Paul Drennan Cravath on the "White Man's Burden" in Island Southeast Asia

Paul Kravath, a founder of the Council of Foreign Relations and the famous New York Law firm of Kravath, Swaine and Moore, made several visits to Island Southeast Asia in the 1920s and 1930s. He left a private record of these visits in which he self-consciously applied the emerging Conservative American consensus on foreign policy begun by fellow lawyer and later American Secretary of State Elihu Root, an ideology which came to dominate American foreign policy through two world wars, the Cold War and beyond. This consensus was summarized in three words by the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the Iraq War as "Empire is good." Kravath's observations of colonialism in Southeast Asia, though embodying Roots' valorization of Anglo-American exceptionalism, were unique in several respects. First, he was forced to test his views against the challenge then being mounted against colonialism by nationalists across southern Asia. Second, he compared the will to empire among the colonial officials of the many colonies he visited, from British officials in Singapore to American officials in the Philippines. Third and finally, he made assessments as to the future course of colonialism and the fate of the colonized. What emerges from his account are insights into how and why the idea of empire trumped the realities of the coming era of de-colonization, realities which imperialists were unable to perceive as a result of the self-serving world view they had developed through processes known even then by near contemporary American observers of empire (such as Mark Twain), but which nonetheless have plagued imperial powers ever since.