Chapter 20
When Frederick Jackson Turner and the U.S. census director couldn’t find a frontier in the West, they cited the growth and spread of the American population as the cause. Another reason, no less significant, was the abrupt halt of American territorial expansion. The American population didn’t grow much faster in the 1870s and 1880s than it had during most of the previous century, but for the first time the region available for settlement had stopped growing. The American domain effectively doubled in 1783, when Britain handed over the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley; it doubled again in 1803 when Jefferson acquired the western half of the valley from France in the Louisiana Purchase; it added another 50 percent in the 1840s upon the annexation of Texas, the conquest of California, New Mexico, and Utah, and the negotiated transfer of greater Oregon. William Seward bought Alaska from Russia in 1867.
And there the expansion stopped, to the surprise of much of the world, including many Americans. There were sufficient reasons for the halting, though they weren’t apparent all at once. In fact three decades would pass before the full meaning of American expansion would become clear, amid a bitter debate over whether it ought to resume and what it had to do with the continuing capitalist revolution.
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OMENS OF THAT debate informed the purchase of Alaska. Nearly all Americans found that frigid region less attractive than William Seward did. It was large but obviously unsuited to extensive settlement; the handful of non-indigenes—Russian fur traders, chiefly—clung to the shore at Sitka and a few other villages, dependent on provisions shipped in from outside. The precariousness of their existence was what compelled czars Nicholas I and then Alexander II to broach unloading Alaska to the Americans. Furs had drawn the Russians to Alaska, but the furs were playing out and the Russian treasury couldn’t stand the continued drain. The czars might have offered Alaska to Britain, but Britain was an enemy, or had been in the recent Crimean War. To strengthen an enemy would be foolish. Better to bequeath Alaska to the Americans, who were so convulsed by their internal problems as to threaten neither Russia nor anyone else.
William Seward understood Russia’s reasons for dumping Alaska; he had his own reasons for accepting it, starting with the bounty Alaska offered to American capitalists. Alaska’s furs might be thinning, but its fish—salmon that weighed a hundred pounds apiece, herring that schooled by the millions—would last forever. Timber—giant cedars and spruces, larger than anything Americans had seen outside the redwood belt of California—crowded to the ocean’s edge. Coal creased the mountains; iron deposits made compasses forget which way was north. Gold doubtless awaited only the discovering. Alaska’s harbors afforded shelter for ships plying the North Pacific, especially to Japan—lately opened to American trade—and China.
As obvious as Alaska’s charms were to Seward, the secretary of state understood that others in Washington were less discerning. “This negotiation must be conducted in the greatest secrecy,” he told the Russian minister, Edouard de Stoeckl, once the discussions grew serious in early 1867. “Let us see first if we can agree. It will be time then to consult Congress.” Seward offered $5 million for Alaska. Coincidentally or otherwise, Stoeckl’s instructions were to consider nothing less than $5 million. But he declined to commit, and a few days later Seward raised the offer to $7 million. Stoeckl accepted in principle, yet while Seward’s lawyers were formalizing the offer, one suggested stipulating that the transfer be unencumbered by any existing licenses or franchises. To compensate the Russian government for extinguishing such claims, an additional $200,000 was added to the purchase price. Stoeckl relayed the offer to St. Petersburg and received a favorable reply on Friday evening, March 29. He visited Seward’s home that night to tell him. The secretary was playing whist with family and friends; Stoeckl supposed that closing the deal could await the next day or the following Monday. Seward would hear nothing of the sort. Dropping his cards, he asked Stoeckl to meet him at the State Department in an hour. The American secretary and the Russian minister, flanked by their lawyers, initialed, engrossed, signed, and sealed the treaty for presentation to their respective governments.1
Seward hoped by his swiftness to present the Senate with a fait accompli, a bargain so tempting none but the willfully perverse could reject it. The pennies-per-acre price conjured parallels to the Louisiana Purchase, another impulsive acquisition, which had worked out splendidly. Yet opposition immediately arose. The New York Herald called Alaska an “ice house” and a “worthless desert”; the New York World declared the deal “one of the very neatest operations of Russian diplomacy.”
The treaty nonetheless cleared the Senate, largely on the strength of a marathon speech by Charles Sumner, chairman of the foreign relations committee, dilating upon the history, resources, and prospects of Alaska and summoning the spirit, lately silent, of Manifest Destiny. “The republic is something more than a local policy,” Sumner said. “It is a general principle, not to be forgotten at any time, especially when the opportunity is presented of bringing an immense region within its influence.”2
The House, which had to appropriate the money to underwrite the deal, put up greater resistance. “Seven million dollars in gold!” Hiram Price of Iowa expostulated. “How many hearts would this lift from the verge of despondency? How many orphans’ tears would it wipe away?”3
Yet Seward got the votes he needed. Some, in the spirit of Gilded Age politics, were purchased. “Do you wish to know how that treaty was consummated?” Seward asked editor and diplomat John Bigelow afterward. Bigelow said he did. “Then I must put you under oath,” Seward continued. “Before that money could be voted”—by the House—“twenty thousand had to be given to R. J. Walker”—formerly senator from Mississippi and secretary of the Treasury, lately legal adviser to Stoeckl and the Russian government—“ten thousand to his partner F. K. Stanton, ten thousand to ten members of Congress, and twenty thousand to Forney”—John W. Forney, friend of Walker and newspaper publisher of many pro-purchase articles. “Ten thousand more were to be given to poor Thad Stevens, but no one would undertake to give that to him, so I undertook it myself. The poor fellow died, and I have it now.”
Bigelow recorded this conversation in a diary that wasn’t made public for many years. Long before then the House approved the Alaska appropriation—by a margin of 113 to 43, which suggests either that Seward bought votes he didn’t need or that he didn’t tell Bigelow of all the votes he bought. The money evidently came from the $7.2 million purchase price, meaning that those congressmen who received payment were in the enviable position of voting their own bribes.4
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER wasn’t related to Charles Sumner, and he didn’t share the latter’s penchant for politics, instead devoting himself to science, history, and philosophy. He early imbibed the thinking of Charles Darwin, and that of Herbert Spencer when a bit older, and he followed Spencer in believing that Darwin’s theories explained the rise of civilization. Some people were better at the contest of life than others, Spencer and Sumner said; the good ones climbed out of the jungle of savagery and passed their talents to their offspring, who climbed still higher. The sorting took place both among nations, with the industrial powers of Europe and North America having made the greatest progress so far, and within nations, as certain individuals and families accomplished and attained more than the rest.
Such, to William Sumner, seemed as obvious as the inflamed nose on J. P. Morgan’s face, and as undeniable as death. Nor were these views especially controversial in America among the kinds of people who encountered Sumner’s essays in the leading journals of the 1880s and 1890s. Religious conservatives—who tended not to read the Forum, the North American Review, Harper’s, and similar fare—disputed anything to do with Darwin, but among the intelligentsia the description provided by Sumner and the other Social Darwinists didn’t elicit inordinate objection.
