In the 1890s, German immigrant Carl Schurz worried that a pernicious element in American national mythology — military expansionism — was regaining traction. A member of the Anti-Imperialist League, Schurz rallied against the powerful lobby clamoring to make Cuba and the Philippines part of the United States.

Like many anti-imperialists then and now, he objected to the actions of US elites abroad on moral and ethical grounds. But as someone who lived through the political upheaval of the American Civil War, Schurz had a unique perspective on imperialism’s revival: it was also a betrayal of the Union cause.

He saw the militaristic foreign policy of the 1890s as a return to the politics of “Slave Power,” which he had fought so hard against forty years earlier.