Chapter 3

BENEVOLENT INTENTIONS

The people of the Island of Cuba are, of right ought to be, free and independent…. The United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.¹

—THE TELLER AMENDMENT TO THE U.S. DECLARATION OF WAR AGAINST SPAIN, 1898

The imperial cruise ventured out into the Pacific Ocean, the largest single physical feature on the planet. Within the past seven years, the United States had made that enormous body of water an American lake. It had taken more than a century for the American Aryan to fill out its continental area as the U.S. Army’s forts became cities. But as the nineteenth century had come to a close, the U.S. Navy had quickly secured the naval links that the Aryan would need to continue westward and capture Asia’s riches.

The U.S. thrust into the Pacific had been the work of President William McKinley and his administration. As assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt had been a key cheerleader for this naval expansion, and later, as vice president and president, he defended America’s military actions in Asia as a positive example of the White Christian spreading civilization. The whys and wherefores of American expansion into the Pacific would occupy the thoughts of presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft. And all three would come to doubt the wisdom of dipping America’s toe into that lake.

IN 1844, AMERICA ELECTED James Polk to the presidency. At the time of his election, the United States was a small country with states exclusively east of the Mississippi. The Louisiana Purchase territory was unorganized. Great Britain claimed the Oregon Territory in the Northwest, and Mexico held what would later be Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California.

At the end of his inauguration day, Polk told his secretary of the Navy, George Bancroft, that one of his main goals was to acquire California. The U.S. Navy had surveyed the Pacific coast in the early 1840s and reported that San Francisco was “one of the finest, if not the very best, harbour in the world.”² Writes University of Virginia professor Norman Graebner in Empire on the Pacific:

It was American commerce with the Far East primarily that focused attention on the harbor of San Francisco. This bay was regarded the unqualified answer to American hopes of commercial greatness in the Pacific area. Geographically, its location opposite Asia would give it a commanding position; its intrinsic advantage would make that position fully effective. Prevailing westerly winds had located this extraordinary harbor on the direct route of traffic between India, China, and Manila and the Pacific ports of Mexico and Central and South America.³

For its part, the Oregon Territory held world-class ports such as Seattle and Portland. Indeed, one sun-follower declared, “the nation that possesses Oregon will not only control the navigation of the Pacific, the trade of the Pacific and Sandwich Islands, but the trade of China itself on the Pacific.”⁴ Congressman William Fell Giles of Maryland announced the Aryans’ intention: “We must march from ocean to ocean… straight to the Pacific Ocean, and be bounded only by its roaring wave…. It is the destiny of the white race, it is the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race.”⁵

Polk quickly picked diplomatic fistfights with the British and Mexicans. But while Britain ceded Oregon, Mexico held on to its precious Pacific frontage.

Mexico was a nation of seven million that had won independence from Spain in 1821 and had modeled its constitution after America’s. The internationally recognized border between Mexico and the United States was the Nueces River in south Texas. President Polk decided it should instead be the Rio Grande, 150 miles to the south, and he ordered General Zachary Taylor into Mexican territory between the two rivers. Mexican historians refer to the U.S. Army’s actions as “the American Invasion.” American historians call it “the Mexican-American War.”

Taylor’s incursion was brutal, with massacres of Mexican civilians and rapes of local women. (The New York Herald wrote of the Mexican women assaulted by U.S. soldiers, “Like the Sabine virgins, she will soon learn to love her ravisher.”⁶) Polk had initiated the invasion with seven thousand troops and thought the conflict would be over in days. It was a vast miscalculation; the war dragged on for three years, involved one hundred thousand U.S. soldiers, and resulted in thirteen thousand U.S. casualties and the deaths of countless Mexican civilians. Ulysses S. Grant—who served in Mexico as a young officer—wrote in his memoirs that he regarded the war “as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.”⁷

With the eventual American victory, the United States could have claimed all of Mexico—but that would have meant absorbing too many non-Aryans. Argued the powerful Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina, “We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race…. Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.”⁸ Added Senator Lewis Cass of Michigan, “We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or subjects. All we want is a portion of territory.”⁹

IN 1872, THE ARTIST John Gast painted what would become the most popular visual euphemization of the American Aryan’s westering. Gast named his masterwork American Progress, and prints of it became one of the best-selling American images of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Gast painted American Progress as a lingerie-clad beautiful blonde, pale skinned and voluptuous, floating westward. On her forehead is the “Star of Empire,” and she holds in her right hand civilization’s tome—a “School Book”—and from her left hand trails a telegraph wire. Below her, American civilization advances: farmers till land, pioneers ride in stagecoaches and ox-drawn wagons, miners with picks and shovels make their way, while the Pony Express and three transcontinental railways all head west. Between the Pacific and advancing American civilization stands savagery—a growling bear, wild horses, a bare-breasted Indian woman, one Indian warrior with his hatchet raised, another clutching his bow. Animals and Indians run from the American advance. No violence is depicted—no stacks of dead Indians or decimated buffalo herds. Only one rifle appears, held by a lone buckskin-clad frontiersman. The United States military is nowhere to be seen.

