Twenty years hence, it may be that you will have a polyglot House and it will be your painful duty to recognize “the gentleman from Patagonia,” “the gentleman from Cuba,” “the gentleman from Santo Domingo,” . . . or, with fear and trembling, “the gentleman from the Cannibal Islands,” who will gaze upon you with watering mouth and gleaming teeth. In that stupendous day there will be a new officer within these historic walls, whose title will be “interpreter to the Speaker.”
Congressman James Clark, 1898
As their continental borders solidified, those U.S. leaders still interested in annexation turned their gaze overseas. Caribbean islands commanding key waterways made appealing targets, as did Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean. Annexing them would prevent enemies from using those islands as platforms to raid U.S. coasts or harass U.S. shipping, and many U.S. leaders also valued their tropical products. Yet of all the potential targets, they annexed only Hawaii. Cuba (twice), the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam also drew expansionists’ gaze in the second half of the nineteenth century, but those territories failed to generate enough interest to launch a genuine annexation attempt. Why did most U.S. leaders shy away from those islands, and what made Hawaii different from the others?
My central argument here is that domestic concerns continued to act as the primary constraint on U.S. territorial ambitions. The first two cases examined below treat failed bids by small cadres of U.S. leaders to annex Cuba before the Civil War and the Dominican Republic after it. Three later cases explore U.S. decision-making during the Spanish–American War, when leaders faced concurrent opportunities to annex Cuba, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. As in Mexico, sectionalism was a key driver of southern efforts to annex Cuba before the Civil War as well as northern leaders’ successful rallies to defeat those efforts. Beyond sectional or partisan politics, though, the alien character of Cuba’s population proved a deal breaker for many in Congress in the 1850s and again in 1898. Xenophobia also undermined the other islands’ appeal, especially in the Philippines. Among these island territories Hawaii alone was sparsely populated enough for proponents to argue that it could be Americanized, a line of reasoning that combined with geopolitical incentives to turn the tide in favor of its annexation.
U.S. decisions in these cases are irreconcilable with profitability theory, which predicts that the United States should have annexed all of these territories. The ruling Dominican regime willingly signed over its sovereignty in 1870, and the U.S. military routed Spain’s forces in the Caribbean and Pacific in 1898, making these among the easiest opportunities for annexation the United States ever faced, yet still U.S. leaders declined. They did so because they were not thinking in terms of profitability. As they considered whether or not to annex these islands, U.S. leaders were less focused on increasing national power than on avoiding the domestic costs of assimilating their alien populations.
Southern leaders worked vigorously but unsuccessfully to annex Cuba before the Civil War, seeing in the island a tantalizing combination of natural resources, geopolitical security, and domestic political benefits. Slave-powered sugar plantations had transformed Cuba into “the centre of gravity of the Caribbean in the nineteenth century,” and the industrial revolution made the United States its largest customer.1 In 1859 Congressman Laurence Keitt of South Carolina highlighted its production of “sugar-cane, coffee, tobacco, vegetables, and fruits, together with the breeding of cattle,” annual U.S. trade “amounting to $80,000,000,” and “almost unlimited” potential for future growth.2 Georgia Senator Robert Toombs argued that this tropical production would complement the existing U.S. economy: “We have their bread and their clothing. Give us Cuba . . . and we shall command all the other wants of the human race; we shall control their commerce in everything; we shall control their tonnage, and it will be of more value even to the Northern people than to the South.”3 As one southern newspaper argued, “Were Cuba annexed, Havana would speedily become the great entrepot of southern commerce, and in a few years be the rival of New York itself . . . and she would be a southern city, a slaveholding city.”4