Sumner’s prescriptions were another matter. Sumner argued that attempts to overrule evolution—as by alleviating the plight of the poor—were both immoral and imprudent. “Those whom humanitarians and philanthropists call the weak are the ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of society are wasted,” he declared. “They constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize any better things.” The do-gooders had made a cottage industry of weeping for the weak.
They see wealth and poverty side by side. They note great inequality of social position and social chances. They eagerly set about the attempt to account for what they see, and to devise schemes for remedying what they do not like. In their eagerness to recommend the less fortunate classes to pity and consideration, they forget all about the rights of other classes, they gloss over the faults of the classes in question, and they exaggerate their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent new theories of property, distorting rights and perpetuating injustice, as anyone is sure to do who sets about the readjustment of social relations with the interests of one group distinctly before his mind, and the interests of all other groups thrown into the background. When I have read certain of these discussions, I have thought that it must be quite disreputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite unjust to go one’s own way and earn one’s own living, and that the only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing.
The reformers, Sumner said, were constantly hatching plans to employ the power of government on behalf of their favored victims. “Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type—that A and B decide what C shall do for D.” A and B were the reformers; they derived power and self-satisfaction from this arrangement. D, the object of their concern, received material benefits. C, whom Sumner called the “Forgotten Man,” unwillingly supported the others. “We should get a new maxim of judicious living,” Sumner said sarcastically: “Poverty is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will have to support other people; if you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you.”5
The immorality of freeloading aside, Sumner held that tampering with the social mechanism reduced total welfare. “If any one will look over his dinner table the next time he sits down to dinner, he can see the proofs that thousands of producers, transporters, merchants, bankers, policemen, and mechanics, through the whole organization of society and all over the globe, have been at work for the last year or more to put that dinner within his reach.” All this happened not by accident but by an interlocking set of agreements and expectations evolved over time. Reformers thought they could improve the operation of the social mechanism by bending this lever or adjusting that flywheel; instead they threw the whole thing out of order.6
Rejecting reform, Sumner put his faith in laissez faire. “Let us translate it into blunt English,” he said of the French phrase. “It will read: Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way.” Sumner didn’t promise paradise. “We never supposed that laissez faire would give us perfect happiness. We have left perfect happiness entirely out of our account.” He would settle for imperfection not made worse by reformers. “If the social doctors will mind their own business, we shall have no troubles but what belong to Nature. Those we will endure or combat as we can. What we desire is that the friends of humanity should cease to add to them.”7
Sumner’s philosophy supported domestic capitalism in obvious ways and was often cited to that effect; but it had implications for foreign policy as well. The struggle among humans took sharpest form in war, with the fit inheriting the earth and the meek finding early graves. This had been so from time out of mind, and the onset of industrialization hadn’t changed anything essential. “War has always existed and always will,” Sumner wrote. “It is in the conditions of human existence.” Tribes and nations competed for the resources of the earth, starting with land but extending, in the modern age, to vital minerals, markets for exports, and opportunities for investment. The deft and strong advanced, the rest retreated, and each tear devoted to the losers was water wasted. “The inevitable doom of those who cannot or will not come into the new world system is that they must perish. Philanthropy may delay their fate, and it certainly can prevent any wanton and cruel hastening of it; but it cannot avert it, because it is brought on by forces which carry us all along like dust upon a whirlwind.”
Yet Sumner refused to celebrate war, any more than he celebrated famine, pestilence, or other winnowers of the human race. “Shall any statesman … ever dare to say that it would be well, at a given moment, to have a war, lest the nation fall into the vices of industrialism and the evils of peace? The answer is plainly: No! … No war which can be avoided is just to the people who have to carry it on, to say nothing of the enemy.… A statesman who proposes war as an instrumentality admits his incompetency.”8
Even so, wars would come whether humans willed them or not. And like the other riders of the apocalypse they left improvement in their wake. “While men were fighting for glory and greed, for revenge and superstition, they were building human society. They were acquiring discipline and cohesion; they were learning cooperation, perseverance, fortitude and patience.… War forms larger social units and produces states.… The great conquests have destroyed what was effete and opened the way for what was viable.”9
NOT ALL THE Social Darwinists were as gloomy as Sumner. John Fiske, by comparison, was positively sunny. The struggle of nations, Fiske asserted in a widely reprinted essay bearing the historically resonant title “Manifest Destiny,” was the struggle against barbarism; as the barbarians succumbed, civilized society emerged. And with its emergence the temptation to war diminished. “Men become less inclined to destroy life or to inflict pain. Or, to use the popular terminology, which happens to coincide precisely with that of the doctrine of evolution, they become less brutal and more humane.”
Yet Fiske conceded that it might be centuries before humanity evolved to where war was obsolete. “For a very long time,” he said, “the possibility of peace can be guaranteed only through war.” And the surest guarantee was that the most pacific nations possess the most potent weapons.
Fiske nominated the United States for avenging angel of peace. The Civil War had shown Americans’ willingness to die—and kill—for principle. It also revealed the astonishing effects of industrialization on human conflict. “Never did any war so thoroughly illustrate how military power may be wielded by a people that has passed entirely from the military into the industrial stage of civilization.”
Most significantly, the war confirmed the redemptive power of American democracy. Fiske followed Lincoln in declaring the crux of the conflict to be not whether people could own others but whether they could govern themselves. As important as emancipation proved to be, the deeper issue was whether democracy “should be overthrown by the first deep-seated social difficulty it had to encounter, or should stand as an example of priceless value to other ages and to other lands.” Democracy had stood its test, and it now gleamed its light across the whole planet.
Yet Fiske wasn’t content for America merely to set an example. Americans must spread their values, institutions, and even their offspring as vigorously as their ancestors had done. The momentum of history was on their side; to turn from the task was to ignore the logic of evolution. “The work which the English race began when it colonized North America is destined to go on until every land on the earth’s surface that is not already the seat of an old civilization shall become English in its language, in its religion, in its political habits and traditions, and to a predominant extent in the blood of its people. The day is at hand when four-fifths of the human race will trace its pedigree to English forefathers, as four-fifths of the white people in the United States trace their pedigree today.” The world was America’s for the taking. “There is really no reason, in the nature of things, why the whole of mankind should not constitute politically one federation.… The time will come when such a state of things will exist upon the earth, when it will be possible … to speak of the United States as stretching from pole to pole.”10
Josiah Strong thought like Fiske—so much so that he felt compelled to say he had been preaching assertive Anglo-Saxonism “three years before the appearance of Prof. John Fiske’s ‘Manifest Destiny.’ ” Strong was the general secretary of the American Evangelical Alliance, and he gave God due credit for America’s astonishing rise. Democracy was but half of America’s secret; the other was “pure spiritual Christianity,” by which Strong meant Northern European Protestantism, untainted by Romish superstition.