American Progress by John Gast, 1872. Civilization follows the sun across the American continent, bringing order and prosperity as dark savages recede. This painting became the most popular nineteenth-century depiction of America’s westward expansion. Painted at the height of America’s longest conflict—the Indian Wars—American Progress doesn’t depict the thousands of U.S. Army soldiers who ethnic-cleansed the land of non-White Others. (Library of Congress)

Much more representative of how the West was won is the 1890 photograph taken near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. American Aryans stand triumphantly around a mass grave into which they dump frozen Indian carcasses. The “battle” (said the White victors) or “massacre” (said the Red losers) at Wounded Knee was the final grand drama of a quarter century of merciless warring upon the Indians—the longest conflict in America’s history.

“Burial of Dead at Wounded Knee, 1890.” How the West was really won. The White victors called Wounded Knee a “battle.” The Indian losers called it a “massacre.” (Stringer/MPI/Getty Images)

This was total war—here’s a typical U.S. Army order during the Indian Wars: “Proceed south in the direction of the Antelope Hills, thence toward the Washita River, the supposed winter seat of the hostile tribes; to destroy their villages and ponies, to kill or hang all warriors, and bring back all women and children.”¹⁰ General William Tecumseh Sherman—who commanded the Indian Wars from 1866 to 1884—ordered his troops: “During an assault the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age.”¹¹ They did not, and through the decades the Indian dead included uncounted thousands of mothers, children, and elderly, some killed merely for sport, their private parts sliced off and used to make prized wallets or to decorate hats, their scalps and their genitals displayed as trophies.

Theodore Roosevelt, then a U.S. civil service commissioner, visited South Dakota three years after the Wounded Knee Massacre. He wrote that the U.S. government had treated the Indians “with great justice and fairness.”¹²

ONE OF THE HISTORIANS who arose to explain the success of American expansion was a University of Wisconsin professor named Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner too believed that the northern German forests had formed the Teuton, that the British Isles had formed the Anglo-Saxon, and that American greatness was part of the Aryan westering. “Forest philosophy,” he wrote, “is the philosophy of American democracy [and] the forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character.”¹³

By this time the United States was a continental nation of seventy-six million people, spread across forty-five states. America occupied more land area than all other countries except Russia and Canada.

In 1893, the thirty-two-year-old Professor Turner, in a speech before the American Historical Association in Chicago, announced, “Now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”¹⁴

The idea that America’s frontier was gone stunned westering White Christians. Roosevelt was one of the first to sense the revolutionary qualities of Turner’s thesis. As John Judis explains in The Folly of Empire, “For Roosevelt… the closing of the frontier [meant] the loss of those elements in national life that made Americans virile and vigorous, stimulated their taste and aptitude for competition, and gave them a strong and unifying sense of racial solidarity. Roosevelt worried that with the absence of battle, Americans would grow soft and overcivilized and unable to defend themselves against a new ‘masterful race’ that still carried within the fighting qualities of the barbarian.”¹⁵

In addition to concerns about the end of the frontier, in 1893 the United States economy sank into its worst depression ever. Six hundred forty-two banks closed and an incredible sixteen thousand companies shuttered their doors. The most actively traded company on the New York Stock Exchange—National Cordage—went belly-up. Giant pillars of the economy such as the Northern Pacific Railway and the Union Pacific Railroad crumbled. America had experienced economic downturns before, but this was much bigger, lasting for four frightening years, from 1893 to 1898. At one point, four million workers were idle—more than one-fourth of a labor force of fifteen million—at a time of no government support for the unemployed.

Not surprisingly, anxiety about overcivilization increased. Kristin Hoganson, associate professor of history at the University of Illinois, writes in Fighting for American Manhood, “The depression of 1893 exacerbated anxieties about manhood, for unemployment resulting from the depression led to fears of male dependency. Rather than providing for their families, as men were expected to do, thousands failed to fulfill this basic male responsibility.”¹⁶

Overseas expansion was seen as a cure-all for the triple whammy of overcivilization, economic depression, and the end of the frontier. Battling Others for their land would enhance the American male’s barbarian virtues and secure profitable markets, and the United States would once again have a frontier in which to hone its Teutonic blade. For many, the sun was not setting on America, but rising on a new ocean of opportunities.

The United States was not the first White Christian country to the imperial feeding frenzy. By the end of the nineteenth century, Britain had fifty colonies, France thirty-three, and Germany thirteen. More than 98 percent of Polynesia was colonized, 90 percent of Africa, and more than 56 percent of Asia. Across this broad swath of the planet, only seven countries were still fully independent nations. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge expressed America’s “empire envy”: “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion and their present defense all the waste places of the earth. It is a movement which makes for civilization and the advancement of the race. As one of the great nations of the world, the United States must not fall out of the line of march.”¹⁷

The U.S. Army had brought the Aryan to the Pacific coast. It now passed the baton to the U.S. Navy. Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, president of the newly founded Naval War College, lectured about the need for U.S. expansion “to seek the welfare of the country.”¹⁸ Captain Mahan published his collected lectures in an 1890 book entitled The Influence of Seapower upon History, 1660–1783. Overnight the groundbreaking book made Mahan the best-known American naval officer and the Naval War College an internationally respected institution.

The U.S. Navy’s traditional approach had been defensive—the protection of America’s borders. Mahan preached an offensive mission: the U.S. Navy should seize strategic world ports, each “one link in the chain of exchange by which wealth accumulates.”¹⁹ The United States, he stated, could experience British-style imperial greatness by concentrating its naval power at the “links” or “pressure points” of international commerce. By striking quickly and sharply at any of these nerve centers, the United States could paralyze whole oceans. To bring Asian booty back to the United States, Captain Mahan said the U.S. Navy must establish links in the Pacific, cut a canal through Central America, and turn the Caribbean into an American lake.