Cuba’s value was even greater in geopolitical terms. Presidents Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe had pursued Louisiana and Florida to secure access to the Gulf of Mexico for U.S. exports, but ships in the gulf could reach the Atlantic Ocean and hence international markets only by passing Cuba.5 Its “command of the Gulf of Mexico” made the island critical not only for U.S. exports but also for seaborne domestic trade.6 In Keitt’s words, “It keeps ward and pass over our commerce from New Orleans to New York, and from New York and our other ports, through the Isthmus transits, to our possessions on the Pacific coast.”7 In the hands of relatively weak Spain, the island represented only a latent vulnerability, but as U.S. Minister to Britain Andrew Stevenson wrote, “The possession of Cuba by a great maritime power would be little less than the establishment of a fortification at the mouth of the Mississippi, commanding both the Gulf of Mexico and Florida, and consequently the whole trade of the western states.”8 That prospect drove U.S. leaders to panic whenever they sensed Cuba being targeted by Britain, setting off diplomatic crises in 1810, 1822, 1837, and 1843.9
For southern leaders, however, the most important benefit of annexing Cuba was political: the creation of a new slave state to bolster their influence in the federal government.10 The prospect of Britain abolishing slavery in Cuba was as threatening to them as if it established a military base there.11 In November 1822 U.S. Minister to Spain John Forsyth wrote to Secretary Adams that “independent of its formidable position, its slave population would make us anxious to keep the island out of the hands of governments which would be compelled by their institutions to make changes in it extremely dangerous to the repose and prosperity of the Southern states.”12 In 1843, amid reports that British agents in Cuba were promoting “a general emancipation of the slaves . . . converting the government into a black military republic, under British protection,” President Tyler grew “exceedingly anxious” that Cuban emancipation would “strike a death-blow at the existence of slavery in the United States.”13 Successive U.S. ministers to Spain were told that “the United States will prevent it at all hazards” and instructed to “exercise a sleepless vigilance in watching over Spain in that quarter.”14
This peculiar mix of material and domestic political benefits drove southern leaders to favor the annexation of Cuba as far back as Jefferson, who openly discussed seizing the island from Spain along with Florida and sent agents to gauge Cuban interest in annexation in 1807–8.15 In 1810, while inciting rebellion against Spanish rule in West Florida, Madison sent his agent William Shaler “to feel the pulse of Cuba” regarding “incorporation of that island with the United States.”16 Requesting reinforcements for his Florida campaign eight years later, Andrew Jackson wrote to Monroe, “Add another Regt. and one Frigate and I will insure you Cuba in a few days.”17 In 1820 John Calhoun wrote to Jackson that Cuba “is the key stone of our Union. No American statesman ought to ever withdraw his eye from it.”18 In 1823 Jefferson wrote to Monroe, “I candidly confess, that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of states.”19 With the balance rule of state admissions still holding strong, and northern leaders reliably opposed to any Cuban annexation, however, these aspirations went unfulfilled. The geopolitics of northern leaders and the domestic politics of southern ones gave rise to fears that another European power might take over Cuba, and those apprehensions fueled a no-transfer policy that carried bipartisan support between the 1820s and 1840s.20
U.S. policy changed in the late 1840s. Growing northern abolitionism combined with the impending extinction of the balance rule to rally southern leaders around a major push for the annexation of Cuba, along with Democrats like Buchanan and Pierce who saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to the Union. Northern states’ fast-growing populations had long since given them control of the House of Representatives—they held 142 of its 233 seats by 1850—and the admission of California with no new southern state on the horizon threatened to give them the Senate as well.21 Hoping to avoid this outcome, Senator David Levy of Florida proposed annexing Cuba in December 1845, but the idea was a nonstarter as long as the Mexican–American War commanded attention.22 In June 1848, the war now over, President Polk raised the notion in Cabinet and found that only Postmaster General Cave Johnson “did not favor the proposition, chiefly because he was unwilling to incorporate the population of Cuba with the Federal Union.”23 Secretary of State James Buchanan instructed U.S. Minister to Spain Romulus Saunders to offer Spanish leaders up to $100 million for the island. When Saunders did so that August and again the following December, however, he was told that “sooner than see the island transferred to any power, they would prefer seeing it sunk in the ocean.”24
