In the winter of 1903–04, Robert P. Skinner, the American consul at Marseille, represented the United States on its first diplomatic mission to Ethiopia. He had been thinking about the trip for years, watching from the French Riviera as the European powers expanded their presence across Africa. Excepting only Liberia, Ethiopia—or, Abyssinia, as Europeans and Americans liked to call it—remained the sole independent nation on the continent, and Skinner wanted the United States to form an official relationship with this holdout against European imperialism. The United States went to Ethiopia in search of a treaty of amity and commerce with its emperor, Menelik II. Skinner viewed his trip as a diplomatic mission to a nation that could potentially be a useful trading partner. In such a light, there seems to have been no reason for issues of race to come up at all, but Ethiopia was in Africa. Progressive Era Americans, both white and black, could not talk about Africa without talking about race, because racism defined the parameters of existence in their own nation. It also defined the parameters of Ethiopia's participation in a European-dominated world.

Figure 1.

Robert P. Skinner, date unknown. Image courtesy of the Massillon Museum, Massillon, Ohio.

In March of 1896, Ethiopia stunned the imperial powers by routing the invading Italian army at the Battle of Adwa and securing Ethiopian independence.Footnote ² On the other side of the world, later that spring, the U.S. Supreme Court decided (with one dissenting vote), “Legislation is powerless to eradicate racial instincts or to abolish distinctions based upon physical differences,” thereby giving a green light to racial segregation of public spaces.Footnote ³ The irony of legalizing racism in the immediate aftermath of one of the greatest assaults on assumptions of white superiority did not go unnoticed at the time but remained contained within circles largely cut off from the national press and the national government. While pan-Africanist blacks within the United States argued that Adwa marked a critical moment in black history, white Americans who talked about it at all largely dismissed the idea that Adwa had anything to with black Africans, because they imagined Ethiopia not to be a black nation. It was, they insisted, a Semitic one that just happened, like Egypt to its north, to reside in Africa. By the time Skinner began thinking about initiating diplomatic relations, he could confidently argue that Ethiopia's ability to hold back the European powers who wanted its land proved that although it was not a white nation, it was not a black one either. Ethiopia could be a potentially useful trading partner because its racial makeup put it at a stage of development that did not require overt control by white men, but, instead, simply assistance from them to learn to want the products of American civilization.

Skinner's mission was a minor episode in the history of U.S. foreign relations: Ethiopia never became a major trading partner, and it did not become an important ally until the Cold War. The mission deserves historical attention, then, not so much for its diplomatic achievements but for what it reveals about turn-of-the-century America. Those white Americans who took the time to think about Ethiopia in 1903 understood it to be an African anomaly. Many black Americans disagreed, sensing that their own struggle for racial equality demanded recognizing that the only African nation that had been able to remain independent by virtue of its own ability was a nation of black men. Progressive Era Americans said a great deal about themselves when talking about Ethiopia.

***

Skinner and his wife Helen had been living in Marseille for almost five years when he first received notice from Assistant Secretary of State Francis B. Loomis that he was going to lead the mission to Ethiopia. He had written letters to Loomis's predecessor about the possibilities of commercial expansion in Ethiopia, noting that the British, the French, and the Russians were moving quickly to establish a dominant presence in the region where there existed “a vast population, politically independent, and capable of absorbing our products.” He viewed it as a serious oversight.Footnote ⁴ He tried again in 1903, telling Loomis that rather than waiting for the European powers successfully to gain control of the Ethiopian market, “we should seek to avert it through the negotiation of a treaty.” The trip, he promised, would cost little and secure much.Footnote ⁵ When Skinner learned that he was going to get his diplomatic mission, he quickly penned an enthusiastic note, filled with exclamation points and underlines. “This Abyssinia matter is all your doing!” Skinner extolled Loomis. “I have hammered away at the idea for five years without success, and now, in less than five weeks you have sent me the cash. I am,” he continued, “very grateful for your interest. I shall try to justify your faith.”Footnote ⁶

Skinner was personally fascinated by Ethiopia, but his mission was not one of safari-by-political-means. Although he and Helen spent most of their lives in Europe, he did not make other trips to “exotic” global locales. Ethiopia was the exception. Skinner kept pushing the White House to send him to Addis Ababa because he thought that the nation would become an important trading partner if the United States could get there before the European nations closed off access. Once there, he argued, the U.S. presence would help Ethiopia maintain its independence. Skinner believed that an official trade relationship with the United States had the power to transform Ethiopia. Faith in what American goods and American diplomacy could offer a presumably “uncivilized” African nation was not unusual for the time.

Such confidence grew out of a century of economic development. The United States entered the nineteenth century a weak Atlantic power clustered on the seaboard and uncertain of its economic future. It entered the twentieth century as the globe's leading industrial power, with borders stretching from sea to sea, linked by railroads and telegraphs that revolutionized the movement of people, goods, and information. By 1890, the United States consumed more energy than any other nation and produced more coal and steel than its closest competitors—Britain and Germany—combined. The nation's population almost doubled between the Civil War and the end of the century, and it grew to be second only to Britain in the extent of its international trade. Most notably for Skinner and his interest in Ethiopian imports, the United States had recently stolen dominance in cotton-goods manufacturing from Britain—thereby symbolically demonstrating the superiority of America's more recent Industrial Revolution.Footnote ⁷