In the Atlantic Monthly, a reviewer called Mahan’s The Influence of Seapower upon History “distinctively the best and most important, also by far the most interesting, book on naval history which has been produced… for many a long year.”²⁰ The reviewer’s name was Theodore Roosevelt.

NOW THE AMERICAN ARYAN sought his naval links. By the 1890s, a generation of young nationalists had arisen around the globe to reclaim their homelands from the White Christian colonial powers. Spain was battling insurrections in both its Cuban and Philippines colonies.

Spain had a conventional Western-style army trained to fight set battles with heavy armaments and many men. The Cuban freedom fighters had little money or arms, so they turned to guerilla warfare: Small bands burned sugar fields, mills, and plantations. They tore up telegraph lines, railroad tracks, and bridges and attacked Spanish forces to seize weapons.

To combat these guerilla tactics, the Spanish introduced a “reconcentrato” policy that “concentrated” Cuban civilians into concentration camps. (After World War II the term concentration camp has come to mean “extermination camp.” But in the 1890s, concentration camps referred to areas where noncombatant civilians were held in order to deny material and moral support to the freedom fighters.) The Spanish put the entire island under martial law and gathered Cubans in central locations where they could be watched by the Spanish army. The concentration camps were roofless and virtually uninhabitable—pigpens, cattle pens, and barbwire-enclosed fields. Food was scarce and lacked nutritional value. Disrupted lives bred mental terror and sleeplessness, which soon gave way to hopelessness. Famine and disease felled thousands of innocent civilians.

By 1898, one-third of Cuba’s population languished in these camps. At least 30 percent perished from lack of proper food, sanitary conditions, and medicines. More than four hundred thousand Cubans died. One reporter wrote, “In other wars men have fought with men, and women have suffered indirectly because the men were killed, but in this war it is the women, herded together in towns like cattle, who are going to die, while the men, camped in the fields and mountains, will live.”²¹

The underdog Cuban freedom fighters received positive press coverage in the United States as a result of an excellent public-relations effort by expatriate Cubans based in New York City, who deftly spun the American press toward stories favorable to their revolutionary cause. The Yellow Press painted the greasy Spaniards as brutal villains who murdered, tortured, and raped innocent Cuban women and children—indeed, newspapers portrayed the entire island as a pure woman being raped by Spain. A New York stage production about the Cuban revolution featured a scheming Spanish villain who attempted to have his way with an attractive Cuban girl. And editorials presented the United States as a chivalrous man outraged at the brutal Spanish for assaulting the helpless Cubans.

Many Americans assumed that the Cubans were revolting to become more like America. Senator William Mason of Illinois said, “Cuban boys had come to our colleges, learned about George Washington and returned home to tell their compatriots.”²² On March 4, 1896, the Chicago Times-Herald wrote, “The struggle Cuba is making for civil and political liberty is identical with the struggle the founders of the republic of the United States made against the selfishness and oppression of the crown of Great Britain.”²³ Charles Kendall Adams, president of the University of Wisconsin, asked Madison’s 1897 graduating class, “What has Spain ever done for civilization? What books, what inventions have come from Spain? What discoveries in the laboratory or in scientific fields? So few have they been that they are scarcely worth mentioning.”²⁴

IN 1895, ROOSEVELT RESIGNED as a civil service commissioner to become one of three New York City police commissioners on the civilian oversight board. In a letter to his sister Bamie, he complained, “The work of the Police Board is as grimy as all work for municipal reform over here must be for some decades to come; and it is inconceivably arduous, disheartening, and irritating.”²⁵ Agitated, bored, and ambitious, Roosevelt quickly turned his sights to Washington.

The former governor of Ohio, congressman, and Civil War veteran William McKinley was the Republican Party’s 1896 presidential nominee, and Teddy knew that if he worked to ensure McKinley’s election, he might receive a high-level job in the new administration. Roosevelt campaigned in a number of states for McKinley, who won, and then enlisted powerful friends to help him lobby the president-elect for the post of assistant secretary of the Navy. McKinley was hesitant, confessing to one of Roosevelt’s friends, “I want peace and I am told that your friend Theodore—whom I know only slightly—is always getting into rows with everybody. I am afraid he is too pugnacious.”²⁶

Roosevelt worried that if more time elapsed, McKinley might learn what a disaster the New York police board had become. Writes Edmund Morris: “By March 4, when William McKinley was inaugurated, the situation at Police Headquarters had become an open scandal. Newspapers that day carried reports of an almost total breakdown of discipline in the force, new outbreaks of corruption, tearful threats of resignation.”²⁷ Knowing this, Roosevelt and his friends furiously lobbied for his appointment. “The only, absolutely the only thing I can hear adverse,” Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote Teddy, “is that there is a fear that you will want to fight somebody at once.”²⁸

President William McKinley. He jump-started the national careers of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. McKinley was the first president to advance the idea that the U.S. military invaded foreign countries with benevolent intentions. His logic struck a humanitarian chord and is still embraced today by the American public. (Library of Congress)