Strong’s God had no difficulty with Darwin. Under the aegis of heaven, the Anglo-Saxons had evolved into the dominant race on the planet, and nowhere more convincingly than in America. Strong quoted Darwin: “There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; for the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and have there succeeded best.” Statistics showed clearly that the Anglo-Saxons were thriving. “In 1700 this race numbered less than 6,000,000 souls. In 1800 Anglo-Saxons (I use the term somewhat broadly to include all English-speaking peoples) had increased to about 20,500,000, and now, in 1890, they number more than 120,000,000.” America had witnessed the greatest explosion in Anglo-Saxon numbers: a 250-fold increase in two centuries, by Strong’s count. But the race spread even as it multiplied, colonizing the Indies, the Antipodes, and parts of Africa. “This mighty Anglo-Saxon race, though comprising only one-thirteenth part of mankind, now rules more than one-third of the earth’s surface, and more than one-fourth of its people.”
Strong credited Anglo-Saxon military prowess for much of the historic advancement of the race, but he suggested that this talent was being superseded by others. “The world is making progress. We are leaving behind the barbarism of war. As civilization advances, it will learn less of war and concern itself more with the arts of peace.” In this new world the Anglo-Saxon would continue to dominate. He possessed a “genius for colonizing,” among his other gifts. “His unequaled energy, his indomitable perseverance, and his personal independence make him a pioneer. He excels all others in pushing his way into new countries.” He was especially suited to the competition of the capitalist age. “Among the most striking features of the Anglo-Saxon is his money-making power—a power of increasing importance in the widening commerce of the world’s future.” With money, there was little the Anglo-Saxons couldn’t accomplish. “Money is power in the concrete. It commands learning, skill, experience, wisdom, talent, influence, numbers.”
Fiske called Anglo-Saxons, but especially Americans, to embrace their destiny. “I believe it is fully in the hands of the Christians of the United States, during the next ten or fifteen years, to hasten or retard the coming of Christ’s kingdom in the world by hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years,” he said. “We of this generation and nation occupy the Gibraltar of the ages which commands the world’s future.”11
“MY DEAR CAPTAIN Mahan,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in May 1890, “During the last two days I have spent half my time, busy as I am, in reading your book, and that I have found it interesting is shown by that fact that having taken it up I have gone straight through and finished it. I can say with perfect sincerity that I think it very much the clearest and most instructive general work of the kind with which I am acquainted.… I am greatly in error if it does not become a naval classic.”12
The book that disrupted Roosevelt’s busy schedule—by day he was a member of the federal Civil Service Commission, charged with implementing the Pendleton Act; by evenings and weekends he was a gentleman scholar, writing a monumental history of the early American West—was Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Mahan worked at the recently established Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island; his book, written with the encouragement of the college administration and the navy brass, helped justify the existence of the college and the navy more broadly by contending that naval power had long tipped the balance in the conflict of nations. Though this first book dealt with the fairly distant past—it covered the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Mahan followed it up with books and essays carrying the story to the present. The lesson persisted throughout: who owned the waves won the wars.
For those left cold by the laissez faire determinism of William Sumner or put off by the ethnocentric religiosity of the Manifest Destinarians, Mahan provided a bracingly rationalistic and secular alternative justification for American expansion. There was nothing preordained, by either nature or heaven, Mahan said, about the prowess of certain countries. Their ascendancy reflected conscious choices made by their governments and people to purchase the ships and infrastructure necessary to naval success. Modern navies of steel and steam were expensive and slow to build. Their support systems were even costlier and slower to construct and required a revolution in attitudes toward international affairs. In the naval age of wood and wind, the foreign needs of a navy were modest, hardly more than what its pursers could buy from grocers in foreign ports and its carpenters hew from the forests of distant shores. The shift to steam freed fleets from the vagaries of wind but chained them to the vicissitudes of the market for coal; to safeguard against fuel famine, prudent nations acquired coaling stations strategically located around the world’s oceans. A steamship, besides, was infinitely more complicated than a sailing vessel and far more prone to mechanical mishap; naval bases abroad, for maintenance and repair, were almost as essential as coaling stations.
Mahan’s histories revealed the costs of failure to prepare. The French lost the battle of Trafalgar long before that fateful October day; the dismal performance of the United States in the early phase of the War of 1812 reflected the “deeply mortifying condition” of the U.S. navy at the conflict’s start. The future would be different, but only for those who seized it. Americans, Mahan asserted, must adopt a “Twentieth-Century outlook,” one anchored in the best navy the country could afford and the stations and bases to support it.13
WHETHER THE AMERICAN capitalists who toppled the Hawaiian government of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893 had read anything by Fiske, Strong, or Mahan is unclear. But they did read the sugar clause of the McKinley tariff, which evoked a sudden longing for their homeland. American vessels had called at Hawaii since the eighteenth century; America missionaries arrived in the early nineteenth. The missionaries wrote of the rich volcanic soil and the luscious climate, attracting American entrepreneurs who planted sugar cane and discovered it grew quite well. The sugar men had allies in Washington who in 1875 finagled a deal allowing Hawaiian sugar to enter the American market duty-free. This triggered a boom in Hawaiian production, in land speculation, in Chinese and Japanese immigration to the cane fields, and in Hawaiian sugar imports to America. The surging imports annoyed domestic American sugar interests, who even while tolerating elimination of the tariff on foreign sugar, as part of the McKinley package, slipped in a bounty on domestic production. The Hawaiian producers, having lost their edge over other foreigners and their level field with the Americans, quickly concluded that their fields must become American.
This conclusion gained credence from the reaction of the Hawaiian government to the Americans’ outsized influence in the country. In the early 1890s Hawaii’s population comprised perhaps 40,000 Hawaiians, 30,000 Asians, and 2,000 Americans, in addition to several thousand Europeans and other Pacific islanders. But the Americans wielded most of the economic power, which they were converting into political power. They had sponsored a constitution, which limited the power of the Hawaiian monarchy, and they controlled the legislature. But when Queen Liliuokalani inherited the throne from her brother in 1891, she moved to curtail the Americans’ power. She abrogated the constitution and replaced it with one far more favorable to herself and the native Hawaiians.
At this the Americans, led by sugar baron Sanford Dole, staged a coup. In January 1893 they seized government offices and announced the establishment of a provisional government, whose primary objective would be the annexation of Hawaii to the United States. They had reason to expect a favorable response from Washington, for President Harrison, eyeing Pearl Harbor from the navalist perspective of Mahan, had already indicated strong interest in part or all of the islands. Harrison’s representative in Hawaii, American minister John Stevens, was an ardent annexationist, and he immediately recognized the provisional government and ordered U.S. marines from the cruiser Boston to surround the Iolani Palace and forestall a countercoup. No submarine cable had yet reached Hawaii, leaving Stevens to formulate policy unperturbed by instructions from Washington; he proceeded to declare an American protectorate over Hawaii.
Stevens’s stroke was a bit much even for the Harrison administration, which disavowed the protectorate. But the administration accepted the credentials of commissioners sent by the revolutionary regime, and it negotiated a treaty of annexation. With time running out on his presidency, Harrison forwarded the treaty to the Senate in mid-February 1893, stressing the need for swift ratification.