With William McKinley's victory in 1896, the executive branch firmly embraced the idea that the government should use all aspects of its foreign policy to further the needs of American business in order to keep up production and consumption. A talented politician with well-connected friends, McKinley subscribed to the Republican notion of partnering government and business to boost industrialization. His party received three-quarters of its national campaign funds from corporations, most particularly from men who earned their living from manufacturing and finance, and McKinley was not about to disappoint his benefactors. This partnership meant that the U.S. government would continue its high tariff rates, embrace the gold standard, and calm the fears of American businessmen that they were going to out-perform their market by pushing open previously closed economic doors.Footnote ⁸ McKinley was unabashed about his goal, telling Robert La Follette that attaining U.S. supremacy in the global market was his “greatest ambition.” The U.S. government set out to open new hunting grounds to American businessmen, at times using treaties and at other times, even though McKinley had traditionally argued against it, using war.Footnote ⁹

By the time Roosevelt became president, McKinley's pursuit of economic opportunity had left the United States with a continuing war in the Philippines, troops in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and a domestic argument about how far the Constitution would follow the flag. Roosevelt learned from his predecessor's misadventures in the tropics to pursue open doors without annexation, despite the federal government's willingness to stop the Constitution at the continental borders.Footnote ¹⁰ The opening of his Second Annual Message to Congress in December 1902 read, “The events of the last four years have definitely decided that, for woe or for weal, our place must be great among the nations.” The United States can no longer “play a small part” in world affairs, he admitted, both because of its enlarged empire and because its economics might depend on market expansion, but such expansion would come through reciprocity treaties instead of territories. “They can be used to widen our markets and to give a greater field for the activities of our producers on the one hand,” he insisted, “and on the other hand to secure in practical shape the lowering of duties when they are no longer needed for protection among our own people.” Promoting American business would promote America's future—not only by securing continued economic growth, but also by encouraging more nations to become “civilized,” and, as such, friends. “As civilization grows,” he concluded, “warfare becomes less and less the normal condition of foreign relations.” Future peace depended on future prosperity.Footnote ¹¹

Sensing that his moment had arrived, Skinner pounced on the opportunity finally to get funding for his proposed trip to Ethiopia. Commerce there, he wrote, “has created itself in spite of American indifference to the desirability of having direct contact with consuming markets, and is susceptible of being greatly increased.” It was a message that the White House was ready to hear. That summer, Roosevelt called the Skinners to Washington to prepare for the trip. “The President,” Helen wrote with evident satisfaction in her journal, “is taking much personal interest in the Expedition to Ethiopia.”Footnote ¹²

Robert shared Helen's delight in Roosevelt's reaction, noting later, “Decidedly the idea of a Mission to the Court of Menelik had caught the President's fancy. One could almost imagine that nothing in his administration had interested him so much.” Describing their meeting in the White House, Skinner remembered that Roosevelt “walked to and fro, exhausting one subject then another.”

“It was all,” Skinner concluded, “very electrifying.” It was classic Roosevelt. Although Skinner might have believed that “nothing in his administration had interested him so much,” Roosevelt reacted to the proposed trip to Ethiopia as he reacted to every idea that caught his fancy. Henry Adams wrote of his friend that “he enjoyed a singularly direct nature and honest intent, but he lived naturally in a restless agitation that would have worn out most tempers in a month, and his first years of Presidency showed chronic excitement that made a friend tremble.”Footnote ¹⁴ The image of the president pacing the room while spouting out everything he knew about the topic at hand was a familiar one to anyone who knew him well and certainly did not mean that there was nothing else interesting him “so much” at that time.

Skinner's recollection of Roosevelt's intellectual ramblings offers great insights into how Americans thought about Ethiopia. Long imagined in the West as a romantic land of adventure—an outpost of semi-civilization in the wilds of Africa—Ethiopia's victory at the Battle of Adwa challenged the accepted paradigm of the inevitable triumph of Western civilization. Influenced by the pseudo-scientific race dogma and the environmental determinism of the day, many people found shocking Ethiopia's ability to defeat the imperialists who wanted to claim it. The nation was an anomaly in the modern world: an African empire, seemingly dwelling in the past, that nevertheless could maintain its independence. Ethiopia threatened popular Anglo-American racial and cultural stereotypes, which held that Teutonic peoples were destined to govern the world in the pursuit of progress for all. This turn-of-the-century racism was popular, in part, because it offered a “scientific” explanation of existing geographic disparities in global power. It also potentially offered justification for expanding America's international role, and prominent figures sometimes seized on it to defend U.S. foreign policy.Footnote ¹⁵

In her 1903 history of the United States, Ellen Churchill Semple, a prominent exponent of environmental determinism, argued that the nation was successful because its original Anglo-Saxon settlers “brought their best capital in the elements of European civilization,” which were then molded by the land to become something stronger and better than they had been in Europe. “Man is a product of the earth's surface,” she insisted in a later work, and cannot be understood apart from the land. Trying to explain Northern European political and economic dominance, Semple argued that mankind began to grow up when it left the tropics for colder climes that forced it to develop new abilities. Anglo-Americans represented the highest levels of development.Footnote ¹⁶ Such ideas were not new. Montesquieu had argued the importance of climate and geography on a society's development in 1748, and Frederick Jackson Turner had updated the theory to fit with the particular circumstance of American development in the early 1890s. Semple's audience was predisposed to agree with her conclusions.Footnote ¹⁷

While environmental determinism offered support for white superiority—particularly of the Northern European variety—and American nationalist-exceptionalism, it also raised new questions about Ethiopia's own exceptionalism. Even admitting, as Roosevelt did in an 1899 letter to an English friend, that the Abyssinians had been victorious at Adwa because they were fighting Italians instead of members of the superior Teutonic race, their continued independence was puzzling.Footnote ¹⁸ How could a geographic space in the tropic band north of the equator have provided the necessary stimulus to develop the Ethiopians into a level of civilization where they could continually hold out against European dominion?