Eventually the lobbying paid off. On April 6, 1897, Theodore Roosevelt was nominated as assistant secretary of the Navy, at a salary of $4,500 a year. One New York City police commissioner laughed triumphantly and declared, “What a glorious retreat!”²⁹ Notes Morris, “An inescapable aura of defeat clouded his resignation…. No matter what he said about ‘an honorable way out of this beastly job,’ the fact remained that he was leaving a position of supreme responsibility for a subservient one.”³⁰

At the time, the hottest debates in Washington were about whether to annex Hawaii and whether to invade Cuba. The secretary of the Navy, John Long, was Roosevelt’s boss, and Teddy had promised him that he would be entirely loyal and subordinate, though to his sister Roosevelt confided, “I am a quietly rampant ‘Cuba libre’ man.”³¹

On April 26—after just one week in office—Roosevelt gave President McKinley a memo with four warnings of possible trouble with Cuba. This was just the beginning of his pro-war campaign. The nerve center of American strategic planning was the Naval War College. Assistant Secretary Teddy—in office only seven weeks—journeyed to Newport, Rhode Island, to address the War College planners. There, Roosevelt delivered a powerful “peace through strength” speech in which he said the word “war” sixty-two times, approximately once a minute.

Teddy’s war cry caused a nationwide sensation when his speech was printed in major newspapers. Exclaimed the Washington Post, “Theodore Roosevelt, you have found your place at last!” The Baltimore Sun called it “manly, patriotic, intelligent and convincing.”³² The Naval War College planners got the message and, on June 30, 1897, submitted to Washington a plan to wage war on Spain that stated, “hostilities would take place mainly in the Caribbean, but the U.S. Navy would also attack the Philippines.”³³

In September of 1897—when Secretary Long was out of town—Roosevelt met with the president three times and gave McKinley a memorandum in which he advocated immediate war and recommended that the United States take and retain the Philippines. He also lobbied Congress. Representative Thomas Butler (Pennsylvania), a member of the House Naval Affairs Committee, remembered, “Roosevelt came down here looking for war. He did not care whom we fought as long as there was a scrap.”³⁴ Teddy’s private correspondence supported this: in a letter to a West Point professor, Roosevelt wrote, “In strict confidence… I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.”³⁵

AMERICA’S ORIGINAL NEMESIS IN the Philippines was Emilio Aguinaldo, the freedom-fighting general and first president, who would see his country’s short independence snatched by the United States. His neighbors recognized his promise early—they elected him mayor of his hometown when he was only seventeen years old. A talented pupil who studied America’s Declaration of Independence and Constitution, Aguinaldo dreamed of his country throwing off its Spanish masters. By the 1890s, he was a leading freedom fighter, now General Aguinaldo of the Philippines Revolutionary Army. In 1896, he wrote of an independent Philippines: “The form of government will be like that of the United States of America, founded upon the most rigid principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality.”³⁶

Hoping to emulate America’s War of Independence, on January 29, 1897, the Filipino freedom fighters appealed to the U.S. State Department: “Pray that help be extended to the Filipinos to expel the Spanish by force, just as the Emperor Napoleon helped America in the war of separation from England, by whose aid the Americans attained independence.”³⁷ The United States turned a deaf ear to their pleas.

In battle after battle, the Philippines Revolutionary Army—consisting of motivated but poorly trained and meagerly armed fighters—beat back Spanish colonial forces. On December 14, 1897, the two sides signed a truce. The Spanish promised democratic reforms and asked Aguinaldo and other freedom fighters to leave the country temporarily as Spain made the transition. Aguinaldo established a government-in-exile in nearby Hong Kong, where he could keep a watchful eye on officials in Manila.

THE UNITED STATES’ ROAD to war began with two Spanish challenges to American manhood. The Spanish minister to the United States, Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, had written a letter to a friend in Cuba describing a meeting with President McKinley. A Cuba Libre sympathizer in the Havana post office stole de Lôme’s letter and forwarded it to newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst in New York, who published it. Minister de Lôme had written that President McKinley was “weak and catering to the rabble, and besides, a low politician.”³⁸ Hearst’s New York Journal called de Lôme’s comments the “Worst Insult to the United States in History,”³⁹ and rival papers offered similarly outraged interpretations.

Less than a week after the de Lôme affair—at 9:40 p.m. on February 15, 1898—the USS Maine exploded and sank in Havana harbor, killing more than two hundred American sailors. It was the most sensational American news event since President Garfield’s assassination in 1881. Not one shred of evidence ever existed to suggest that the Spanish had sunk the Maine.⁴⁰ (Captain Charles Dwight Sigsbee, the Maine’s skipper, suspected that the explosion had been caused by a fire in a coal bunker next to a reserve magazine, which was a frequent mishap aboard steam-driven warships.) Nevertheless, the February 18, 1898, edition of Hearst’s Journal ran the banner headline, “DESTRUCTION OF THE WAR SHIP MAINE WAS THE WORK OF AN ENEMY.” Directly below was a boldface quote about a top U.S. government official supporting Hearst’s sensational claim: “Assistant Secretary Roosevelt Convinced the Explosion of the War Ship Was Not an Accident.” Hearst sold more than a million copies of his paper that morning.

