The decade beginning in 1890 had a most distinct historical character. For one thing, its chronological boundaries were marked by crucial historical events. The year 1890 saw the rise of the People's Alliance, the McKinley Tariff, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the official closing of the frontier, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. At the turn of the century, in 1901, Morgan bought out Carnegie, Robert La Follette became governor of Wisconsin, and Theodore Roosevelt became president.
The significance of these events was not lost on those who lived through them. There were several attempts to characterize the decade in terms of a color. The "Yellow '90s" was the description of Stuart P. Sherman. The "Mauve Decade" was the epithet of Thomas Beer. However, no one drew parallels with the London art of Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde and called it "the decayed decade." Other titles were "Electric" by H. L. Mencken, "Romantic" by Richard Le Gallienne, and even "Moulting" by W. L. Wittlesey.
The central events of the early 1890s certainly suggest political dissolution and public disillusion. The Sherman Anti-Trust Law was invoked, not against corporations, but against labor unions. The Homestead Strike of 1892 ended in the rout of the strikers. The Pullman strike of 1894 was crushed without mercy by the federal government in league with railroad barons. The panic and depression of 1893 scarred society, and the silver panacea of the Democrats and Populists was rejected in the election of 1896. But the accession of William McKinley to the presidency in 1897 revealed a marked change in America's self-regard. Expansion overseas now served to divert and defuse national tensions. Despite its horrors, the Spanish-American War of 1898 was even described by the new secretary of state, John Hay, as a "splendid little war."
McKinley was the last veteran of the Civil War to become president and the first from a family engaged in heavy industry. His wife, Ida, suffered front epilepsy and phlebitis. McKinley did not want it said of Ida that none dared sit beside her at the White House. He became expert at throwing a handkerchief over her face when she had a seizure during receptions. It is a myth that McKinley was the tool of conservative, northeastern businessmen.
He hailed from the Midwest and headed a diverse coalition of interests. Fourteen years in Congress had taught him the arts of compromise, and he was determined, unlike his predecessor, Grover Cleveland, not to antagonize senators by high-handed actions. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt was one of those who mistook McKinley's caution for cowardice. He said, "McKinley has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair." It was not true. McKinley was one of those leaders who knew how to listen. He was openly patient, secretly stubborn, and inwardly resentful of undue political pressure. Roosevelt later realized his mistake. He then remarked of the basic motive underlying the surface veneer of McKinley's charm, "He treats everyone with equal favor, their worth to him is solely dependent on the advantages he could derive front them."
The election of 1896 had determined the outcome of the most controversial issue of the day. In 1897 the problem of Cuba replaced silver as the most troublesome question. In the late nineteenth century the Spanish colony of Cuba was in all almost continuous state of rebellion. Despite attempts at enticement by the Cuban rebels and intense provocation by the Spanish ruler, President Ulysses S. Grant and Secretary of State Hamilton Fish avoided American involvement in the Tell Years' War of 1868 to 1878. In 1878 Spain ended one rebellion with a paper peace but would not relinquish control of its island possession. America had $50 million invested in Cuban sugar and minings. Its trade with Cuba was worth more than $100 million in 1893. But guerrilla warfare took its toll of these lucrative investments. Between 1890 and 1896 Cuban trade had dwindled to a third of its former size.
The Cuban revolt of 1895 was conducted with great savagery on both sides and was, therefore, ideal copy for tabloids like the New York World and New York Journal, which were engaged in their own bitter war for circulation and survival. Spanish officials seized and searched ships at sea and ignored the rights of Cubans who had taken American citizenship. They destroyed fields of sugarcane, butchered livestock, and dismantled mills-especially those belonging to foreigners. American sympathy for the Cubans deepened to outrage when the Spanish governor general, Valeriano Weyler, proclaimed a policy of "reconcentrado," the herding of peasants into towns before laying waste to the countryside. On April 4,1896, Cleveland's secretary of state, Richard Olney, had formally warned Madrid "That the United States cannot contemplate with complacency another ten years of Cuban insurrection, with all its Injurious and distressing incidents, may certainly be taken for granted."