Some of the proposed solutions to the “problem” of Ethiopia were evident in Roosevelt's conversation with Skinner. The Ethiopians “were not negroes at all but of semitic stock,” living in “a dry and partly desertic [sic] country.”Footnote ¹⁹ Both observations contained a measure of truth and of wishful thinking. The Amhara-Tigrean peoples of Ethiopia dominate the highlands and center their identity in the old Aksumite civilization, most notable for its Semitic language of Gèez, its members' distinct features, and its adoption of Christianity during the fourth century. Many of Ethiopia's peoples, however, locate their historic identity to the south and the southwest, as opposed to southern Arabia, speak languages very different from those common in the highlands, and do not adhere to the Christian faith. As for the land, it is as diverse as the people—containing deserts, mountains, forests, and savannas—but not utterly unlike its neighbors.Footnote ²⁰ Ethiopia did not fit into the prescribed racial and environmental categories of the time, and it needed to be studied. There would be no better place to do it, it seemed clear, than at the upcoming Louisiana Purchase International Exposition, which would house, its creators boasted, “the largest assemblage of the world's peoples in the world's history.”Footnote ²¹ Roosevelt asked Skinner not only to get Menelik to sign a trade agreement, but to get him to send representatives to the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. Americans interested in the relatively new science of anthropology were almost necessarily also interested in Ethiopia. For them, Skinner's mission promised both opportunity and information.

Skinner's journey sparked excitement around the nation as newspapers and magazines scrambled to capture readers' attention with descriptions of his destination. The Washington Post was likely on the mark about much of its readership when it acknowledged that “most of us have an idea that Africa is a country without trade or civilization and properly comes under the description Darkest.” Of Abyssinia in particular, the newspaper continued, “we have a notion that the country is steeped in savagery, and that the inhabitants wear rings in their ears and noses, and have fig-leaf clothing, which we imagine they wear only when Kodak fiends are known to be in the neighborhood.”Footnote ²² In an effort to overcome such stereotypes, Harper's Weekly offered its readers a more sophisticated look at Ethiopia that celebrated its rich cultural heritage and its role in international trade.Footnote ²³ The two portrayals highlighted the conflicting views Americans held of Ethiopia. It was an African nation, so it must be barbaric. It was, and always had been, an independent nation, so it must be at least partially civilized.

For the American officials supporting Skinner's mission, understanding Ethiopian independence required highlighting its Semitic roots. Describing Ethiopia as a unique outpost of Semitic civilization in Africa, they used the nation's current level of progress to further support their own agenda of promoting American economic expansion over European imperialism. Menelik's nation was not so barbaric that it needed to be dominated by an outside power for it to move into a new stage of social development. Ethiopia did not need a new government; it simply needed new goods. For African Americans who had relished the victory at Adwa, it was imperative that it be known that Ethiopia was a black nation that could boast of an astonishing history. Disproving the racist theories undergirding their nation's global program for progress and its concurrent domestic segregation policies demanded that it be an African, not a Semitic, nation.

Black Americans, especially those influenced by nationalist or pan-Africanist ideas, saw Ethiopia as proof that the white races of Europe were not inherently superior to the black races of Africa. In his 1903 work, The Souls of Black Folks, W. E. B. Du Bois traced Egypt's foundations to Ethiopia, insisting on the black roots of the one of the world's most celebrated civilizations: “The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx.”Footnote ²⁴ Author and editor Pauline Hopkins agreed. Her novel, Of One Blood, serialized between 1902 and 1903 in the Colored American Magazine, centered the past and future of humankind in Ethiopia. Hopkins argued that not only were all people of one stock, but all could trace their origins to Ethiopia, which could also claim the foundations of all the great ancient civilizations. God punished the Ethiopians for their vanity centuries ago, but he also promised to restore them when the time was right. “Fair-haired worshippers of Mammon,” one of her Ethiopians announces to a white American visitor, “do you not know that you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting? that your course is done? that Ethiopia's bondage is about over, her travail passed?”Footnote ²⁵ Hopkins's novel struck at the heart of America's racial debate, with its black Ethiopians possessing wisdom beyond anything the celebrated Anglo-Saxon civilization had produced.Footnote ²⁶

Pauline Hopkins's work built on old ideas within the African American community. American slaves had long found hope in Psalm 68:31: “Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God,” which they—as Menelik after them—read as a promise of deliverance. The Revolutionary-era writer Phillis Wheatley drew regularly on this imagery, calling herself “Ethiop” and filling her poetry and prose with mythologizing as well as biblical references to Ethiopia and Egypt; an admirer responded by dedicating a poem to the “Ethiopian Poetess.”Footnote ²⁷ In 1829, David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World promised, “The God of the Ethiopians, has been pleased to hear our moans in consequence of oppression; and the day of our redemption from abject wretchedness draweth near, when we shall be enabled . . . to stretch forth our hands to the Lord our God.”Footnote ²⁸ Frederick Douglass used the verse in his famed Fourth of July address in 1852. Likewise, in his History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880, George Washington Williams used the verse to frame words of hope for the future progress (defined as the spread of Christianity, technology, and wealth) of blacks on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote ²⁹ Beginning in the late eighteenth century, when black Protestants left white churches, they often added African, Abyssinian, or Ethiopian to stand alongside the denominational labels of their new houses of worship. Originally, “Ethiopia” stood for all of Africa. After 1896, it stood for the nation that had triumphed over its would-be white oppressors, although the phrase “Ethiopian race” was still used to refer to blacks in general. In its various manifestations, such Ethiopianism celebrated an ancient black civilization, a special relationship between Africans and African diaspora peoples and God, and a promise of future triumph for people of African descent (at a time when most people did not recognize that all humans are of African descent). The victory at Adwa made this triumph seem imminent.Footnote ³⁰