General Emilio Aguinaldo, the George Washington of the Philippines. However, he wasn’t White, and according to Professor Burgess of Columbia and most American political and intellectual leaders, this disqualified him from leading a state, a job restricted to those with Teutonic blood. Aguinaldo’s biggest mistake was to believe that the United States would support independence for the non-White Filipinos. As president of the short-lived Philippines republic, Aguinaldo told his cabinet: “I have studied attentively the Constitution of the United States, and I find in it no authority for colonies, and I have no fear.” (Library of Congress)

Before any U.S. government body investigated the facts, Congress rushed through a fifty-million-dollar defense appropriation bill to put the country on an aggressive war footing. McKinley confided to an aide, “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up, and I do not want to see another.”⁴¹ But the Atlanta Constitution ridiculed McKinley as a “goody-goody man,” calling for a “declaration of American virility…. At this moment here is a great need of a man in the White House…. The people need a man—an American—at the helm.” The New York Journal sought “any signs, however faint, of manhood in the White House,” while a New York World editorial proclaimed, “There are manly and resolute ways of dealing with treachery and wrong. There are unmanly and irresolute ways.” As other papers piled on, Assistant Secretary Roosevelt remarked to a friend, “McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate éclair.”⁴²

New York Journal, February 18, 1898. Front page. The USS Maine blew up in Havana harbor because of a ship malfunction. But the assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, wanted a war and, with not a shred of evidence, helped Yellow Press publisher William Randolph Hearst create the idea in the American mind that it “was the work of an enemy.” Years later, President Franklin Roosevelt belatedly apologized to the government of Spain for American accusations.

McKinley paced his Executive Mansion office by day and needed sleeping pills at night. He recalled to visitors the horrors he had witnessed in the Civil War and reiterated how he wanted to prevent any recurrence. With one friend he burst into tears as he voiced his fear of war. Nevertheless, on April 20, 1898, McKinley reluctantly signed the war resolution against Spain. A brilliant politician regarding domestic affairs, the president who had never paid much attention to the rest of the world now had to square the nation’s conscience with its opposition to European-style imperialism. Initiating what would become a recurring Yankee tradition, McKinley contended that the U.S. military could invade other countries when Americans decided that their people needed help. McKinley conjured up the fantasy that when a U.S. soldier pointed a gun at a foreign Other, he was there to help. The Teller amendment to McKinley’s war resolution declared these benevolent intentions:

The people of the Island of Cuba are, of right ought to be, free and independent…. The United States does hereby demand, that the Government of Spain at once relinquish its authority and government in the Island of Cuba [and] the United States hereby disclaims any disposition or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said Island except for the pacification thereof, and asserts its determination, when that is accomplished, to leave the government and control of the Island to its people.⁴³

When McKinley called for volunteers, he authorized three regiments composed of frontiersmen with special qualifications as marksmen and horsemen. The secretary of war, Russell Alger, offered Teddy a regiment. Roosevelt turned down command but said he would serve as lieutenant colonel if his friend Leonard Wood commanded. Thus the “Rough Riders” (a name Roosevelt cribbed from Buffalo Bill) were born.

On June 14, 1898, American troops sailed from Tampa to free Cuba. Roosevelt’s thoughts were of how he would help “score the first great triumph of a mighty world movement.”⁴⁴

In contrast to the American Revolutionary War, Cuban freedom fighters would have beaten the Spanish without foreign aid. (Indeed, impartial observers noted that U.S. troops could not have landed if the Cubans had not fought the Spanish back.) But Teddy saw things differently:

The Cuban soldiers were almost all blacks and mulattoes and were clothed in rags and armed with every kind of old rifle. They were utterly unable to make a serious fight, or to stand against even a very inferior number of Spanish troops, but we hoped they might be of some use as scouts and skirmishers. For various reasons this proved not to be the case, and so far as the Santiago Campaign was concerned, we should have been better off if there had not been a single Cuban with the army. They accomplished literally nothing, while they were a source of trouble and embarrassment, and consumed much provisions.⁴⁵

Teddy’s commander, Leonard Wood, wrote to the secretary of war that the Cuban Army was “made up very considerably of black people, only partially civilized, in whom the old spirit of savagery has been more or less aroused by years of warfare, during which time they have reverted more or less to the condition of men taking what they need and living by plunder.”⁴⁶ English correspondent John Atkins remarked that “by far the most notable thing” about the Americans’ reaction to the color of the natives “was their sudden open disavowal of friendliness towards the Cubans.”⁴⁷Before the invasion, the American press had portrayed the Cuban fighters as predominantly White men, “as brave as any who wear the blue.”⁴⁸ Those newspapers reflected the military’s disappointment that the Cubans were Black: the Cuban freedom fighters were now lazy, thieving, murderous bands.

Roosevelt, who as an author had crafted a winning persona as a manly Ranchman, had arranged for friendly photographers and correspondents to accompany the Rough Riders to Cuba, where they reported Teddy’s courageous charge up Kettle Hill on the San Juan Ridge. Roosevelt’s men had been waiting in trenches for orders when they began suffering serious casualties. Teddy decided to wait no longer and led his men to charge the Spanish positions above. Joined by several other brigades, Roosevelt successfully drove the Spanish away. Later, Roosevelt’s men helped repel a counterattack on another hill. Awash in celebrity as a result of the press coverage, Roosevelt “became a walking advertisement for the imperialistic manhood he desired for the American race.”⁴⁹

The war in Cuba was brief, and on July 17, 1898, Spanish and American troops gathered in the city of Santiago for the surrender ceremony. In 1894, Teddy had penned an article entitled “National Life and Character” in which he wrote that Blacks were “a perfectly stupid race” and it would take “many thousand years” before the Black became even “as intellectual as the [ancient] Athenian.”⁵⁰ Victorious American Aryans had no intention of handing a state to this inferior race. This was at a time when Professor Burgess’s political science students at Columbia University were learning from him that only those Whites with Teutonic heritage were capable to control the organs of a state. Instead, the Americans informed shocked Cuban freedom fighters that the old Spanish civil authorities—White men—would remain in charge. No Cubans were allowed to confer on the surrender or to sign it. Down came the Spanish flag and, to the cheers of American soldiers, up went the Stars and Stripes.