The Whig presidents Zachary Taylor and Millard Fillmore were more beholden to northern interests and so abandoned Polk’s pursuit of Cuba, reviving the no-transfer policy and working to prevent private filibustering expeditions to the island.25 Secretary of State Edward Everett wrote a lengthy dispatch to his British and French counterparts in December 1852 in which he admitted that “territorially and commercially, it would, in our hands, be an extremely valuable possession. Under certain contingencies, it might be almost essential to our safety. Still, for domestic reasons, on which, in a communication of this kind, it might not be proper to dwell, the president thinks that the incorporation of the island into the Union at the present time, although effected with the consent of Spain, would be a hazardous measure.”26 Fillmore elaborated in his annual message a few days later, “Were this island comparatively destitute of inhabitants or occupied by a kindred race, I should regard it, if voluntarily ceded by Spain, as a most desirable acquisition. But under existing circumstances I should look upon its incorporation into our Union as a very hazardous measure.”27
President Franklin Pierce resumed the pursuit of Cuba, filling his Cabinet and major diplomatic posts with expansionists.28 With Britain and France distracted by the Crimean War, he requested congressional authority to seize the island in February 1854 after the U.S. merchant ship Black Warrior was held by Spanish authorities in Havana.29 Suspecting that Britain and Spain were colluding “to Africanize that island,” senators Stephen Mallory of Florida and John Slidell of Louisiana grew increasingly desperate to seize the island while it remained “in such a state as to make her valuable to the South,” and they proposed resolutions empowering the president to suspend neutrality laws and allow filibustering.30 At the same time, the controversy over the Kansas–Nebraska Act ignited northern public opinion against any extension of slavery, and their proposals met stiff opposition from New York’s William Henry Seward and Delaware’s John Clayton, among others.31 Congressman Joshua Giddings of Ohio objected to Pierce’s effort “to maintain slavery, at the point of the bayonet, at the expense of our blood, our treasure, and our honor,” proclaiming, “There is a spirit in the North which will set at defiance all the low and unworthy machinations of this executive.”32 In the words of one newspaper, “There was a time when the North would have consented to annex Cuba, but the Nebraska wrong has forever rendered annexation impossible. . . . No new slave state will ever again be admitted into this Union, and no slave territory ever again be annexed to it.”33 Secretary of State William Marcy lamented that “the Nebraska question” had shattered the Democratic Party in the northern states “and deprived it of the strength which was needed & could have been much more profitably used for the acquisition of Cuba.”34
His call for conquest rejected by Congress, Pierce revived Polk’s effort to purchase the island. That April Marcy instructed U.S. Minister to Spain Pierre Soulé to offer up to $130 million for Cuba and, if Spain refused, to “direct your efforts to the next most desirable object, which is to detach that island from the Spanish dominion and from all dependence on any European power.”35 Finding Spanish leaders unreceptive yet again, Soulé consulted the opposition Spanish Democratic Party, reporting in July that with $300,000 they could seize power and cede Cuba to the United States.36 In early August Pierce requested $10 million from Congress for a three-man commission to persuade Spain to sell Cuba, but again the northern-majority Congress refused to play along.37
Stymied, Marcy told Soulé to devise a diplomatic plan for Cuba’s acquisition with the U.S. ministers to Britain and France, James Buchanan and John Mason.38 Meeting that October in Ostend, Belgium, the three ministers declared that if Spanish leaders remained unwilling to sell Cuba, “We shall be justified in wresting it from Spain.” They asserted, “We should however be recreant to our duty, be unworthy of our gallant forefathers and commit base treason against our posterity, should we permit Cuba to be Africanized and become a second St. Domingo with all its attendant horrors to the white race.”39 Northerners howled against the extension of slavery when the Ostend Manifesto was published, and the resulting scandal, combined with the Democrats’ defeat in the 1854 midterm elections, effectively ended Pierce’s campaign for Cuba. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis complained that “the administration has done all that was in its power to acquire the island. . . . It would have been done, if Congress had sustained the president.”40
