of this book shows that there are many events in this countries history that show we have leaders.


These people that are the "Founding Brothers" of this nation show the quilties of being leaders. Thats what brought this country to where it is. During the book there was a part about the Quaker delegation they petitioned the House of Representatives to end the African save trade immediately. This was showing the leadership that we have. Another time where these "brothers" showed there leadership, was when Geroge Washington decided he wasn't going to run again for president. Benjamin Franklin stood up and helped with everything that was going on. Also the leadership showed up again during Geroge Washington's second term as president. The significance of this theme of leadership in this book is to show that our country has founding brothers, everything didn't just appear out of no where.



The events that happened in Founding Brothers are the events that lead us to today in this nation. The Founding brothers showed things through them being the president at a certian time. Things that they did were like After Jeffersons daughter died he took the letter that she left for her family and made it into something that he could forgive himself for. Also after eveything that Geroge Washington did for the country he didn't run again for president. He thought that it would be better for someone else to take over and try to make an even bigger impact. Being a leader in all of these situations was a big deal for these people, it wasn't easy. Proving that they could do it they made everything that we have today possible.



The relationship between the leadership and what people thought about this wasn't hard to see in founding brothers. Everyone thought that these people did good at what they were doing. Like Geroge Washington show how he could lead this country into a big nation that would do very well in the world. People didn't realize this at the time but after reading the book you can see what they did for us.
The significance of the perspective in this book shows the theme really well the leaders were the leaders then and they still are now.





These people like Geroge Washington and Thomas Jefferson are the figures of this natons. The leaders of this nation. This theme has been know throughout history. Being a leader is something people do everyday. The leaders in this book were the leaders than and they still are today. The Important thing about this theme is a everyday person could be a leader, it doesn't have to be a really smart person.

 American Empire

Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: "In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."....

There was heated argument in the United States about whether or not to take the Philippines. As one story has it, President McKinley told a group of ministers visiting the White House how he came to his decision:

Before you go I would like to say just a word about the Philippine business. . . . The truth is I didn't want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them. . . . I sought counsel from all sides -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- but got little help.  It is really unbelieveable that the president wouldn't want more land for his country. Most countries would take as much as they could get. Instead he goes to god to tell him what to do.. Most people would just take the land without even thinking about it. -Batchelder3232 5/7/09 1:48 PM yeah that would be pretty crazy. You would think that he would want more. -Nicole Pedone 5/8/09 9:17 AM
       I thought first we would only take Manila; then Luzon, then other islands, perhaps, also.
       I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way -- I don't know how it was, but it came:
       1) That we could not give them back to Spain -- that would be cowardly and dishonorable.
       2) That we could not turn them over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient -- that would be bad business and discreditable.
       3) That we could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and
       4) That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly.

       The Filipinos did not get the same message from God. In February 1899, they rose in revolt against American rule, as they had rebelled several times against the Spanish. Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader, who had earlier been brought back from China by U.S. warships to lead soldiers against Spain, now became leader of the insurrectos fighting the United States. He proposed Filipino independence within a U.S. protectorate, but this was rejected.
       It took the United States three years to crush the rebellion, using seventy thousand troops -- four times as many as were landed in Cuba -- and thousands of battle casualties, many times more than in Cuba. It was a harsh war. For the Filipinos the death rate was enormous from battle casualties and from disease.
       The taste of empire was on the lips of politicians and business interests throughout the country now. Racism, paternalism, and talk of money mingled with talk of destiny and civilization. In the Senate, Albert Beveridge spoke, January 9, 1900, for the dominant economic and political interests of the country:

Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever. . . . And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . .
       The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. . . .
       No land in America surpasses in fertility the plains and valleys of Luzon. Rice and coffee, sugar and cocoanuts, hemp and tobacco. . . . The wood of the Philippines can supply the furniture of the world for a century to come. At Cebu the best informed man on the island told me that 40 miles of Cebu's mountain chain are practically mountains of coal. . . .
       I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. . . .
       My own belief is that there are not 100 men among them who comprehend what Anglo-Saxon self-government even means, and there are over 5,000,000 people to be governed.
       It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. . . . Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals.