Theodore Roosevelt in his Rough Rider uniform. With almost twenty years of public-relations experience as a successful author, Roosevelt was a past master at using New York photo studios to create a lasting image. He cribbed the title “Rough Rider” from William Cody (“Buffalo Bill”) and had his uniform tailored by Brooks Brothers. (Library of Congress)

As soon as the United States got control of Cuba, Congress passed the Platt Amendment, which canceled the benevolent intentions expressed in the original war resolution. Cuba was prohibited from making treaties with other countries and was forced to cede Guantánamo Bay to the United States for use as a naval base. After he became military governor of Cuba, Leonard Wood admitted to Roosevelt, “There is, of course, little or no independence left Cuba under the Platt Amendment.”⁵¹

AMERICAN SUN-FOLLOWERS ALSO EYED naval links necessary for westward expansion across the Pacific. Filipino freedom fighters had been battling their Spanish colonial masters for years. But most Americans had never heard of the distant Philippines. Even fewer understood that it was experiencing its own revolution, just like Cuba. It was not until an 1898 article in the North American Review—“The Cuba of the Far East”—that there was a single public reference to the revolt in the Philippines.⁵²

Indeed, early in his presidency, McKinley was asked the location of the Philippine Islands. “Somewhere away around on the other side of the world,” he answered.⁵³ And the president later admitted, “When we received the cable from Admiral Dewey [Commodore at the time] telling of the taking of the Philippines I looked up their location on the globe. I could not have told where those darned islands were within 2,000 miles.”⁵⁴

The Philippine Islands

When asked the location of the Philippine Islands, President McKinley answered, “Somewhere away around on the other side of the world.”

ON FEBRUARY 15, 1898, when the Maine exploded in Havana, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines were suddenly in play. Just as the U.S. Army had planted forts that facilitated westering, the U.S. Navy could now obtain the links necessary to circle Whitman’s circle.

With Assistant Secretary Roosevelt beating the tom-toms in Washington, Admiral George Dewey in Hong Kong made plans to seize Manila. While the United States could defeat Spanish naval power, that was not the same as controlling the Philippines. Conquering territory required land troops, and the U.S. Army was on the other side of the world. Aguinaldo’s soldiers had proven themselves against Spanish forces, and now Dewey imagined he could use them as a temporary rent-an-army.

Dewey solicited Aguinaldo’s assistance several times. Within a month of the Maine explosion, he dispatched Commander Edward Wood to liaise with the Filipino leader. When he met with Wood, Aguinaldo naturally assumed that since he was dealing with an emissary of the top U.S. official in Asia, he was hearing the official American position on his revolution. Wood told him that the United States would support Filipino independence if the Filipino army teamed with the U.S. Navy against Spain. With his own Indians, the American Aryan had been quick to make treaties that Congress could later disregard. Now on the international stage, U.S. officials were more circumspect. When Aguinaldo asked whether the United States had designs of its own for the Philippines, Wood assured him, “The United States is a great and rich nation and needs no colonies.”⁵⁵ When Aguinaldo suggested that he commit this in writing, Wood “replied that he would refer the matter to Admiral Dewey.”⁵⁶

In almost every meeting, Aguinaldo asked the U.S. officials for a signed agreement stating their intentions and obligations. According to Aguinaldo, the U.S. consul to Singapore, Spencer Pratt, assured him, “The Government of North America is a very honest, just, and powerful government. There is no necessity for entering into a formal written agreement because the word of the Admiral and of the United States Consul were in fact equivalent to the most solemn pledge, that their verbal promises and assurance would be fulfilled to the letter and were not to be classed with Spanish promises or Spanish ideas of a man’s word of honour.”⁵⁷

Many historians maintain it is impossible to ascertain precisely what the State Department and War Department representatives promised the Filipinos. They point to the lack of written agreements, the ambiguity of the verbal interchanges, the potential for misunderstandings between English-speaking Americans and their Spanish-speaking Filipino counterparts. But it is clear that the American emissaries gave Aguinaldo every encouragement. In hindsight, the Filipino leader should have heeded the warning of the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines, Basilio Augustín y Dávila:

A squadron manned by foreigners, possessing neither instruction nor discipline, is preparing to come to this archipelago with the ruffianly intention of robbing us of all that means life, honor, and liberty. Pretending to be inspired by a courage of which they are incapable, the North American seamen undertake, as an enterprise capable of realization, the substitution of Protestantism for the Catholic religion… to treat you as tribes refractory to civilization, to take possession of your riches as if they were unacquainted with the rights of property.⁵⁸

The May 1 “Battle of Manila Bay” was actually not much of a fight. On May 1, Admiral Dewey’s modern, steel ships steamed into Manila Bay. Spain’s creaky, wooden ships were conveniently tied up in a row. It was a turkey shoot, American cannon pounding Spain’s wooden relics into kindling. The conflict was so one-sided that Dewey had his sailors break for a sit-down morning meal. After the breakfast dishes had been washed and dried, the U.S. Navy resumed its attack.

