McKinley’s train hissed to a gentle stop at eight forty-five the morning of September 3, 1898, at the Montauk, New York, station. There to greet him under a brilliant blue sky was an enthusiastic crowd “as motley a one as can well be imagined”—some two thousand soldiers, sailors, railroad employees, teamsters, and a few farmers from the surrounding countryside. Even Theodore Roosevelt was there, just back from Cuba. Determined to personally congratulate the president for winning the war, they surged toward McKinley, shouting their approval.
A short carriage ride away, nestled in the sand dunes, lay a hastily constructed hospital and convalescence center for returning soldiers named Camp Wikoff. In neatly laid out white tents, some eighteen thousand men, including a bedridden General Shafter, had assembled in an oddly impressive sight. “This is beautiful,” McKinley said as his carriage paused for a moment at the crest of a hill. “I think I never saw a handsomer camp.”1
McKinley, still every bit the former army officer, grilled nurses and doctors, toured kitchens, and examined horses brought there to give men exercise. The presidential visit hadn’t been widely advertised, and soldiers were stunned to hear from outside the flap of a tent that a surprise guest was about to enter. “Boys, the president has come to see you,” an officer would announce. Weak and gaunt with such tropical diseases as malaria and yellow fever in addition to their battle wounds, they propped themselves up in their cots as best they could to exchange a polite word with the commander in chief, offering as upbeat a prognosis on their conditions as possible, and mumbling platitudes such as, “I’m getting along, sir.”
It was a hot day with only a faint breeze wafting in from the ocean and, as usual, McKinley was overdressed for the occasion. Under his frock coat and waistcoat, he perspired profusely. His straw hat provided scant protection from the sun’s burning rays. Genuinely moved by the desperate condition of the most gravely ill and wounded, he brushed aside doctors’ warnings and entered wards containing contagious men. Reporters noticed that, emerging from the tent of one mortally ill soldier, McKinley’s eyes were moist and downcast.2 Time and again, The New York Timesreported, the president could be heard commenting, “How sorry I am to see these brave fellows in such condition.”
The visit was a sobering reminder of what McKinley had to do next. As The New York World editorialized in July, “We are not spending our blood and treasure in putting down one anarchy in Cuba for the sake of setting up another.”3
American soldiers don’t normally set the tone of the national psyche, but they were on the cutting edge in their conviction that handing the island over to the insurgents was lunacy. General William Ludlow, whom McKinley quickly appointed military governor of Havana, believed it would take at least a full generation before the Cubans would be fit for self-rule. “They are not as we are,” he wrote to McKinley. “They are Latins, and belong to a dying race, which seems not capable of reconstruction as a stable people as is the Anglo-Saxon.”4 The irascible General Shafter expressed his doubts in the colorful language of a former frontier solider. Responding to a reporter’s question, Shafter blurted out. “Self-government! Why those people are no more fit for self-government than gunpowder is for hell.”5
Comments like Shafter’s, which circulated widely, fueled an abrupt shift in the national mood regarding the whole Cuban problem. Arguments that had been overlooked or ignored before now suddenly seemed persuasive. It was pointed out, for example, that it would not be democratic for the United States to hand the island over to the insurgents when no more than 30,000 out of a population of 1.5 million had ever taken up arms.6 The New York Times summed it up in August when it wrote that the “higher classes” feared a “long reign of terror in which all who opposed the insurrection will suffer greatly.” The island’s business class feared a “government by machete.”7
The most egregious example of mob amnesia was how quickly lawmakers and pundits flip-flopped on the Teller Amendment, U.S. legislation to ensure Cuban independence. Written just a few months earlier, it was intended to provide moral cover for the war by declaring its noble purpose. Now Americans had second thoughts. It would be wrong to walk away from such a chaotic situation, given that the United States had unleashed it.
Congressmen conveniently discovered a rather large loophole they could use to escape their self-imposed straitjacket. The United States, the Teller Amendment read, “hereby disclaims any disposition of intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island except for pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the island to its people.”
The New York Times in mid-August found plenty of wiggle room in what became known simply as the “pacification clause.” The pledge “by no means binds us to withdraw at once, nor does full and faithful compliance with its spirit and letter forbid us to become permanent possessors of Cuba if the Cubans prove to be altogether incapable of self government.”8 Senator John T. Morgan, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, bluntly told a Cuban delegation that the Teller Amendment would require withdrawal of U.S. troops only “in such a manner and at such time as the competent authority in the United States shall provide.”9
For the Cubans, it was a horrific turn of events. They had struggled for decades to cut themselves free from the Spanish, and suddenly a new foreign power was seamlessly stepping in. And this time, the colonial experience would be unlike anything they had witnessed before.
While Spain had devoted neither resources nor vision to Cuba, the Americans descended with the energy and enthusiasm of a nation new to the colonial game and eager to show how it’s done. They distributed emergency food supplies to starving people in the countryside10 and dispatched doctors. In Havana, American officials led a house-by-house inspection of medical and sanitary conditions. They began cleaning streets, overhauled the water supply, and set up a native police force. New schools were opened and the educational system was reorganized to combat what had been widespread illiteracy.11 And it was all carried out under tight security. By March 1899, the United States had nearly forty-five thousand troops in Cuba, more than double the number it had sent to take Santiago.12
Benevolent though such work may have been, the Cubans had a more cynical view of the relationship. At times the humanitarian projects felt like the work of a SWAT team sent ahead to soften up the country for the real mission.
By the boatload, American businessmen began arriving in Havana almost as soon as the shooting had stopped—real estate tycoons, sugar and tobacco magnates, mineral company executives, and railroad engineers. Contracts for utilities and streetcar lines were handed out. Massive mineral deposits were opened to mining. Rich agricultural lands were put to the plow. All over the island, one could look up and see a sunburned American with a stack of papers under one arm, directing Cuban workers with the other.
Mining expert Charles M. Dobson, commissioned by the U.S. government to examine metal deposits, discovered enough manganese to meet 40 percent of American demand, as well as deposits of lead, copper, and zinc.13 As his report spread wildly, American money poured in, so much so that by the end of the occupation, over 80 percent of Cuba’s mineral exports were in American hands, most of those under the control of the Bethlehem Steel Company.
R. B. Hawley, another investor and former congressman from Texas, purchased sixty-six thousand acres of land near Puerto Padre, a harbor on the north coast, for himself and a group of Wall Street investors to build the largest sugar mill on the island. His farm alone could produce two hundred thousand bags of sugar, or about 10 percent of the entire Cuban crop.14 In 1899, the Havana Commercial Company, organized in New York City, scooped up twelve cigar factories and one cigarette factory in Havana and then took control of an important leaf-importing business. Altogether, by 1903, Americans would own thirty-seven different agricultural settlements in Cuba, accounting for between 7 and 10 percent of the entire island.15
As the American historian John Clark Redpath commented in the summer of 1899, “The idea that we are in Cuba on a philanthropic and humane mission has gone to join the other misplaced, absurd, and hypocritical pretexts which history has flung with a lavish hand into limbo near the moon.”16