The Senate, however, balked long enough to let Grover Cleveland be inaugurated, and the new president promptly withdrew the treaty. Cleveland claimed a need to investigate the matter more fully, to determine whether Stevens or any other American officials had acted improperly. His claim was sincere enough, but he also wanted to let opposition to the treaty build. With most of his party, Cleveland doubted the wisdom and, especially in this case, the virtue of territorial expansion. It favored particular groups in the United States—the sugar trust, as Cleveland discovered, had cut a deal with the Hawaiian producers to the effect that in exchange for the trust’s support of annexation, the producers would split their share of the sugar bounty with the trust—and it arrogated to the American government authority that properly rested with the people of the territories involved. The provisional government in Hawaii had little popular support, it refused to submit the question of annexation to a referendum, and those few Hawaiians who had signed petitions in favor of annexation seem to have acted under the duress of their American employers.
Cleveland’s investigation consumed four months, and it confirmed the president’s belief that annexation would be unwise and immoral. Secretary of State Walter Gresham agreed and in fact contended that the United States must undo the mischief done in its name, by restoring Lilioukalani to her throne. Attorney General Olney responded that this would be carrying an admirable principle to an impractical extreme. To oust Dole and the new rulers would require the active use of military force, for which there was no support in the United States. When Lilioukalani promised to behead the plotters in the event of her restoration, this course grew still less attractive. Cleveland dithered till year’s end, when he threw the Hawaii matter to Congress, urging the legislators to be guided by “honor, integrity, and morality.” The Democratic majority interpreted these virtues as Cleveland knew they would, and annexation expired, for the time being.14
LEONARD WOOD KNEW Theodore Roosevelt through mutual friends in Washington. Both enjoyed exercise, and one day in February 1898 they arranged to go for a hike along Rock Creek, not far from Wood’s house. Wood watched through his window while waiting for Roosevelt, and examined the trees in his yard for the first buds of spring.
Suddenly I saw him trotting around the court from Connecticut Avenue to my house at 2000 R Street, with a broad smile on his face. As I met him at the door he said, “Well, I have had my chance, Leonard, and I have taken advantage of it. Yesterday afternoon the Secretary of the Navy left me as acting secretary. He has gone to take a short and much-needed rest, and I have done what I thought needed to be done. I have placed various ships in commission with orders to be ready for sea at once. I have given large orders for the purchase and shipment of coal. I have assembled supplies and forwarded munitions. In other words, I have done everything I can to get the navy ready.… I may not be supported, but I have done what I know to be right. Some day they will understand.”
Wood understood at once, and he supported Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of war. Wood was an army surgeon, and when he wasn’t hiking with Roosevelt he served as McKinley’s personal physician. He visited his patient regularly, and after one White House examination McKinley joked, “Have you and Theodore declared war yet?” Wood replied, “No, Mr. President, we have not. But I think you will, sir.”15
The war Wood and Roosevelt wanted was against Spain, and by the late winter of 1898 they were hardly alone. For years Roosevelt and others of his generation, men too young to have fought in the Civil War, had grown tired, and at the same time jealous, of the war stories of their elders. Roosevelt’s combat envy was perhaps extreme; two uncles had covered themselves in glory during the war, albeit on the Southern side, while his own father had failed to serve. Roosevelt’s sister suggested that her brother’s obsession with war reflected an unspoken desire to make up for their father’s failing. But many others of Roosevelt’s cohort exhibited a comparable desire to prove their valor.
Most would have been happy for any war; the one on offer was against Spain. Decades after nearly all the rest of Spanish America had broken free from the mother country, Cuba remained the “ever faithful isle.” But modernity tested the faith of the Cuban people, and during the latter part of the nineteenth century insurgents raised the banner of Cuban independence. One ten years’ war for independence ended in failure in 1878, but a generation later a new crop of insurgents joined some of the old ones, and in 1895 another war of liberation began. The nationalists’ grievances included corruption, lack of political participation for the masses, racism on the part of the Spanish-descended criollos against the blacks who constituted the largest part of the Cuban population, and a devastating depression in the sugar industry brought on by the 1894 Wilson-Gorman tariff of the United States, which laid fresh duties on Cuban sugar.
Because the insurgents lacked the numbers of troops and quantities of arms to challenge Spanish rule directly, they resorted to guerrilla warfare: sabotage, ambushes, sporadic raids, destruction of private property. The Spanish army responded by imposing harsh policies on the populace at large in regions affected by the insurgency; of these policies the most notorious was reconcentrado, which forced peasants into armed camps, the better to monitor their comings and goings. The mere fact of relocation entailed hardship; the appalling conditions in the camps magnified the suffering immensely. Thousands—mostly women and children—sickened and died. Before long the situation in Cuba assumed the proportions of a humanitarian disaster.
The nightmare would have made headlines in American newspapers on its own, but it received crucial help. The insurgents established a junta, or propaganda bureau, in New York, which fed stories to the American press. These naturally cast the insurgents in the most flattering light and the Spanish government in the most lurid. The aims of the junta dovetailed with the interests of certain American newspapers, especially the “penny press” of New York, where Joseph Pulitzer’s Journal battled William Randolph Hearst’s World. At substantial expense Pulitzer and Hearst had installed new printing equipment that allowed them to produce papers for the masses; now, to attract those masses, they required stories with an emotional immediacy ordinary news often lacked. Atrocity tales from Cuba—whether reported honestly, embellished, or fabricated—served perfectly.16
American politicians had reason to get into the act as well. American investors in Cuba—in the sugar industry, most conspicuously—lobbied Congress for protection for their assets. More broadly, the depression in the United States caused incumbents to welcome distraction. While Cleveland remained president, the Republicans who controlled Congress could excoriate the administration for not taking stronger measures on behalf of the suffering Cubans, and hope voters wouldn’t notice how little they were doing for suffering Americans. After the 1896 election gave the Republicans control of the White House as well as Congress, the party’s strategists saw Cuba as an antidote to the issues that continued to divide the country at home. “If we should have war,” Henry Cabot Lodge explained, “we will not hear much of the currency question in the elections.”17
Yet even if American leaders had wanted to stay out of the Cuban affair, they would have had difficulty doing so. The junta in New York was simply the most visible insurgent presence in the United States; rebels based in Florida and other Atlantic and Gulf states launched numerous raids and supply operations against Cuba from American shores. The U.S. navy interdicted many such ventures as violations of American neutrality laws, but others got through, prompting complaints from Spain that the United States was already intervening in the Cuban war.