Ethiopianism celebrated a cyclical view of history that contrasted sharply with the dominant linear view that had been created in the previous century to explain the European rise to power. People from other parts of the world suspected that the Europeans had false confidence in the stability of their power. European civilization currently reigned supreme on the global stage, but it had not always done so, and it would not always do so. As the Fates in ancient Greece warned the lucky not to grow accustomed to good fortune, black Americans whispered, preached, and proclaimed that God would strike down their oppressors and revive the glorious African civilization that he was currently humbling. W. E. B. Du Bois's and Pauline Hopkins's consciousness of a global black community—united by color and shared experiences of discriminatory racial hierarchies and economic disadvantages—led them to value Ethiopia not for its potential usefulness as a minor trading partner with the United States, but as a symbol of African power and African promise.Footnote ³¹

***

When Skinner set out for Ethiopia, he was one of a long line of foreign travelers who had ventured into its highlands in search of souls, slaves, gold, ivory, and knowledge.Footnote ³² More recently, they had come for land. His quest was different, he proudly boasted, because “America was the first country to establish diplomatic relations for the avowed purpose of protecting and extending commerce, and without a political issue of any character to discuss.”Footnote ³³ We wanted, he insisted, only the freedom to sell our goods—most importantly cotton sheeting—and buy theirs—most importantly coffee. The Europeans did not believe it, but “read something mysterious and even a little sinister in his project.” They tended to see themselves in other nations, Skinner implied, and were worried about Roosevelt's intentions in their domain. “Years before,” he noted in his journal, “France, Italy and Great Britain had set up parched and dreary coastal colonies which effectively hemmed in Ethiopia from the sea, and were watching each other as they were now watching President Roosevelt.”Footnote ³⁴ They did not rule Ethiopia, but they dominated its links to the outside world, and they did not want the United States to alter that situation.

Skinner journeyed to Ethiopia via Europe, for that was the quickest way to reach the Horn of Africa, which undoubtedly reinforced the image of European domination over the continent. Skinner, his brother-in-law Horatio Wales, and long-time-friend A.P.L. Pease, left New York City on October 8, 1903, sailing first to Naples and then on to Beirut, where they were joined by a guard of twenty-seven marines who continued on with them. The group landed to a “hospitable welcome” in French-controlled Djibouti, where its leader was struck by the “excessive heat,” the “tame leopard which paraded before the Cafè,” and “the shiny black Somali children, whose nakedness was not encouraging to my desire to find a market for American sheetings.”Footnote ³⁵ They spent two “pleasant days” in Djibouti before hopping on a train that took them across the deserts of Djibouti and into the grasslands of eastern Ethiopia. They halted at the “boom city” of Dire Dawa. The train—an object that represented both modernity and imperialism—had yet to reach Addis Ababa, so here the travelers turned to older forms of transportation: horses and mules and feet.

In his 1906 book describing his journey, Abyssinia of To-day: An Account of the First Mission Sent by the American Government to the Court of the King of Kings, 1903–1904, Skinner chose this moment in his narrative to address the nature of the modern Ethiopian polity. He did not want his readers to arrive in Addis Ababa not knowing anything about the nation's history and its current ruler. Menelik, Skinner wrote of the emperor who so impressed him on his trip, “has created the United States of Abyssinia—a work for which he was endowed by Nature with the constructive intelligence of a Bismarck, and the faculty for handling men by sheer amiability of a McKinley.”Footnote ³⁶ Born Sahle Maryam in 1844 to a family that had ruled the Shawa province for nine generations, Menelik took control of all of Ethiopia in 1889. Knowing that he needed peaceful relations with the Europeans in order to concentrate on consolidating power at home, he made an agreement with Rome that gave Italy a large Red Sea colony (Eritrea) in return for its recognition of Ethiopia's independence. When Italy went against its promise, he shocked the world by defeating the European nation at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. Consequent boundary agreements with Rome, London, and Paris halted open discussion about Ethiopia's borders.Footnote ³⁷ Menelik built modern Ethiopia by force of arms; he maintained it through the consolidation of power in his new capital city and the introduction of Western technology, which connected him with his expansive empire and the international community.

Figure 2.

King Menelik of Ethiopia with his court in Addis Ababa in 1903. The photo is from the scrapbooks of the 1903 Skinner expedition to Ethiopia. Image courtesy of the Massillon Museum, Massillon, Ohio.

Modern states demand capital cities and, in 1886 Menelik's consort Queen Taytu chose to move the royal court to a Shawan site famous for its thermal springs, naming it Addis Ababa (“new flower”).Footnote ³⁸ The emperor made it his official capital five years later, ending the tradition of a moving court, which opened the door to permanent European legations. By 1910, about 70,000 people made their home in Addis Ababa.Footnote ³⁹ Recognizing that maintaining power demanded constant contact with the “outside world,” Menelik embraced the same technologies that had girded America's earlier expansion: roads, railroads, telegraphs, and telephones. Reflecting on Menelik's efforts, Skinner wrote, “He wishes to lift his people up to the point of being able to comprehend and utilize these modern improvements and inventions, and to turn them to their own advantage, for the defense of their country and their national liberty.”Footnote ⁴⁰ The emperor was determined that his nation would remain independent and that it would prosper, sending a message to the white world that Ethiopia was its equal.