When McKinley became president on March 4, 1897, his range of options toward Cuba and Spain was already quite narrow. In his inaugural address he declared, "We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression." But he was well aware of the depth of public antipathy to Spain. He also knew that it had been fomented by newspapers interested in sensationalism and indifferent to historical perspective. He believed that the press would keep up the pressure on the public and that the public would continue to pressure Congress. He recognized that the basis of his popular support was, in one sense, wider than the Republicans but, in another, narrower. Formerly he had appealed not only to a single party but also the public at large. If he could not resolve the problem before the next election, he would be abandoned by both public and party. However, some eloquent Republicans were openly advocating expansion through war. They included congressmen from the Atlantic states, prominent publisher Whitelaw Reid, and self-seeking publicists like Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Mahan. These Americans had different solutions to the Cuban problem. Some wanted the United States to expel Spain from the island, then take possession of it and gain control to the approaches of the projected isthmian canal in Central America. Some wanted to establish a Cuban republic.
The American consul in Havana, Fitzhugh Lee, was committed to the rebels but responsible in his conduct of consulate affairs. In 1897 McKinley appointed a New York lawyer, Stewart Woodford, known for his tact and determination, to the American ministry in Madrid. Furthermore, in June 1897 McKinley sent a special investigator, William J. Calhoun of Illinois, to report on Cuba. Calhoun's report of June 22, 1897, reaffirmed what McKinley had suspected. Of the notorious scorched-earth policy Calhoun concluded, "The country was wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation."
McKinley tried to convince Spain that its preferred solution should be gradual reform. On June 26, 1897, he advised Madrid to end the policy of reconcentration, introduce programs of relief for refugees, restore law and order, and concede Cuban autonomy. Underlying his request was an implicit warning. If Spain continued to fight simply to avoid political humiliation, then the rebels would prolong the war in order to ensure foreign intervention. Moreover, McKinley openly stated that Cuba had a special relationship with the United States. This last part of his message was no more than a thinly veiled threat. In its reply of August, Spain repudiated the whole notion of a special relationship between America and Cuba and reserved its imperial right to repress the rebellion.
However, the assassination of the reactionary prime minister, Antonio Canoras del Castillo, in Madrid and the accession to power of a more liberal administration led to compromise. The new ministry recalled Gen. Valeriano Weyler and agreed to assist refugees and form a plan for Cuban autonomy. The queen regent, Maria Christina, promulgated the plan in November 1897. But it was rejected by the rebels, who realized that Spain would still retain the reins of power and maintain a formidable army of occupation on the island. Spain clung obsessively to the usual belief of an imperial power fighting an impossible guerrilla war that increased resources and a final sustained campaign would result in the defeat of the enemy. Moreover, Spanish peninsulares and officers on the island resented the very idea of autonomy and were committed to subverting it even after it became official Spanish policy. On January 12, 1898, a mob of veterans and hoodlums attacked the property of Havana businessmen who supported autonomy. These riots undermined American trust in Spain's ability to carry out its declared policy. Both sides in Cuba preferred war to reform, and the rebels declared for full independence.
On February 9, 1898, the New York journal carried a facsimile of a purloined letter written by the Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy De Lome, to a friend in Cuba. In it De Lome reviewed the prospects for a peaceful solution. He characterized McKinley as a weakling interested only in his own popularity, and he advised Spain to court American friendship by proposing a reciprocal tariff. What the letter implied was more damaging to the Spanish case than what it actually said. A year of diplomacy had produced nothing more from Spain than a stream of patently false promises.
On February 15, 1898, the Maine, an American ship paying a courtesy visit to Havana, exploded in the harbor with the loss of 266 sailors. It was widely assumed that the ship had been blown up by Spanish agents. Without a scintilla of proof, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt announced, "The Maine was sunk by an act of dirty treachery on the part of the Spaniards." It is, however, difficult to see what Spain could have hoped to gain by exploding the Maine. The ship's commanding officer, Captain Sigsbee, asked the administration to suspend judgment. The suspicion remains that it was the work of Cuban agents, "provocateurs" designed to discredit Spain and force America's hand. Nevertheless, McKinley secured a defense appropriation of $50 million from Congress, in part to prepare for war, in part to indicate to Spain the gravity of the situation.