Americans back home were elated by the stunning news. Newspaper front pages featured images of America’s new high-tech navy hero, Admiral Dewey, who was blond and blue-eyed, the very picture of an Aryan. “Americans saw the white-haired Navy Military man as the paragon of American racial superiority, civilization and manhood,”⁵⁹ William Leeman writes in “America’s Admiral: George Dewey and American Culture in the Gilded Age.” Biographers “traced Dewey’s heritage through Saxon royal lines as far back as the early centuries A.D.”⁶⁰ Some went so far as to assert that he was a descendant of Thor, the Saxon hero-god of war and thunder. A young English author wrote in the American Monthly Review of Reviews, “[Admiral Dewey was] the logical result of a system which produces the best naval officers in the world… the American officer combines valuable qualities of his own with the necessary traits which are found in the English and other northern races.”⁶¹ The author’s name was Winston Churchill.

Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed, “No man since the Civil War, whether soldier or civilian, has added so much to the honorable renown of the nation or has deserved so well of it.”⁶² Recalled Dewey, “Towns, children, and articles of commerce were named after me. I was assured that nothing like the enthusiasm for a man and a deed had ever been known.”⁶³ Dewey mania swept through America with Dewey days, Dewey songs, Dewey fireworks, Dewey parades, Dewey flags, Dewey portraits, Dewey mugs, Dewey hats, Dewey skirts, Dewey shorts, and baby boys named George in his honor. These babies chewed Dewey teething rings and shook rattles shaped like Dewey’s body. Older children played with Dewey action figures. A St. Louis department store’s newspaper ad offered “Dewey souvenir bargains in every department, in every aisle, on every counter.”⁶⁴ Adults bought Dewey neckties, cuff links, canes, paperweights, letter openers, shaving mugs, napkins, commemorative plates and coins, miniature busts, candlesticks, replica navy hats, Dewey laxatives, and Dewey gum, called “Dewey’s Chewies.” Nationwide ads for the Pears’ Soap Company featured a drawing of Admiral Dewey scrubbing his White hands whiter. Below Dewey’s image, a White Christian missionary hands a bar of soap to a crouching “Pacific Negro”; the advertising copy reads: “The first step towards lightening The White Man’s Burden is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness. Pears’ Soap is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth as civilization advances, while amongst the cultured of all nations it holds the highest place—it is the ideal toilet soap.”⁶⁵

The Navy Department had ordered Dewey to attack Spanish naval power in Manila before he was able to secure his rent-an-army. Many in the United States assumed that Dewey’s victory assured control of the Philippines, but the U.S. Navy held only Manila Bay; the American consulate operated from a bobbing ship. Spanish colonial forces held the walled city of Manila and its immediate environs. The Philippines Revolutionary Army had the rest of the country.

Dewey dispatched the USS McCulloch to Hong Kong to pick up the man who he hoped would align the Filipino freedom fighters with the U.S. Navy. Under the cover of darkness on the evening of May 16, the U.S. consul-general, Rounseville Wildman, shepherded General Emilio Aguinaldo through Hong Kong harbor, where together they boarded the McCulloch for Aguinaldo’s return.

Just after noon on May 19 in Manila Bay, U.S. Navy officers saluted General Aguinaldo as he transferred from the USS McCulloch to Dewey’s private launch for the trip to Dewey’s command ship. The Filipino freedom fighter soon found himself face-to-face with the most famous military man in the world.

Aguinaldo grilled Dewey about the United States’ past verbal assurances. According to Aguinaldo, Dewey explained that the United States was a humanitarian country that had dispatched its navy to help the Filipinos win their independence. When asked for a written commitment to Filipino independence, Aguinaldo recalled that Dewey said that “the United States would unquestionably recognize the Independence of the people of the Philippines, guaranteed as it was by the word of honour of Americans, which, he said, is more positive, more irrevocable than any written agreement.”⁶⁶ Dewey pointed out that the United States was a rich nation with enough territory and no history of taking colonies. Historian Stanley Karnow observes: “The Americans’ only preoccupation at that juncture was to defeat the Spanish. To achieve that goal, they sought the help of the Filipinos, indulging them with pledges that had no foundation in reality. Aguinaldo filtered Dewey’s remarks through the prism of his own dreams, [and he] construed American attention to mean that he was now a U.S. ally in the struggle against Spain.”⁶⁷

U.S. sailors ferried the returning hero to the mainland, where thousands cheered as U.S. Marines turned rifles over to the freedom fighters. Addressing the crowd, Aguinaldo declared, “Divine Providence is about to place independence within our reach. The Americans have extended their protecting mantle to our beloved country…. The American fleet will prevent any reinforcements coming from Spain…. Where you see the American flag flying, assemble in numbers; they are our redeemers.”⁶⁸

Pears’ Soap advertisement, 1899. Admiral George Dewey was the most famous military man in the world, the high-tech Daniel Boone bringing bright, White civilization to the dark savages. (First appeared in McClure’s Magazine, October 1899)