By the time McKinley inherited the problem it was nearing full boil. The Republican platform of 1896 had endorsed independence for Cuba without committing McKinley to any means toward that end. He initially resisted intervention. The economy was finally pulling out of the depression, and war might spook investors and abort the recovery. McKinley’s own experiences in the Civil War still haunted him. “I shall never get into a war until I am sure that God and man approve,” he told Leonard Wood. “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.” Yet the advocates of war grew stronger every day. Hearst and Pulitzer brayed loudly for intervention. Whitelaw Reid of the soberer New York Tribune implored the president to act. Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt hissed warlike thoughts in McKinley’s ear. Senators of both parties argued vehemently and at length for Cuban freedom. Members of the House would have done the same had Tom Reed let them. But Reed opposed intervention and suppressed debate. “Mr. Reed has the members of that body bottled up so tight they cannot breathe without his consent,” one congressman declared. Yet neither Reed nor McKinley expected to hold the line forever. Mark Hanna thought the slightest accident could make Congress uncontrollable. “A spark might drop in there at any time and precipitate action,” he said. The French ambassador declared in wonder, “A sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation.”18
McKinley stood against the fury as long as he could. He bought time with a fact-finding mission to Cuba. William Calhoun, an Illinois friend, spent a month on the island in the spring of 1897 but on his return filed a report that gave McKinley no comfort, characterizing the country as “wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.” McKinley dispatched a protest to the Spanish government declaring that the United States had “a right to demand that a war, conducted almost within sight of our shores and grievously affecting American citizens and their interests throughout the length and breadth of the land, shall at least be conducted according to the military codes of civilization.”19
The American protest simply provoked the Spanish government. Cuba had become a test of Spanish will, and resistance to American meddling the proof of Spanish pride. When McKinley floated an idea that the United States might purchase the island as a way to resolve the conflict, the Spanish prime minister, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, retorted publicly: “Spain is not a nation of merchants capable of selling its honor.” Some American war hawks asserted that what Spain wouldn’t sell, the United States might seize. But McKinley rejected that thought. Forcible annexation, he said, would be “criminal aggression.”20
With each passing month the president’s options narrowed. To do nothing would be to countenance the continued destruction of the island. To push the Spanish harder, as by recognizing the insurgents’ provisional government, would risk war. The assassination of Cánovas in August 1897 gave McKinley some breathing space as he awaited the formation of a new government, which turned out to be headed by Cánovas’s opponents, the Liberals. And in fact the Liberals announced a series of reforms, including home rule for Cuba under a Spanish protectorate. McKinley interpreted the measures as a positive sign, declaring hopefully in his December annual message that the Spanish government had embarked on a course of amelioration “from which recession with honor is impossible.” He added, however, in words chosen as much to appease American war hawks as to encourage the Spanish, that if a satisfactory settlement in Cuba was not soon reached, “the exigency of further and other action by the United States will remain to be taken.”21
Now it was the Spanish government that was trapped. Loyalists in Cuba rioted against the autonomy plan, reasonably fearing the loss of their political and economic power. To protect American nationals and their property on the island, the McKinley administration requested permission to dispatch an American naval vessel. The Spanish government, hoping to demonstrate that the Americans had nothing to fear, approved the request. On January 25, 1898, the Maine steamed into Havana harbor and dropped anchor.
The momentary calm that followed was shattered by two explosions. The first was diplomatic: the publication of a confidential letter purloined by the Cuban junta from the Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme. In the letter Dupuy de Lôme sneered at McKinley as “weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd, besides being a would-be politician who tries to leave a door open behind himself while keeping on good terms with the jingoes of his party.” The junta handed the letter to Pulitzer’s Journal, which printed a facsimile under the banner headline “Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.”22
A week later a second explosion occurred, in Havana harbor. On the evening of February 15 a tremendous ball of fire engulfed the Maine, killing 266 and wounding many more. The American press seized at once on Spanish perfidy as the cause, ignoring the captain of the Maine, who judged it an accident. McKinley called for an investigation, uncertain what it would yield beyond time to consider his next move. Meanwhile, to placate the growing war party in Congress, he requested an appropriation of $50 million for national defense. Congress approved the measure almost at once. The war hawks were pleased; the Spanish were awed. “To appropriate fifty millions out of money in the Treasury, without borrowing a cent, demonstrates wealth and power,” McKinley’s minister to Spain wrote home. “The Ministry and press are simply stunned.”
The Maine report reached the president in late March. The examiners concluded that an external explosion, probably a mine, had sunk the ship. The board wouldn’t say who planted the mine, but the American press and public weren’t so diffident. “Nine out of ten American citizens doubtless believe that the explosion which destroyed the Maine was the result of the cowardly Spanish conspiracy,” the Cleveland Leader asserted, probably accurately. Hearst’s World, having got out front of the story by declaring, “Remember the Maine and to Hell with Spain!” considered its judgment confirmed.23
IT WAS WHILE the explosion was being investigated that Roosevelt seized control of the Navy Department. He had campaigned hard for McKinley in 1896 and been rewarded with the second slot at the Navy Department. His chief was John Long, whose uncertain health often kept him out of the office. During one such absence, on a Friday afternoon in February 1898, Roosevelt exploited his opportunity as acting secretary to prepare the navy for the war with Spain he hoped to provoke. He dashed off orders on scraps of paper, handing them to clerks who coded and cabled them to American commanders around the globe. He repositioned the Atlantic and Pacific fleets. He requisitioned coal and ammunition. He placed docked ships on alert to get up steam at the first hint of war. And he sent a portentous cable to George Dewey, the commander of America’s Asiatic squadron:
SECRET AND CONFIDENTIAL. ORDER THE SQUADRON EXCEPT MONOCACY TO HONGKONG. KEEP FULL OF COAL. IN THE EVENT OFDECLARATION OF WAR WITH SPAIN, YOUR DUTY WILL BE TO SEE THAT THE SPANISH SQUADRON DOES NOT LEAVE THE ASIATIC COAST, AND THEN OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS IN THE PHILIPPINE ISLANDS.24
Roosevelt’s cable became operative when the findings of the Maine commission forced McKinley’s hand. The war hawks in Congress screamed louder than ever. “By God!” one apoplectic senator thundered on a visit to the State Department. “Don’t your president know where the war-declaring power is lodged? Well, tell him, by God, that if he don’t do something Congress will exercise the power and declare war in spite of him! He’ll get run over and the party with him!” Roosevelt attended the annual Gridiron Dinner in Washington and waved his fist in the face of Mark Hanna. “We’ll have this war for the freedom of Cuba in spite of the timidity of the commercial interests!” he vowed.25
Yet McKinley still hesitated. He sent a note to Spain demanding an end to hostilities in Cuba, a definitive reversal of reconcentration, relief for the Cuban people, and American arbitration toward full independence. When the Spanish government balked, McKinley’s time ran out. “If the President of the United States wants two days, or if he wants two hours, to continue negotiations with the butchers of Spain, we are not ready to give him one moment longer for that purpose,” Democratic congressman Joseph Bailey of Texas warned. One of the lingering congressional holdouts asked Tom Reed to dissuade the war hawks. “Dissuade them!” Reed told a reporter. “He might as well ask me to stand out in the middle of Kansas and dissuade a cyclone.”26
McKinley prepared a war message, convinced he had no choice. Not even an eleventh-hour suspension of hostilities, announced by Spain in the second week of April, could avert the inevitable. “It comes too late,” Republican senator Stephen Elkins of West Virginia, one of the last doves, declared. “Had it come a few days ago, I think we could have averted war.” But no longer.27
Yet the war message was hardly a clarion of righteous wrath. In fact, McKinley didn’t even ask for a war declaration. He simply requested authority to secure an end to hostilities in Cuba, to establish a stable government there, and to “use the military and naval forces of the United States as may be necessary for these purposes.”28
The war hawks had expected more, and they made their disappointment plain. “It is the weakest and most inconclusive speech sent out by any president,” Bailey of Texas asserted. Senate Republican Joseph Foraker of Ohio told a reporter, “I have no patience with the message, and you may say so.” Democrat Joseph Rawlins of Utah called the message “weak, impotent, imbecile, and disgraceful.”
