The White House, Washington, D.C., October 1898. Only a few months had passed since William McKinley had steered the United States to a stunning victory over Spain, and now he was faced with the most important decision of his presidency. In April, Congress declared war upon Spain for its brutal repression of a rebellion in Cuba. Though most of the fighting took place in the Caribbean, in Cuba and Puerto Rico, American war planners ordered the U.S. Navy’s Pacific squadron to sail for Manila Bay, in the Spanish colony of the Philippines, and destroy the fleet there. Both campaigns went extremely well for the United States, and the war—“a splendid little war,” in John Hay’s famous appraisal—was over by August. Dealing with Cuba was fairly straightforward: the island became ostensibly independent but in reality was dominated by the United States through indefinite military occupation. But in the Philippines, what had been a relatively minor sideshow quickly overwhelmed U.S. foreign policy and domestic politics, provoking an intense, emotional, and acrimonious debate that lasted for several years.
Having routed the Spanish and demolished their claims to empire, McKinley was now faced with the problem of what to do with the Philippines. It was a difficult decision, bound to be controversial whatever course he chose. Even arch-imperialists like Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge and naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan were not convinced that the United States should seize all the islands of the Philippine archipelago. But returning the islands to Spain was unthinkable, as was handing them over to another colonial power, and few believed the Filipinos capable of governing themselves. Most Americans understood that McKinley would claim at least the city and harbor of Manila, and possibly all of the island of Luzon on which Manila was located. Such a limited protectorate would be unusual but not unprecedented: the Hawaiian Islands, after all, had finally come under American rule earlier that year, and the government had purchased Alaska in 1867. But all the Philippines? With no future possibility of gaining statehood? This was a bold step, for it would mean that the United States had unequivocally become an overseas colonial power. It would mean that Americans had joined Europe’s unseemly imperial scramble.
In the fall of 1898, representatives from the governments of Spain and the United States met in Paris to hammer out a peace treaty. McKinley had chosen his negotiators but had not yet given them clear instructions for the Philippines. While the rest was clear—Cuba would become nominally independent, Puerto Rico and Guam U.S. protectorates—a solution to the Filipino dilemma was not. “When next I realized that the Philippines had dropped into our laps I confess I did not know what to do with them,” McKinley told a visiting delegation from the General Missionary Committee of the Methodist Episcopal Church—his own church—just over a year later. “I sought counsel from all sides—Democrats as well as Republicans—but got little help.” But then, late one night in October, he had an epiphany. Worldly politicians may have offered no guidance, but a higher power did: “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; 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.” He would not return the Philippines to Spain, which would be “cowardly and dishonorable.” He would not hand them over to a power less squeamish about empire, such as France or Germany, which would be “bad business and discreditable.” He would not grant the Filipinos independence, for they were “unfit for self-government” and would “soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s.” After ruling out these alternatives, McKinley concluded that “there was nothing left for us 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 by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died.” After that, finally at peace with his decision, McKinley “went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly,” and upon waking the next morning instructed the War Department’s chief map designer “to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!”1
It is a familiar episode in American diplomatic history, and a much derided one. For Akira Iriye and most other historians, McKinley’s moment of divine inspiration rings false. Given the stakes involved—the Philippines as independent nation or colony? America as republic or empire?—few take him at his word. Historians have instead portrayed his faith-based decision as one marked by “incongruity and frivolousness,” “superficiality,” and a “lack of sincerity.” McKinley, Iriye and others assume, could not possibly have meant what he said. Surely other factors, based on power or trade or imperial glory, must have been at work. Religion was little more than high-minded cover for more hardheaded motives.2
Or so it would seem. To modern historians whose worldview is not framed by religious faith, McKinley’s decision to seek guidance through prayer is incomprehensible. But to McKinley himself, it made perfect sense; indeed, it would have been so natural, so intuitive, that he probably did not even pause to think whether it was incongruous or frivolous. And whether one disapproves of his ultimate decision to annex the Philippines, it was extremely unlikely that McKinley acted superficially or insincerely. In fact, given his personal history, the scene he related to the Methodist missionaries was the most likely one possible. His decision to seek guidance and solace through prayer was perfectly consistent with his religious faith and political ideology. It would have been odd, and totally uncharacteristic of the man, had McKinley not prayed to God for guidance.