For the first two months after Dewey splintered the Spanish fleet, American and Filipino military forces complemented each other: the U.S. Navy held the sea, and the Philippines Revolutionary Army beat Spanish forces into a humiliating retreat behind Manila’s walls. But while Filipinos perceived the U.S. Navy as a benevolent force providing a protective canopy under which they fought for independence, Washington saw things differently. In his residence, President McKinley wrote a note to himself: “While we are conducting a war and until its conclusion we must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep what we want.”⁶⁹

The Philippines’ first Independence Day was celebrated on June 12, 1898. The main event was led by (now president) Aguinaldo in his hometown. He proudly unfurled the country’s new flag, explaining that the banner’s red, white, and blue colors were a salute to “the flag of the United States of America as a manifestation of our profound gratitude towards that Great Nation for the disinterested protection she is extending to us and will continue to extend to us.”⁷⁰

The Filipinos would not celebrate another Independence Day for sixty-four years.

ON JUNE 16, THE AMERICAN consul, Oscar Williams, wrote from Manila that “[Aguinaldo] has organized a government… and from that day to this he has been uninterruptedly successful in the field and dignified and just as the head of his government.”⁷¹ But the future of the Philippines would be decided in the American Aryan’s capital. The very idea that a Pacific Negro was capable of ruling eight million people was unthinkable. Instead of referring to the leader of the Philippines as President Aguinaldo, the New York Times called him “Chief Aguinaldo,” or just “insurgent” or “unmoral infant.”⁷² Professor Theodore Woolsey of Yale Law School argued, “The so-called Filipino republic is but a body of insurgents against the sovereignty of the United States.”⁷³

“Filipino’s First Bath,” Judge magazine, June 10, 1899. President McKinley bathes a Filipino in civilization’s waters like St. John the Baptist. “Oh, you dirty boy,” exclaims McKinley. The artist was able to depict Filipinos as Africans because so few Americans knew the difference. (Puck magazine begat Judge magazine, which begat The New Yorker magazine.)

On June 30, 1898, President Aguinaldo made the strategic error that marked the beginning of the end of Filipino nationhood: he allowed twenty-five hundred armed American soldiers to come ashore to prosecute the war with Spain. Aguinaldo told his cabinet, “I have studied attentively the Constitution of the United States, and I find in it no authority for colonies, and I have no fear.”⁷⁴

“Hurrah for the Fourth of July! We’re coming in on independence day celebrations too.” Minneapolis Journal .President McKinley’s premise that the U.S. military would act with benevolent intentions convinced Americans that the people of Cuba, Hawaii, and the Philippines appreciated American invasions of their countries. (Charles Bartholomew, Cartoons of the Spanish-American War)

The half-starved Spanish held out behind Manila’s walls. Aguinaldo’s troops held the rest of the country. But one crucial element had become clear: the Spanish were White and the Filipinos were not. The Americans approached the Spanish with a deal: U.S. forces would pretend to attack Manila, the Spanish would pretend to defend, and, after a little noise, the Spanish would surrender the capital. The Americans would then claim a glorious victory, the Spanish—who had realized they could not win—a manly defeat without casualties. Recalled Admiral Dewey, “The Governor-General arranged with me that I was to go up and fire a few shots and then I was to make the signal, ‘Do you surrender?’ and he would hoist the white flag and then the troops would march in.”⁷⁵ All of this was kept secret from the Filipinos.

“Holding His End Up.” Europeans gaze at a newly imperial Uncle Sam, who stands on an Army and Navy platform in 1898. Because Americans knew so little about their new possessions, the artist could portray Hawaiians, Cubans, and Filipinos as monkeylike Africans. (Philadelphia Inquirer, 1898)

On August 13, the Americans and Spanish “fought” the sham Battle of Manila. Filipino troops tried to join their U.S. Army allies, but the Americans shot at them to prevent any but White troops from passing through Manila’s thick walls.

For almost four months Aguinaldo’s forces had beaten back the Spanish until they were huddled in the capital eating horse meat and rats. The U.S. Army waltzed into Manila with little wear and tear. And since the Americans had been careful to commit nothing in writing, Aguindalo had no documentation to support his story. Historian Ambeth Ocampo writes, “By nightfall, it had become painfully clear that the Americans transformed the ‘ally’ to ‘enemy.’ ”⁷⁶

U.S. Army soldiers on Manila’s wall, August 13, 1898. The McKinley administration portrayed the Battle of Manila as a great military victory. The truth was that the United States and Spain agreed that Spain would surrender Manila to the Americans after a fake battle, which served the interests of both the U.S. and Spanish militaries and kept the non-White Filipinos from taking the capital.

The capture of Manila marked the end of the Spanish-American War and thrilled the expansionists who imagined that Manila (as the assistant secretary of the Navy, Theodore Roosevelt, had argued) would be a key strategic link for the United States. In his rush to war, Teddy apparently never asked himself the elementary question of why a merchant shipping goods from China would first ship them to nearby Manila.

The United States could have saved blood and treasure if Washington had just leased warehouses in Hong Kong rather than attempt the military conquest of a poor and inconvenient Asian backwater. Only years later would Roosevelt comprehend the enormity of America’s blunder in the Pacific.

Theodore Roosevelt’s Strategic Blunder

Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt imagined Manila to be a key American strategic link to China. Roosevelt never asked himself the elementary question of why merchants would detour to Manila on the U.S.-China trade route.