But it did the job. Congress granted the president the authority he requested, adding demands for Spanish withdrawal and recognition of Cuban independence. Senator Henry Teller of Colorado appended a clause forswearing annexation by the United States, and the war hawks had no choice but to accept it. Spain broke diplomatic ties with the United States and, after American ships began blockading Cuba, declared war. Congress reciprocated, backdating its war declaration to the day Spain cut ties.29
THE ONSET OF WAR inspired Roosevelt to one of the most impetuous and least responsible acts of his thirty-nine years of life. He abruptly resigned his post at the Navy Department, where he might have had significant influence on the outcome of the war he had helped precipitate, to join a regiment of volunteers, in which he would have next to none. Roosevelt’s friends and allies, including his political sponsor, Henry Cabot Lodge, urged him to remain in Washington. His family noted that his wife, Edith, was incompletely recovered from complications attending the birth of their fifth child. Who would tend the children if he left home? How would she and they cope if he were killed? But Roosevelt closed his ears, his mind, and his heart to all influences save the martial. “I suppose, at bottom, I was merely following my instinct instead of my reason,” he acknowledged afterward. “It was my one chance to do something for my country and for my family and my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring rod in every family. I know now that I would have turned from my wife’s deathbed to answer that call.”30
America mustered for the Spanish war the way it had mustered for all of its wars till then. To the small core of the regular army it added a much larger force of volunteers raised in the states and territories and led by a combination of career and newly commissioned officers. Roosevelt’s regiment was peculiar but not unique. When Congress authorized the raising of special cavalry units from the West consisting of cowboys, Indians, hunters, and frontier scouts, Roosevelt lobbied friends at the War Department for a commission with one such regiment. The secretary of war, Russell Alger, granted Roosevelt’s request and more, offering him command of the regiment. Roosevelt, for once in his life, judged himself inadequate to a task, and he demurred on grounds of utter lack of pertinent experience. He suggested Leonard Wood for command, with himself as second. Alger accepted.
Between the announcement and the muster, the War Department discovered funds to increase the regiment from 780 saddles to 1,000. Consequently, in addition to the Westerners the First Volunteer Cavalry included two hundred soldiers who learned their horse craft not on the plains of Colorado or the deserts of Arizona but on the polo fields of Long Island and the steeplechase courses of Newport. “You would be amused to see three Knickerbocker club men cooking and washing dishes for one of the New Mexico companies,” Roosevelt wrote Lodge from camp at San Antonio. Roosevelt, an awkward child whose athletic endeavors had been limited by myopia and characterized by enthusiasm rather than grace, gushed over the athletes who joined the regiment. One was “perhaps the best quarterback who played on a Harvard eleven,” he wrote; another was a former national tennis champion. A Yale high jumper and the captain of the Columbia crew team were almost as impressive. Yet the cowboys, whom Roosevelt revered even more than he did the athletes, were the heart and soul of the outfit. “They were a splendid set of men, these southwesterners,” he wrote afterward: “tall and sinewy, with resolute, weather-beaten faces, and eyes that looked a man straight in the face without flinching.”31
Long before Roosevelt’s Rough Riders—as an editorial alliteralist labeled them—shipped out for Cuba, Roosevelt landed the first blow against Spain, albeit vicariously. On May 1 George Dewey and the American Asiatic squadron, following Roosevelt’s order from the Navy Department, steamed into Manila Bay and in a six-hour battle sank three Spanish ships and burned seven others. Hundreds of Spanish seamen were killed or wounded. Dewey lost no ships, and only seven of his men were wounded, none seriously.
The news required several days to reach America, as Dewey had cut the submarine cable on the way in, but when it did arrive it made Dewey a national hero and the envy of all those, like Roosevelt, who dreamed of covering themselves in comparable glory. Roosevelt’s special worry was that the Spanish would surrender before he bloodied his lance. “Do not make peace until we get Porto Rico,” he urged Lodge, presumptively exploiting a loophole in the Teller amendment, which said nothing about Spain’s other Caribbean colony. When it became apparent that the War Department had raised far more troops than it could transport to Cuba, Roosevelt grew nearly frantic. He hustled his men from San Antonio to Tampa, the port of embarkation for the invasion across the Florida Strait, and he fought, almost physically, for a place for his regiment aboard one of the transports. He couldn’t, however, find space for most of their horses, and the Rough Riders prepared to become weary walkers.32
They landed at Daiquirí, on Cuba’s south coast, not far from Santiago. The landing was uncontested but nearly disastrous, as almost none of those involved had any experience putting troops ashore on an open beach. Massive confusion resulted in the drowning of many horses and mules but, miraculously, only two men, troopers of the African American Tenth Cavalry.
Santiago was the objective of the invasion, chosen because the city’s harbor protected the Spanish Cuban fleet, which American strategists hoped to drive out to sea, where American warships waited. Protecting Santiago were San Juan Hill and the smaller Kettle Hill, so called by the American troops for the large iron vessel, used for boiling sugar cane, they found on top. The Americans assaulted the heights on July 1. Roosevelt led the Rough Riders up Kettle Hill in the face of daunting fire from the Spanish troops’ German Mauser rifles, which outclassed the Civil War–era Springfield rifles most of the Americans carried. “The Mauser bullets drove in sheets through the trees and the tall jungle grass, making a peculiar whirring or rustling sound,” Roosevelt wrote. “Some of the bullets seemed to pop in the air, so that we thought they were explosive; and, indeed, many of those which were coated with brass did explode, in the sense that the brass coat was ripped off, making a thin plate of hard metal with a jagged edge, which inflicted a ghastly wound.”33
The Rough Riders took Kettle Hill before joining other American units in the assault on San Juan Hill. The Spanish fought bravely but were badly outnumbered and forced to retreat, leaving the Americans in command of the heights before Santiago, from which their guns could bombard the city and the ships in the harbor. Admiral Pascual Cervera there upon decided to hazard the open sea. His fleet steamed out into the Caribbean, only to be crushed by the American ships there. The war might have ended at this point had Lodge and others in Washington not heeded Roosevelt’s advice that Puerto Rico must be captured first. Seizing the second island required modest effort and a few more weeks, but on August 12 Spain’s representatives in Washington capitulated.