The U.S. mission made its way by foot, horse, and mule through grasslands, deserts, and highlands on its way to Addis Ababa. In deference to the racial theories of the day, Skinner felt compelled to highlight the distinctions between the nation's Semitic ruling class and the “savages” that peopled the empire's exterior. On reaching the King's Highway to Addis ten days later, Skinner noted his relief. “When one has been . . . cut off from every vestige of civilization . . . the first sight of even a telephone pole evokes the joy one feels upon finding one's self among old friends.” From that point on, he continued, they “traveled along the main road in Abyssinia, and encountered frequent caravans, usually mule caravans, laden with hides, coffee, and ivory.”Footnote ⁴¹ Along the way, the Americans hunted game, chased off monkeys, and photographed the scenery, which Skinner was afraid would not last long in the “modernizing” nation. They also handed out “a number of exceedingly stiff-printed muslin flags of red and yellow, the colours of the St. Louis Exposition,” leaving a little bit of the United States behind them as they traveled.Footnote ⁴²

The U.S. delegation reached Addis Ababa twenty-two days after landing in Djibouti and found nothing but hospitality in Menelik's capital. Life there, Skinner recorded, “proved to be both intimate and informal.” The emperor greeted the group immediately, sitting “in Oriental fashion” on his throne surrounded by the hundreds of people who participated in his court. After being announced, Skinner presented the emperor with an invitation to participate in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, which Menelik took, “evidently surprised and pleased,” but announced (in Amharic, translated into French) that the details could be discussed at a later time, though the Ethiopians apparently had neither time nor money, Skinner later wrote with regret, to send an exhibit to St. Louis. After a brief audience, the Americans were escorted to a nearby palace, which would be their home for their stay in the capital. The officers set up quarters inside. The marines erected Camp Roosevelt on the front lawn where they were barraged by locals who were quite pleased with their visitors. This arose, Skinner thought, “from the popular conviction that American friendship had no dangers, and would be a source of moral strength to the nation.”Footnote ⁴³ Menelik seemed to share his conviction.

The initial meeting revolved around introductions and invitations; the second focused on the real task at hand: a treaty of reciprocity. One of the emperor's chief advisors came to escort Skinner back to the palace at ten o'clock the following morning for his informal audience with His Majesty. “The Emperor,” Skinner remembered, “was amazed when I handed him a project of treaty written in his own language by Professor [Enno] Littmann, of Princeton University . . . probably the only man in the United States familiar with Amharic.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This small act of American courtesy undoubtedly helped smooth the way for the mission. In addition, Skinner presented Menelik with a signed portrait of Roosevelt, which “excited his liveliest interest”; a copy of the president's book on North American Big Game; a “beautiful American writing-machine”; a “well-selected lot of American garden seeds”; and a “magazine rifle of the latest model.” At the last, “the imperial eyes brightened with evident pleasure,” and Menelik promptly demanded that Horatio Wales demonstrate the weapon there in the throne room before taking a shot with it himself. “There was immediately,” Skinner wrote, “a wild stampede for cover on the part of the satellites while the imperial had pulled the trigger.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The emperor apparently found it all very amusing.

Although the two groups engaged in displays of friendship, business was never far from their minds. Skinner had been pressing for an American treaty with Ethiopia for years, and he was eager to accomplish his goal. Describing the treaty negotiations in his book, he wrote that it was clear that “the forces now at work for the development of Ethiopia” were not helping “American commercial ambitions.” It thus seemed “a perfectly obvious business proposition that the United States Government should look into this field, where we had an actual interest of no mean importance, and defend it by the simple process of procuring a treaty which should guarantee to our people equal treatment in respect to trade conditions.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The final treaty reflected this view, offering most-favored-nation status and free travel and trade to each others' citizens for a duration of ten years in order to render commercial relations “more and more advantageous to the two contracting Powers.”Footnote ⁴⁷ With Menelik's signature, Skinner could congratulate himself on opening a new door for America's commercial empire. Ethiopia's future as a consuming nation would play a small part in the fight against perceived overproduction in the United States.

Figure 3.

Horatio W. Wales holding one of the lions sent by King Menelik of Ethiopia to President Theodore Roosevelt. Photo taken in Alexandria, Egypt while waiting for a Hagenback Circus boat coming through the Suez with a shipment of animals for the United States, January 1904. Image courtesy of the Massillon Museum, Massillon, Ohio.