A common charge of radical historians has been that America was bent on war for blatant commercial advantage. However, in Expansionists of 1898 (1936) Julius Pratt reviewed the business press of the 1890s to demonstrate that the majority of businessmen believed that war would disrupt trade and argued against it. McKinley's mentor, Mark Hanna, was among those businessmen utterly opposed to war because of its inevitable financial and human cost. He spoke against it on March 26, 1898, at a private Gridiron dinner. Theodore Roosevelt replied, "We will have this war for the freedom of Cuba, Senator Hanna, in spite of the timidity of commercial interests." He was already intriguing against his superior, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long, with various orders for naval preparedness. It seemed that Roosevelt believed in war as social therapy.
While a commission of American experts examined the wreck in Havana, the State Department proposed a final compromise whereby Spain was to grant an armistice, end reconcentration, provide relief, and accept arbitration from McKinley. This ultimatum convinced the Spanish government that America was serious about Cuban independence. On March 31, 1898, it agreed to autonomy, relief, and redress for the Maine. In the meantime, American experts had attributed the ship's destruction to an unspecified "external cause." But the Spanish government refused arbitration and withheld recognition from the rebels. Supposedly in response to papal overtures, however, it granted an armistice on April 9. McKinley was not deceived by what he correctly interpreted as yet another example of Spanish obfuscation and delay. He saw only two possible outcomes to the catastrophe. Either Spain would continue to prosecute the war indefinitely and devastate the island in the process or the United States could intervene, expel Spain from the hemisphere, and establish peace. He believed that compromise would be futile and would simply prolong tragedy.
On March 17, 1898, the prudent Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont, recently returned from Cuba, treated the Senate to a scathing account of Spanish misrule on the island. On April 6, 1898, six European ambassadors called on McKinley and asked him, in the interests of humanity, to refrain from intervention. He turned their request upside down by replying that any intervention would itself be in the interests of humanity. And this was the basis of his message to Congress on April 11, 1898, when he declared that "in the name of civilization, in behalf of endangered American interests, which give us the right and the duty to act, the war in Cuba must stop." He asked Congress for authority to deploy military and naval forces "to secure a full and final termination of hostilities between the government of Spain and the people of Cuba." He was most dismissive of Spanish attempts at compromise and conciliation.
Both houses accepted an extra article proposed by Senator Henry M. Teller of Colorado to the war resolution of April 20, 1898, that "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."
The war of 1898 was the shortest in American history, lasting 100 days from April to August. Because this was to be an overseas war it was essential to paralyze the main Spanish fleet at the outlet. Commodore George Dewey, commander of the American Asiatic fleet, sped from his base in Hong Kong to Manila in the Spanish Philippines where he penetrated the defenses of a Spanish armada at dawn on May 1, 1898. He then gave his famous order, "You may fire when ready, Gridley." Five times he maneuvered the American fleet around the Spanish armada, bombarding it without mercy, before giving the counterorder to "draw off for breakfast." Although it became obvious when the smoke cleared that the Spanish fleet was lost beyond hope, the Spanish military governor, Basillo Augustin, mistook the American withdrawal for retreat and sent a message to Madrid that Spain had won a great victory.
To the world outside the Philippines the issue was in doubt for several days until the New York World and the Chicago Tribune carried a scoop of Dewey's success on May 8, 1898. To America the week's suspense had been unbearable, and when defiant news finally came the country was caught up in a great wave of patriotic fervor. Dewey, however, was not carried away with his success and waited for the arrival of enough troops to make a victory on the islands complete and secure. He also encouraged Emilio Aguinaldo, leader of the Filipinos opposed to Spanish rule, to renew their war of independence. In September the insurrection established an alternative government widely accepted on the islands.
After the Battle of Manila Bay, McKinley confessed in private that he had only a vague idea of where the Philippines were. Yet although he had declared in December 1897 that the seizure of territory was "criminal aggression," five months later he was maintaining, "while we are conducting the war and until its conclusion we must keep all we get; when the war is over we must keep what we want."