For William McKinley was one of the most pious presidents ever to hold office. He was an evangelical Methodist and a deeply felt religious faith framed his outlook from childhood until death. He was raised in Ohio by an intensely devout mother and grew up listening to Methodist circuit riders sermonize about fighting off sin through the Holy Spirit. He entered Republican politics, as any good Northern Methodist reformer would, first in Ohio and then nationally. And along the way, he never lost this pure evangelical faith or a belief that it formed the basis of progress, order, and moral conduct. “My belief embraces the Divinity of Christ and a recognition of Christianity as the mightiest factor in the world’s civilization,” he wrote in a private note to himself at the height of the furor over the Philippines. “We need God as individuals and we need Him as a people.” Years earlier, he had arrived in Washington with a verse from the Book of Micah as his motto: “What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” This was entirely in keeping with both his religion and his politics.3
From adolescence to the presidency, almost everything McKinley did was informed by the crusading, reformist ideology of Northern Methodism. Like many evangelicals, benevolent reform, and not the pro-business policies he would later adopt, brought him to the Republican Party. He had a progressive, Social Gospel mentality—albeit a fairly conservative one—long before his election as president in 1896. As a student, he volunteered at the local YMCA, eventually becoming president of its branch in Canton, Ohio. He then fought in the Civil War, including in the Battle of Antietam, regularly attended soldiers’ prayer meetings and participated in camp revivals, and praised emancipation as a morally just cause worthy of a Union victory. His service in the war convinced him that war was hell, to be avoided if at all possible and waged only for truly noble causes, like the abolition of slavery and the preservation of the Union. After the war, he favored Reconstruction and was bitterly critical of the South’s treatment of freed slaves. In 1876, as a young Ohio lawyer, he defended striking miners in court when few others dared to do so. Around the same time, McKinley and his wife became prominent activists in the Midwest temperance movement. As a congressman in the 1880s, he denounced Jim Crow as it was beginning to take root throughout the South; he also voted several times for inflationary silver measures, such as the Bland-Allison Free Coinage Act and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. Later, as governor of Ohio, he refused to stay in a New Orleans hotel that did not allow African Americans to meet him there.4
As president—more specifically, as a pro-business Republican president during a time of unprecedented social upheaval—McKinley tempered his reformist instincts. The nation polarized sharply during the 1890s, and as strikes became increasingly violent, as farmers stormed across the Plains to protest their poverty and powerlessness, as white Southerners began to build a segregated society, and as big business grew in size and power, McKinley usually found himself on the side of the establishment. He championed “sound money” policies, especially economic policies, that suited industrialists and angered farmers. His egalitarian views on race lay dormant, and as president he let segregation go unchallenged in a way that would have shamed the moralistic young congressman. His party was shifting, and he felt he had no choice but to shift with it. Partly this stemmed from the temper of the times; partly it was a matter of political expediency. The progressive Methodist within him did not disappear entirely. In some matters, where it was politically feasible, he continued to champion benevolent Christian reform. He still, for example, promoted temperance and moral individual living. But by the 1890s, such openings were rare for a Republican politician.5
On foreign policy, however, it was still possible for McKinley to be a Christian reformer. He came to the war with Spain slowly, so slowly that it seemed as if public opinion, driven relentlessly by the bombastic New York papers, was dragging him along. But he was careful, as most successful politicians are, not reluctant. And while he did not seek war, once he decided the United States had no other choice, he pursued it on moral grounds. There were of course other reasons for war, but for McKinley only humanitarian considerations could sanctify the resort to war and empire. For as distasteful as it now seems, McKinley and other Americans of his era did not see a conflict between benevolence and empire; they did not see the term “progressive imperialist” as inherently contradictory. He believed he was doing a great service for the Philippines, selflessly progressive, that would also benefit the rest of the world. The annexation of the Philippines, and the grisly war it caused there, were thus not at odds with his work for the YMCA, his service in the Civil War, his support for missions, or his advocacy of temperance. It was a war for the betterment of others, whether they wanted it or not. McKinley and others like him may have been misguided, but they were hardly insincere. In keeping with his own ideals, and with the spirit of his age, McKinley extended America’s mission abroad and set it on the path to globalism.6
Along the way, he was aided by pious policymakers, Protestant and Catholic missionaries, and a newly activist sensibility among American Jews. Together, they fostered an international consciousness for America, a sense of being one part of an interconnected, global whole. In the twentieth century, the world system would be managed by American hegemony, economic, political, and cultural as well as military. It was this regulatory world order, a kind of informal American imperialism, which they helped create. But first, Americans had to sort out the issue of slavery. And to do that, they needed to fight a bloody, apocalyptic war against one another. The consequences would be profound, not only for America but also for the rest of the world.