In addition to the treaty, Skinner also worked to fulfill his government's additional requests. These included “a vast amount of trade information,” which he collected throughout the trip in order to create a commercial report for the State Department. In response to requests from the Department of Agriculture, he “secured a collection of the seeds of the more important crops peculiar to Ethiopia, a number of which may be found valuable in the exploitation of the uncultivated western lands of the United States, now being made available by the extension of our irrigation system.” He announced, alas, that he had been unable to procure any wild coffee seeds, as they could only be found in the remote province of Kaffa, but he had ordered some to be shipped to the United States as soon as possible. In regard to Roosevelt's particular interest in the Grevy Zebra, Skinner noted with disappointment that his efforts to obtain a pair for cross-breeding purposes had been “in vain,” because they “are exceedingly rare and difficult to capture, alive.” As with the coffee, he left instructions that a pair should be shipped as soon as possible. Finally, he noted, “the invitation to participate in the Louisiana Purchase Exposition has been accepted, and the preliminary orders were given during my visit in Addis Ababa for the collection of material necessary for a proper exhibit.”Footnote ⁴⁸

The American delegation remained in Addis Ababa for nine days, celebrating Christmas with the local British delegation, whose members were willing, economic competition notwithstanding, to share food and spirits with their fellow Anglo-Saxons. In recognition of the gifts that the Americans had brought to him, Menelik gave Skinner two “superb” elephant tusks and two eight-month old lion cubs, “as playful as kittens,” for Theodore Roosevelt. One of the cubs died on the journey back to the coast, but the other survived to be shipped to Washington. Writing to Loomis about the gifts immediately after landing in Marseille, Skinner noted that it would have been impossible for him to have declined the presents. “To have refused would have been extremely ungracious, and would have created a very unpleasant impression at a critical moment in the negotiations.” The emperor, he continued, “was much interested in the President's personality, and the gifts represent a genuine warmth of feeling.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The animals kept coming, with additional lions and a zebra named “Dan” arriving from Ethiopia that fall—just in time to be viewed as a congratulatory gift from Menelik on Roosevelt's recent re-election.Footnote ⁵⁰ Such gifts delighted the science-minded Roosevelt and hint that Menelik knew more than one might think about the American president.

With the exception of the lion, which gave them “no end of trouble throughout the journey,” Skinner's mission experienced no difficulties on the trip home, reaching French-controlled Djibouti “with imperishable recollections of a great adventure and feelings of friendly warmth for the people we had left behind.”Footnote ⁵¹

***

In the opening section of its January 23, 1904, edition—after announcing Roosevelt's clear hold on the Republican nomination—Harper's Weekly directed its readers' attention to the news from Africa. The treaty with Menelik “has been duly concluded,” the article read, and “all parties are to be congratulated.” The United States will get complete control of “something like a million dollars' worth of trade in American cotton goods, which now finds its way by indirect routes through various third parties.” The Ethiopians “will doubtless pay us in ‘jungle products,’ such as ivory, wax, and gum Arabic.” Still, this would not be the end of it. “When we remember that the Ethiopian empire is about the size of California, with thrice the population, a somewhat similar climate, and great natural resources, we can easily look forward to a time when these resources will be exploited by American enterprise and skill, and when the whole country will be so opened up that its exports and imports will be multiplied tenfold.”Footnote ⁵² Ethiopia seemed to be ideally situated to make the most of its new relationship.

In a letter dated January 13, 1904, to Secretary of State John Hay, William Ellis of New York reported on his own private journey to Ethiopia the previous year. The people, he wrote, “are of a healthy condition, strong and brave and all they need is good advice and teaching from a friendly nation which I am satisfied that they will get at the hands of this great nation.” Recalling his own meeting with Menelik, Ellis insisted that the emperor “is greatly impressed with America and feels under many obligations” to Roosevelt and his cabinet. It was a feeling Ellis apparently shared, for he went on to say that “as an American and a man in the commercial world,” he did not “know how to thank you and the administration for this connection,” which “leaves an open field for a great many young Americans and for the American trade and commerce” in what will someday “be one of the richest countries of the dark continent.” If he read the Harper's article that came out ten days after his letter, Ellis surely agreed with its optimism that the treaty signaled a brighter future for both nations.Footnote ⁵³

William Ellis was a businessman with an office at 29 Wall Street and, in that way, not unlike many of the men who were intent on finding international customers for American goods. Unlike most of those men, however, Ellis was not white, and his letter demonstrates the difficulty of a simple analysis of what Americans thought about Ethiopia. Ellis defined himself as “an American and a man in the commercial world,” and he viewed Ethiopia as both a potential market and as a nation that, with “good advice and teaching,” would become a beacon of wealth and independence in the “dark continent.” He told Hay that although Ethiopia's “civilization” had not yet “reached the standard that it is in this country,” American assistance ensured that it would eventually do so. He celebrated Skinner's mission both because he wanted new economic opportunities for Americans and because he believed that Ethiopia could “progress” in the same way the United States had in the previous century. For obvious reasons, he did not see race as a barrier to development. He himself had been born in a cabin in Texas, yet he worked his way up the economic ladder to become “the only Negro who ever invaded Wall Street.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Progress was about opportunity, not racial destiny. If Ellis could become a wealthy man despite America's racist proclivities and policies, then Ethiopia could become a wealthy nation despite Europe's racist imperial designs. The United States could help.

Ellis did not suffer from a blind nationalism; he knew the evils that plagued his country. In 1906, he caused an uproar by disobeying the Texas segregation laws that demanded he exit his Pullman car during its passage through that state on its way from Mexico to New York. The Washington Post reported that the “Negro Capitalist” ignored “all orders to go into the negro compartment of the day coach,” leaving the railroad “liable to heavy penalties.” Eleven years later, he wrote a letter to Roosevelt thanking him for a speech at Carnegie Hall in which the former president “denounced the murder and crime against the Black men of the country.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Well aware of the limitations of an American civilization defined in terms of Northern Europeans, Ellis nevertheless embraced the popular faith that American goods could transform nations. However, unlike them, his confidence in Ethiopia's future progress did not require identifying it as a Semitic nation, and that distinction hit at the heart of the domestic implications of ideas driving American foreign policy. Ellis told The New York Times that, when asked by Menelik to give a speech, he announced: “As our American motto is, America for Americans, Monroe Doctrine, so I hope your motto will soon be Africa for Africans, Menelik Doctrine, and Europe for Europeans.”Footnote ⁵⁶ For Ellis, race had nothing to do with ability, be it on an individual or a national scale.