JOHN HAY CALLED IT ironically a “splendid little war,” yet that was before the full cost of the conflict became evident. The American war effort wasn’t egregiously inefficient by historical military standards, but because the battles went so well, the losses beyond the battlefield loomed large by comparison. American soldiers’ experience of the tropics had been limited to the Mexican War, and most of what had been learned at Vera Cruz had been forgotten in the intervening fifty years. Hygiene was abysmal in some of the American camps, reflecting the still rudimentary state of epidemiological knowledge. Malaria, typhoid, yellow fever, and dysentery claimed about twenty-five hundred lives, or ten times the number lost in battle. Refrigerated railcars and ships brought fresh beef almost to the front, but unscrupulous jobbers passed tainted meat—beef injected with chemicals to mask its putridity—off on the troops. The soldiers’ complaints eventually produced a public outcry and an investigation of the “embalmed beef” scandal. The commissary general of the army was court-martialed and convicted, although for insulting a fellow officer—Nelson Miles—rather than for poisoning the rank and file.
Theodore Roosevelt led a mutiny against the hazardous conditions in which his men were compelled to live in Cuba. Promoted to colonel of the regiment after Leonard Wood was reassigned, Roosevelt fought as hard against the War Department to obtain proper provisions, clothing, and shelter for his men as he had fought against the Spanish to gain the San Juan Heights. He jumped the chain of command to write Lodge in Washington imploring that the regiment be removed from Cuba as soon as possible, now that the fighting was over, lest more take ill and die. “It is simply infamous to keep us here during the sickly months that are now on and which will last until October,” he told Lodge. “If there was need of our holding a town against any foe, I would care not one jot more for yellow fever than for Spanish bullets and would not mind sacrificing the lives of my entire command. But to sacrifice them pointlessly from mere stupidity and inefficiency is cruel.” Roosevelt gathered signatures of division and brigade commanders in Cuba on a round-robin letter to the commanding general in Cuba, William Shafter, warning that the army faced destruction from disease. “The army must be moved at once, or perish,” Roosevelt and the others wrote. In a separate letter Roosevelt suggested Maine as a suitable landing spot; the men might recuperate there in quarantine till the danger of transmission to the American population passed.34
Roosevelt’s outspokenness didn’t endear him to the careerists at the War Department, who vetoed his nomination for a Medal of Honor. (It was awarded posthumously a century later.) But unlike some of the other signers, Roosevelt didn’t intend to remain in the army, and anyway he had nearly all the rewards he could want. From the moment the Rough Riders mustered at San Antonio, reporters followed them like boys behind a circus parade. Richard Harding Davis took a special shine to Roosevelt, featuring him in numerous dispatches home. “Roosevelt, mounted high on horseback, and charging the rifle-pits at a gallop and quite alone, made you feel that you would like to cheer,” Davis wrote of the fight for San Juan Hill. “He wore on his sombrero a blue polka-dot handkerchief, à la Havelock, which, as he advanced, floated out straight behind his head like a guidon.” Not to be outdone, Roosevelt told his own story in a memoir first serialized in Scribner’s and then published in book form, bound in khaki, as The Rough Riders. The book swelled to bursting with Roosevelt’s pride in himself and his men. “Is it any wonder I loved my regiment?” he asked after recounting one gallant deed of many. Reviewers poked fun at Roosevelt’s egotism. Rumor claimed that the publisher had run out of the uppercase letter I in setting the type. Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley characterized the book as “Th’ Biography iv a Hero be Wan who Knows.” Dooley didn’t begrudge Roosevelt his turn in the limelight. “If Tiddy done it all he ought to say so an’ relieve th’ suspinse.” But he suggested a new title: “Alone in Cubia.”35
THE HUMOR SOON wore thin. Dewey’s victory at Manila, and a follow-on landing of marines there, gave American forces possession of the Philippine capital but not much else of the archipelago. Filipino nationalists who had fought against the Spanish before the arrival of the Americans protested the new foreign presence and began to challenge it militarily. Nonetheless American and Spanish negotiators signed a treaty in December 1898 transferring title of the Philippines (and Puerto Rico) from Spain to the United States.
McKinley appreciated that annexation of the Philippines might cause trouble, but he couldn’t discover a preferable alternative. To withdraw from the islands would leave them at the mercy of Germany, Japan, or some other imperialist power at a time when those countries were making short work of the independence of dozens of poorly defended peoples of Asia and Africa. McKinley was no enthusiast of empire. “If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet,” the president told Herman Kohlsaat, “what a lot of trouble he would have saved us.” (When the war began, McKinley had hardly known what ocean the Philippines were in. “I could not have told where those darned islands were within 2,000 miles,” he told Kohlsaat.) But after long and careful consideration, he concluded that since Dewey had stayed, so must the United States. “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight,” he explained to a visiting group of ministers and missionaries (according to their later recounting).
And I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came: (1) That we could not give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government, and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am president!36
The Spanish treaty provoked a vigorous debate when the Senate considered it for ratification. All the senators and the myriad pundits understood that taking the Philippines would make an empire of the American republic. E. L. Godkin, the editor of the Nation and the New York Evening Post, thought his countrymen had troubles enough of their own. “We do not want any more states until we can civilize Kansas,” he said. He listed the evils attendant to annexation:
The sudden departure from our traditions; the absence from our system of any machinery for governing dependencies; the admission of alien, inferior, and mongrel races to our nationality; the opening of fresh fields for carpetbaggers, speculators, and corruptionists; the un-Americanism of governing a large body of people against their will, and by persons not responsible to them; the entrance on a policy of conquest and annexation while our own continent was still unreclaimed, our population unassimilated, and many of our most serious political problems still unsolved; and finally the danger of the endorsement of a gross fraud for the first time by a Christian nation.
Empire would be the end of America as Americans knew it, Godkin said. “This triumph over Spain seals the fate of the American republic.”37
Carl Schurz deplored the embrace of empire as only a refugee from imperial Europe could. “The character and future of the Republic and the welfare of its people now living and yet to be born are in unprecedented jeopardy,” Schurz asserted. Americans didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. “The Filipinos fought against Spain for their freedom and independence.… They will fight against us.”
Andrew Carnegie hadn’t yet retired from steel-making, but after the bloody battle at Homestead he spent less time at the mill and more in politics and philanthropy. He worried aloud that annexing the Philippines would produce collisions between the United States and the other imperial powers. The first wreck would occur in Asia. “It is in that region the thunderbolt is expected,” Carnegie wrote. “It is there the storm is to burst.” McKinley boasted of the uplifting influence American civilization would have upon the Filipinos; Carnegie gravely doubted any such effect. “Has the influence of the superior race upon the inferior ever proved beneficial to either? I know of no case in which it has been or is.… Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves more than the natives.”
