For all of Sumner’s bombastic invocation of black rights, opposition to the Dominican annexation had taken on a racist tinge. Carl Schurz regretted that annexation would soon bring the absorption of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean islands in its wake. He described these islands as populated mainly by indolent black people and issued this challenge to treaty proponents: “Show me a single instance in any tropical country where labor when it was left free did not exhibit a strong tendency to run into shiftlessness, and where practical attempts to organize labor did not run in the direction
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