Black identity in America could not be separated from black identity in Africa. “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,” Du Bois famously wrote, which dominated “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The struggle to define Menelik as the leader of black Africa was necessarily tied to the struggle for racial equality at home. Even more than that, it directly addressed the struggle to combat the Anglo-Saxon vision of history that placed all the glories of the past, present, and future firmly in white hands. Pauline Hopkins and Du Bois struggled for equality, but they believed that the future held something even better, and they were not alone. Many black contemporaries—at home and abroad—shared their faith that change was going to come through Ethiopia.Footnote ⁵⁸

In 1915, American artist Meta Warrick Fuller served as a reader for the historian Freeman Murray's book, Emancipation and the Freed in American Sculpture: A Study in Interpretation. In its pages, she discovered a sculpture by Anne Whitney, from 1862–63, titled Ethiopia (Africa). “The symbolization is that of a colossal Ethiopian woman, in a half recumbent position,” Murray described. “She has been sleeping for ages in the glowing sands of the desert, out of which she is lifting herself.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Here, “Ethiopia” is clearly synonymous with Africa and clearly tied to the Emancipation Proclamation. Fuller wrote to Murray of her interest in the theme of “The Rise of Ethiopia” and told him that she would someday like to attempt it. That moment came in preparation for the America's Making Exposition, held in New York in 1921, for which Fuller sculpted her own Ethiopia: a woman with black physiognomy facial features, an Egyptian king's headdress, and mummified legs that seem to place her in the midst of a transformation. Like her predecessor, she too is waking up.Footnote ⁶⁰ Fuller's sculpture gave a physical form to the ideas that Hopkins and Du Bois (and many others) expressed in their writings: Egypt and Ethiopia were grand ancient black civilizations and Menelik's modern nation promised a different future for African Americans than the one offered by America's white leaders. Denied equal participation in the political arena, pan-Africanists spread their message of hope through vibrant, compelling works of literature and art—many of which centered on a nation few would ever have an opportunity to visit. Ethiopia the idea proved as powerful as Ethiopia the reality.

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Progressive Era Americans held competing visions of Ethiopia that respectively idealized its blackness and its less-than-blackness, according to the needs of the imaginer. They were not alone. Seven thousand miles away, Menelik, surrounded by advisors who had shared in his great victories with him, also believed that his nation's successes contained within them a message of meaning that resonated far past its borders. Back in 1893, Menelik first learned that the Italians had deceived him by changing the wording of a treaty signed between the two countries to say that not only did he grant Rome territory along the Red Sea, but he also “consents to avail himself” of the Italian government for any negotiations he wished to engage in with other European powers. The Amharic version that Menelik had signed read only that he “may, if he so desires,” do so. He promptly sent a letter to the capitals of Europe decrying the betrayal and insisting, “My country is strong enough to maintain its independence, and it does not care for any protectorate.” He concluded, “Ethiopia stretches her hands to God,” not to Rome.Footnote ⁶¹ His decisive victory at Adwa three years later was his vindication. God had special plans for Ethiopia and, notably, the celebration of those plans was open to blacks the world over.

In June of 1900, The New York Times reported that London would be hosting a Pan-African Conference the following month. “Southwest Africa, the West Indies, Abyssinia, and, it is said, the United States, will send representatives, with the view of looking after the general conditions of the colored race.”Footnote ⁶² Menelik sent his aide-de-camp, Benito Sylvain, to participate in his stead. Attendees voted to create a permanent Pan-African Association dedicated, in the first place, “to secure civil and political rights for Africans and their descendants throughout the world” and “to encourage friendly relations between the Caucasian and African races.” They made Menelik an honorary member. In the closing address, Du Bois asked that “the nations of the world respect the integrity and independence of the free Negro states of Abyssinia, Liberia, Haiti, and the rest” and that “the black subjects of all nations take courage, strive ceaselessly, and fight bravely, that they may prove to the world their incontestable right to be counted among the great brotherhood of mankind.”Footnote ⁶³

Menelik took his symbolic role in the struggle against global racism seriously. Ellis reported that when he described to him how Lincoln had freed the slaves, the monarch's eyes filled with tears. He was so delighted by the New Yorker's depictions of Andrew Carnegie's philanthropic efforts on behalf of education within the United States that he sent with Ellis a letter to the famous industrialist, thanking him for his “gift to the African Americans of the United States assisting and aiding them to gain a higher sphere of civilization, knowledge, virtue and morality and educating them on a higher plane.” The emperor told Carnegie that he was “greatly interested” in and “thankful” for his efforts. Carnegie had the letter framed.Footnote ⁶⁴

If the Roosevelt administration had been paying attention in 1903, it would have learned that the emperor of Ethiopia believed Adwa to be more than a struggle over territory. The battle on the ground was a manifestation of the white race's belief that it possessed a natural right to rule, and Ethiopia's victory was the decisive rebuttal. Menelik stretched his hands out to God, he proclaimed, not to the European powers. Black Americans found hope in Ethiopia's resilience and independence, but the whites who controlled the United States felt more comfortable in a world in which Ethiopia was a Semitic nation, not a black one. In 1935, twenty-two years after Menelik's death, when Benito Mussolini's militarized Italy stole Ethiopia's independence, many changed their minds. Under occupation, Ethiopia—now stretching out its hands to the League of Nations for promised protection—became black.