Success on land in Cuba was by no means assured for the United States. The army of 26,000 men lacked adequate supplies and equipment, and the War Department led by Secretary Russell A. Alger was incompetent. Fortunately for America, Spain was even more inefficient. It had a superior land force of 200,000 troops in Cuba but deployed only 13,000 at Santiago where the Americans landed, and eventually defeated, the Spanish. Rather than surrender without a fight, Adm. Pascual Cervera led his inferior fleet out of Santiago Harbor on July 3 to certain defeat against a superior American force of four battleships. Gen. Nelson A. Miles's campaign to take Puerto Rico, another Spanish island in the Caribbean, between July 21 and August 12 passed off more smoothly. It was in this feverish atmosphere of imperial expectation, and to protect the Philippines, that Hawaii was annexed by a joint resolution of Congress that passed the House on June 15, 1898, and the Senate in July
The war was over on August 12 when McKinley, as commander-in-chief of the armies and navies, signed a protocol by which Spain was ordered to evacuate Cuba, to cede Puerto Rico and an island in the Ladrones (Guam) to the United States, and to allow America to occupy Manila until a peace treaty had determined the future of the Philippines. The protocol thus set an entirely constitutional precedent for an extension of presidential Power. Moreover, McKinley's words implied that a war begun in the name of liberty for Cuba should end in territorial acquisition for the United States. McKinley dispatched a carefully selected commission to oversee the peace conference in Paris, including his most trusted associate, Assistant Secretary William R. Day; publisher Whitelaw Reid; and Senators William P. Frye of Maine, Cushman K. Davis of Minnesota, and George Gray of Delaware.
McKinley was genuinely concerned for the future safety of the Filipinos. He recognized their inexperience in government and also dreaded the predatory intentions of other powers toward the islands. But he was equally eager to secure extra trade and new trading routes for the United States. Thus, from a mixture of interested and disinterested motives, he instructed the commission to demand the entire archipelago. Later McKinley recorded his reasoning:
We could not give them back to Spain-that would be cowardly and dishonorable; we could "Or turn them over to France or Germany-our commercial rivals in the Orient-that would be bad business and discreditable; 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 there was nothing left to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could for them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.
The idea of converting the Filipinos to Christianity was, of course, eyewash. The Philippines, named after a religious fanatic, Philip II had been Catholic for centuries
McKinley began to work for public support for his policy of retaining the Philippines. He did not expect to secure Senate ratification of the proposed treaty without a contest. His opponents inside and outside Congress were a motley but formidable crew. Their arguments were as varied as their personalities. Sonic said it was unconstitutional to rule territories acquired in war without the consent of the people concerned. Senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts welcomed the annexation of Hawaii but opposed the acquisition of the Philippines because he believed the Hawaiian peoples were in favor of annexation and the Filipinos were opposed to it. The "little Americans," led by novelist Mark Twain, editor E. L. Godkin, and reform politician Carl Schurz, dreaded that imperial responsibilities would entail increased armaments and involve the United States in confrontation with rival powers. Steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie said that imperialism would encourage all American aristocracy and erode individualism. Thomas B. Reed represented a racist school of thought, aghast at the prospect of introducing people from the South Seas into the United States. Congressman Champ Clark of Missouri remarked of the Filipinos, "No matter whether they are fit to govern themselves or not, they are not fit to govern us." He ridiculed the idea of "a Chinese senator from Hawaii, with his pigtail hanging down his back, with his pagan joss in his hand, " arguing in pidgin English with Henry Cabot Lodge.
Expansionists vehemently denied that the United States was about to engage in imperial competition with Europe and argued that their alms were limited to coaling stations and naval bases on strategic islands. They suggested an American naval line from the Atlantic in the East to Cuba in the Caribbean to an isthmian canal and from there to Hawaii, Guam, and Manila in the Pacific. "McKinleyism," said its advocates, meant control of islands en route, to Asia, not colonies on the continent itself.
In the Senate debate, those opposed to annexation concentrated their case on historical and constitutional grounds, that the acquisition of colonies was immoral. They argued that the United States could hardly uphold the Monroe Doctrine to protect the New World from the Old if it annexed remote territories across the Pacific. What remained unperceived by both the proponents and opponents of expansion were the responsibilities it involved.
The treaty was actually signed on December 10, 1898. To compensate Spain the United States paid $20 million for the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam. When the Senate voted on the treaty on February 6, 1899, it was ratified by 57 votes to 27, only 2 votes more than the necessary two thirds majority.