       The fighting with the rebels began, McKinley said, when the insurgents attacked American forces. But later, American soldiers testified that the United States had fired the first shot. After the war, an army officer speaking in Boston's Faneuil Hall said his colonel had given him orders to provoke a conflict with the insurgents.
       In February 1899, a banquet took place in Boston to celebrate the Senate's ratification of the peace treaty with Spain. President McKinley himself had been invited by the wealthy textile manufacturer W. B. Plunkett to speak. It was the biggest banquet in the nation's history: two thousand diners, four hundred waiters. McKinley said that "no imperial designs lurk in the American mind," and at the same banquet, to the same diners, his Postmaster General, Charles Emory Smith, said that "what we want is a market for our surplus."
       William James, the Harvard philosopher, wrote a letter to the Boston Transcript about "the cold pot grease of McKinley's cant at the recent Boston banquet" and said the Philippine operation "reeked of the infernal adroitness of the great department store, which has reached perfect expertness in the art of killing silently, and with no public squalling or commotion, the neighboring small concerns."
       James was part of a movement of prominent American businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals who formed the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 and carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was an odd group (Andrew Carnegie belonged), including antilabor aristocrats and scholars, united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles."
       The Anti-Imperialist League published the letters of soldiers doing duty in the Philippines. A captain from Kansas wrote: "Caloocan was supposed to contain 17,000 inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native." A private from the same outfit said he had "with my own hand set fire to over fifty houses of Filipinos after the victory at Caloocan. Women and children were wounded by our fire."
       A volunteer from the state of Washington wrote: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces."
       It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs -- hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility.
       In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:

The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog. . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.   This is unbelieveable too, thinking arother person is a dog just because of the country they come from. That is a really bad way to think of someone. Also pumping slat water into a person to make them talk is discusting! And even shooting these inncent people when they have done nothing besides do that you told them to is also really messed up. -Batchelder3232 5/7/09 1:50 PM that is ridicilous. that is a way to judge someone by not even knowing who they were. -Nicole Pedone 5/8/09 9:17 AM

       Early in 1901 an American general returning to the United States from southern Luzon, said:

One-sixth of the natives of Luzon have either been killed or have died of the dengue fever in the last few years. The loss of life by killing alone has been very great, but I think not one man has been slain except where his death has served the legitimate purposes of war. It has been necessary to adopt what in other countries would probably be thought harsh measures.

       Secretary of War Elihu Root responded to the charges of brutality: "The war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare. . . . with self-restraint and with humanity never surpassed."
       In Manila, a Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar. Other marine officers described his testimony:

The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied "Everything over ten."

In the province of Batangas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one-third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease.
       Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war:

We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag.
       And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power.

       American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks.  Is this really discution, having Philipnos people pilled up dead and using that as a way to kill more. i wouldn't be able to do that. Having a dead person infront of me and killing more. Gross.  -Batchelder3232 5/7/09 1:45 PM I dont think that I would like that either. I would probably get sick -Nicole Pedone 5/8/09 9:18 AMA British witness said: "This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery." He was wrong; it was war.
       For the rebels to hold out against such odds for years meant that they had the support of the population. General Arthur MacArthur, commander of the Filipino war, said: " . . . I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon -- the native population, that is -- was opposed to us." But he said he was "reluctantly compelled" to believe this because the guerrilla tactics of the Filipino army "depended upon almost complete unity of action of the entire native population."

 This hole conecpt of doing any of these things to any type of person is a unrealitic thing for this day and age. Thinking about someone doing this now is, it would never happen. I think that If you were a president you would take the land that was pretty much given to you. There are some really disterbing things that go on in the article. Losing all of these peope to a war that is going to mean nothing in 50 years is unbelieveable to me. It's something that isn't really worth fighting for.  -Batchelder3232 5/7/09 1:53 PM