The debate on Capitol Hill revealed similar convictions and prejudices. Lest the United States be accused of stealing the Philippines, the treaty with Spain specified a cash payment to the Spanish government; for this reason the House held hearings on the treaty and let its members weigh in on annexation. Democrat Jehu Baker of Illinois contended that annexation would sully American virtue irretrievably. “The attempt to suddenly sweep us into a colonial policy similar to that of Britain—so suddenly that we scarce have time to note where the leap will carry us—is, in my opinion, the most audacious and reckless performance of jingoism that this or any other country has ever witnessed,” Baker said. Jerry Simpson, the bare-ankled Kansas Populist, detected aggrandizement of the most shocking sort in McKinley’s imperialism. Annexation would furnish an excuse for the creation of a large army, which would be deployed against the ordinary people of America just as federal troops had been deployed to crush the labor strikes of the previous decade. “This is what they want it for,” Simpson asserted, “along with a scheme for colonial empire, and to place on the throne in this country William McKinley, President of the United States, Emperor of the West Indian Islands and of the Philippines.”
Other opponents leveled more prosaic complaints against annexation. Henry Johnson of Indiana predicted that the products of the Philippines would enter America tariff-free, doing “immense injury to the American farmer and laborer.” Hernando Money of Mississippi took the trade issue in another direction. The key to American prosperity, Money declared, was not colonies but markets. “Are conquests and subjugation necessary to the spread of American products?” he asked. Not at all, he answered. “The commerce of the United States, fortunately for this great Republic, has been founded more wisely upon the skill of its artisans.… That which carries American commerce abroad is not the protection of this Government; it is not that the flag of the fighting Navy of the United States is found on every sea and in every port; it is the skill of the American workingman.”
Still other objectors took the low road of racism. John Daniel of Virginia asked the Senate if its members understood the intimate consequences of annexation. “Today we are the United States of America. Tomorrow, if a treaty now pending in the Senate is ratified, we will be the United States of America and Asia.” This would be no mere political union. “It is a marriage of nations. This twain will become one flesh. They become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.”
The annexationists countered certain of the objections, ignored others, and generally portrayed the taking of the Philippines as the logical, even inevitable, extension of venerable American traditions. Theodore Roosevelt contended that the United States had won the Philippines as fairly as it had won northern Mexico a half century earlier. “We have hoisted our flag,” he said, “and it is not fashioned of the stuff which can be quickly hauled down.” Henry Cabot Lodge, who seemed to some the evil genius behind Roosevelt—“Lodge is the Mephistopheles whispering poison into his ear,” anti-imperialist Edward Atkinson said—proclaimed that to relinquish the Philippines would be an “act of infamy.”38
But the most impassioned articulation of the argument for empire came from Albert Beveridge. The Indiana Republican amalgamated Mahanism, Social Darwinism, Manifest Destinarianism, and rampant capitalism in a Senate speech extolling annexation and everything it stood for and promised. “This island empire is the last land left in all the oceans,” Beveridge asserted of the Philippines. Its ports and harbors held the key to the “illimitable markets” of China. In that direction lay America’s future.
Our largest trade henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean. More and more Europe will manufacture the most it needs, secure from its colonies the most it consumes. Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. She is nearer to us than to England, Germany, or Russia, the commercial powers of the present and the future.… The Philippines gives us a base at the door of all the East.… The Philippines command the commercial situation of the entire East.
Beveridge, one of the rare Americans who had actually visited the Philippines, extolled the natural bounty of the islands. “I have cruised more than 2,000 miles through the archipelago, every moment a surprise at its loveliness and wealth. I have ridden hundreds of miles on the islands, every foot of the way a revelation of vegetable and mineral riches.” Rice, coffee, sugar, coconuts, hemp, tobacco, and a dozen other commercial crops grew like weeds in the rich soil of Luzon. Hardwood forests cloaked the mountains, which in turn contained coal enough to fuel all the ships of the world. Precious minerals abounded. “I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. I have gold dust washed out by crude processes of careless natives from the sands of a Philippine stream.”
But material considerations were only part of what called America to the Philippines. “It is elemental,” Beveridge said. “It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration.… He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth.” To take the Philippines, to embrace empire, was to seize America’s destiny. “It holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man.”39
THE SENATE AND the House agreed, in substance if not in every detail. In February 1899 the Senate ratified the treaty in a close vote, and the House approved the money by a more comfortable margin. The Philippines and Puerto Rico became American colonies and the United States an empire.
But it was an empire unlike any the world had known. America’s capitalist economy comported well enough with imperialism; already England’s John A. Hobson was formulating a capitalist explanation of modern imperialism in which he would cite the United States as a prime example. Theodore Roosevelt and his fellow martial enthusiasts might be the public face of American imperialism, Hobson asserted, but they were hardly its driving force. That role went to the big capitalists. “It is Messrs. Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan, Hanna, Schwab, and their associates who need Imperialism and who are fastening it upon the shoulders of the great Republic of the West. They need Imperialism because they desire to use the public resources of their country to find profitable employment for the capital which otherwise would be superfluous.” In Russia, V. I. Lenin would follow Hobson’s lead and declare imperialism the “highest stage of capitalism.”40
One didn’t have to be a Hobsonite or a Leninist to note the expansive spirit of American capitalism. Amid the excitement surrounding the war with Spain, Congress in July 1898 approved the annexation of Hawaii (by joint resolution rather than treaty), to the delight of investors in the plantations there (and to the dismay of Grover Cleveland. “Hawaii is ours,” the former president wrote Richard Olney. “As I look back upon the first steps in this miserable business, I am ashamed of the whole affair”). In 1899 and 1900, McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, circulated a pair of notes calling for an “open door” in China, by which Hay meant that Americans’ imperialist competitors must neither partition China nor bar American merchants and investors from equal access to the markets of that country.41
Yet for all its consonance with capitalism, empire accorded ill with American democracy. The premise of democracy is that people ought to govern themselves; the essence of imperialism is that some of them—those in the colonies—don’t. In asserting imperial control over the Philippines and Puerto Rico, Americans denied democracy to Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. The opponents of the Spanish treaty considered this contradiction decisive, but they lost the argument, and the contradiction became embedded in American foreign policy.
To those already inclined to view the American political economy as a battleground between capitalism and democracy, the decision for empire seemed simply one more illustration of capitalism’s currently dominant position. This may have overread the result. As the debate over the Spanish treaty demonstrated, capitalists were hardly of one mind regarding empire. Albert Beveridge spoke for those who coveted the resources of the Philippines and the markets of China, yet Andrew Carnegie, whose capitalist credentials none could gainsay, adamantly opposed the imperialist project as productive of future conflict. Capitalism required markets, Carnegie and his like-thinkers acknowledged, but markets might be had without acquiring colonies. Meanwhile some democrats, conspicuously Theodore Roosevelt, were no less enthusiastic for empire than the most imperially ardent investors and market-struck merchants.
Even so, the doubts regarding empire came mostly from the democratic side of the American public mind. If empire could be shown to pay, the capitalists would swallow such qualms as some of them had and pocket their profits. Empire, however, would always nag at the democractic conscience.42