It was followed by a Filipino revolt led by Emilio Aguinaldo that lasted two years and in which more people died than in the war of 1898. It ended with the capture of Aguinaldo on March 27, 1901. The American military government was replaced on March 4, 1901, by a civil commission of four members. William Howard Taft, a circuit judge, headed the commission to establish a civil government in the Philippines. The average weight of the commissioners was 227 pounds, and it was said the natives would find them "an imposing spectacle." Carnegie wrote to a friend in the cabinet, "You seem to have finished your work of civilizing the Filipinos; it is thought that about 8,000 of them have been completely civilized and sent to Heaven; I hope you like it."
The loss of American lives in the course of the Filipino revolt widened the debate about American imperialism. In February 1899, British poet Rudyard Kipling published his famous appeal to racial and patriotic duty:
Take up the White Man's burden,
Send forth the best ye breed...
To wait in heavy harness,
On fluttering folk and wild-
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
His poem was generally taken as an address to America in the Philippines as well as to Britain in South Africa.
In Cuba, Gen. Leonard Wood, as temporary governor general, devised the future form of the island's relations with the United States. In 1900, after Havana had been much improved by progressive methods of saturation, over 1,400 people-mainly Spanish immigrants-died there in an epidemic of yellow fever. A commission of four army surgeons under Dr. Walter Reed believed the theory of Cuban physician Dr. Carlos Finlay that yellow fever was transmitted by the stegomyia mosquito. Unlike the 700 other species of mosquito, the stegomyia lives in houses and lays its eggs only in clean water. Their research was fatal for two members of the commission, Dr. James Carroll and Dr. Jesse W. Lazear, but proved Finlay's theory. Gen. William Crawford Gorgas, as chief sanitary officer in Havana, continued his campaign to cleanse the city, exterminate the stegomyia mosquito, and eliminate the disease.
Their efforts focused American attention on the responsibilities of the United States toward Cuba. William Allen White was quite typical of Journalists when in the Emporia Gazette of March 20, 1899, he expressed a philosophy of racist supremacy:
Only Anglo-Saxons can govern themselves. The Cubans will need a despotic government for many years to restrain anarchy until Cuba is filled with Yankees. Uncle Sam the First will have to govern Cuba as Alphonso the Thirteenth governed it...It is the Anglo-Saxon's manifest destiny to go forth as a world conqueror. He will take possession of the islands of the sea...This is what fate holds for the chosen people. It is so written...It is to be.
The president agreed. In his message of December 1899, McKinley argued that the new Cuba "must needs be bound to us by ties of singular intimacy and strength if its enduring welfare is to be assured." Underlying these sentiments was the president's design to turn the fledgling republic into an American protectorate. The Platt amendment to an army appropriation bill of March 2, 1901, allowed the president to end the occupation of Cuba after its government agreed to five conditions: never to make a treaty that would impair its independence; never to contract a debt it could not repay; to consent to American rights of intervention to preserve Cuba's independence and stabilize its government; to execute a sanitary program planned during American occupation; and to allow the United States a naval base on the island.
American imperialism was both a fulfillment and a betrayal of American traditions. It was a logical extension of the Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States claimed the right to preserve the New World from the Old, and a natural development of Manifest Destiny. Although the United States had acquired much of its continental territory, such as Florida and Alaska, by purchase, it had also acquired much by war-Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona from Mexico and the central plains and Great American Desert from the indigenous Indians. However, the notion of holding colonies was alien to the principles of the Revolution and the Constitution. And because the war of 1898 was fought overseas, it set precedents in strategy, tactics, and diplomacy.
The sudden acquisition of territories overseas, moreover, posed various constitutional questions about the civil rights of the peoples involved. In a series of test cases, the Insular cases, of which all but two were decided on May 27, 1901, the Supreme Court resolved the controversy with a sophistical distinction. By a majority of 5 to 4 it declared that the Philippines and Puerto Rico were territories appurtenant to, but not part of, the United States, and thus that their peoples were subjects, not citizens. The argument was not about theory but about tariff. According to the Court's decision, the United States could both acquire the islands and yet erect a tariff wall against their crops of sugar and tobacco that would otherwise compete as imports with its own produce in the domestic market. Mr. Dooley, the Irish American saloon keeper invented by Peter Finley Dunne at the turn of the century to satirize politicians, concluded his discussion of the Insular cases with, "no matter whether the constitution follows th' flag or not, th' Supreme Court follows th' illiction returns."
Source: Sean Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: Third Edition (New York: NYU Press, 1993), 338-53.