Mussolini told the American ambassador to Italy “that the people were illiterate, wild, barbarous, and in no way entitled to consideration by or respect of civilized nations, for Ethiopia was not a nation but an aggregation of slaves under a barbaric control.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Haile Selassie I, Ethiopian emperor at the time, asked only that his nation be seen as an equal, independent participant in the global community. “It is international morality that is at stake,” he told fellow members of the League of Nations in an eloquent and emotional call for assistance. They refused. Mexico, New Zealand, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States alone denied Italian sovereignty, but these countries also failed to offer relief. Franklin D. Roosevelt was not swayed by Mussolini's rhetoric but was hampered by an isolationist populace vehemently against intervening in any foreign war.Footnote ⁶⁶ The United States government's response was primarily guided by political, not racial, concerns, but the Italo-Ethiopian Crisis was often simplified in the American press into a war between Mussolini's white Blackshirts and Haile Selassie's “black warriors.” There was no question of who would come out on top.Footnote ⁶⁷

To readers who were perhaps confused by lingering memories of descriptions of Ethiopia as a Semitic country, the New York Times explained that the Abyssinians were the product of “a vast melting pot from practically every African tribe and race” whose “ethnology is lost in a welter of past confusions and migrations.” On the precipice of its conquest, it was convenient to think of Ethiopia as black—as the quintessential African nation that many black Americans had long perceived it to be. Even Haile Selassie himself was turned into an image of the continent: “The lion is probably the most familiar and conspicuous African,” observed a New York Times reporter, “not excluding the Lion of Judah, now crying out from the wilds of Ethiopia against the Wolf of Rome.” He would cry in vain, the reporter concluded, for “the Dark Continent” was “the only outlet” still left for the expansion of the “white races,” and they were desperate.Footnote ⁶⁸

The popular white American journalist Boake Carter explained the crisis as the inevitable outcome of the dwindling supply of regions available for European development. “So the blackman [sic] is now about to assume the role of guinea pig, of helpless, unwitting, innocent victim of the white man's self-complicated civilization.” Ethiopia's “Black Emperor” faced a mighty Italian foe because his nation was “ancient, feudalistic, and semi-barbaric.” The Italians would not have wanted it otherwise, because they were looking for “virgin” soil. There was no way to avoid race in such a situation. The British, Carter reported, are “fearful” that an Ethiopian victory or even a protracted war “may be the spark which will inflame the African blacks against their white rulers.” London offered shelter for Haile Selassie himself but promptly recognized Italy's sovereignty over his nation. “Mussolini's intention to wage war on a black race,” Carter insisted, “has set the fires of race differences and dislike glowing again, as they have not glowed for decades.” We can see it in our own country, he explained, in reference to a recent riot between blacks and Italians, “the significance of which cannot surely be missed.”Footnote ⁶⁹

In June of 1935, heavyweight champion Joe Lewis, “the Brown Bomber,” defeated the Italian fighter Primo Carnera. Professor Rayford W. Logan of Atlanta University told a reporter that he feared the victory “will be interpreted as additional insult to the Italian flag, which will permit Mussolini to assert the necessity for Italy to annihilate Abyssinia.”Footnote ⁷⁰ While the article seemed to find humor in Logan's concern, his sense of connection between black Americans and Ethiopia was prevalent throughout the country. That same month, Robert L. Ephraim, the president of the Negro World Alliance, announced a rally in Chicago to protest Italian aggression.Footnote ⁷¹ That fall, an article in the New York Age reported that the Italian invasion was just another example of “the Black Man's oppression by the whites.” Black journalists around the country urged their readers to defend “fellow Ethiopians” in Ethiopia, as did black activists, intellectuals, and theologians. Langston Hughes turned the summons into a poem: “But in the wake of your sacrifice/May all Africa arise/With blazing eyes and night-dark face/In answer to the call of Sheba's race.”Footnote ⁷²

W. E. B. Du Bois reported on the unrest in a 1935 Foreign Affairs article, noting that “mass meetings and attempts to recruit volunteers” to fight for Ethiopia have taken place in Harlem, the Caribbean, and throughout West Africa. “Despite the efforts of both France and England, there is widespread and increasing interest.” In the United States in particular, he continued, blacks “have reached a point today where they have lost faith in an appeal for justice based on ability and accomplishment.” They did not believe that a nation that knew the economic value of keeping them oppressed would yield to their calls for equality. “This attitude the action of Italy tends to confirm. Economic exploitation based on the excuse of race prejudice is the program of the white world. Italy states it openly and plainly.” The white world remained unmoved because Ethiopia was not white. “The hands which the Land of Burnt Faces is today stretching forth to the God of Things-that-be are both physical and spiritual,” Du Bois lamented, “and today, as yesterday, they twine gnarled fingers about the very roots of the world.”Footnote ⁷³

American responses to Ethiopia in victory and in defeat provide powerful examples of deep-rooted racial hierarchies and continual efforts to combat them. When white Americans reached out to Ethiopia in 1903 they were looking for customers in an interesting anomaly. In 1935, they did not reach out at all, resigning themselves to seeing the Italian invasion as the inevitable expansion of white civilization across the African continent. In contrast, when black Americans stretched out their hands to Ethiopia at both moments, they were searching for a brighter future that would give meaning to the sufferings of the past. In the moment of Ethiopia's defeat, they scored a bitter victory: Many of the heirs of European civilization decided Ethiopia was black.