His popularity in the South boosted by the Ostend Manifesto, Buchanan rode to the presidency in 1856 on a platform calling for “ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico.”41 The following year he sent Christopher Fallon to Europe “to ascertain whether Spain is willing to sell, & upon what terms,” telling him “that the government of the United States is as willing now to obtain the island by fair purchase as it was in 1848.”42 Spain remained as cold as ever to the prospect. U.S. agents reported that “both the government and the Spanish people concurred . . . all of the treasure of the earth could not purchase Cuba.”43 With Congress unwilling to fund annexation, Buchanan was forced to think outside the box. After entertaining a variety of schemes, he plotted to counter Spanish intransigence by providing his agents in Spain with resources to opportunistically finance any Spanish leader willing to transfer Cuba to the United States.44 U.S. Minister to Spain William Preston wrote that the volatile nature of Spanish politics ensured such an opportunity would arise: “Before the end of the year some ministerial crisis might, nay would occur, that would cause me to be sought, instead of seeking, and probably thrust an offer on the United States, as when we acquired Louisiana. Statesmen will make great sacrifices to retain power, but still greater to save their lives; and, it is probable or possible that the rulers of Spain may find both in peril before a twelvemonth.”45
Since the federal power of the purse lies with the House of Representatives, Buchanan decided in his 1858 annual message to “lay the whole subject before Congress.” He requested $30 million to facilitate a treaty of annexation, to be used as “an advance to the Spanish government immediately after the signing of the treaty, without awaiting the ratification of it by the Senate.”46 This request ignited the climactic pre–Civil War debate on Cuba. Southern expansionists rallied to Buchanan’s cause, Slidell and Congressman Lawrence Branch of North Carolina proposing bills authorizing the appropriation.47 Discounting any risk of war, they highlighted Cuba’s natural resources and geopolitical position, stressing that annexation would maximize U.S. national security by transforming the Gulf of Mexico into “a mare clausum” (closed sea).48 Mississippi Congressman Reuben Davis argued that “as a means of defense from a foreign foe, or for national preservation, it is indispensable. . . . It would become a mighty fortification far out at sea, which, of itself, would give protection to many hundred miles of our coast.”49 William Avery of Tennessee agreed: “Did Cuba bring with her no commerce; had she no resources, no soil, no climate, no productions; were she a wild, barren waste upon the waters, her geographical position would still decree that she should be part and parcel of this government.” He drove the point home by considering what other great powers would do in the same situation: “Sir, put any one of the enlightened principalities of Europe—Great Britain, France, Russia, or any of them—in the same relative position towards Cuba which this government sustains, and Cuba would have long since ceased to be a province of Spain.”50
Northern opposition was swift and unyielding, however, coalescing around three major arguments: (1) the appropriation would de facto cede the Senate’s advice-and-consent power to the president; (2) the plot to annex Cuba was aimed at extending slavery; and (3) the population of Cuba would be an undesirable addition to the United States. Seward and Congressman Homer Royce of Vermont were among those who criticized Buchanan’s request for usurping the Senate’s power to approve foreign treaties. Authorizing an immediate down payment on Cuba of up to $30 million would essentially allow the president to blackmail the Senate into accepting any treaty he might craft with Spain, since its rejection after payment was already made would forfeit that hefty sum.51
More prominent among northerners’ objections was the recognition that annexing Cuba would add another slave state to the Union, a development they opposed for both moral and political reasons.52 Southern leaders made little secret of slavery’s role in motivating their territorial ambitions; as Senator Albert Brown of Mississippi told his constituents in September 1858, “It is against our interest to have an anti-slave state . . . come into the Union, and help to swell that hostile power at the North. . . . I want Cuba . . . I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican states; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery.”53 Northern leaders responded fiercely. Royce declared, “There is today a large majority of the people of this country who are solemnly pledged to resist, by all constitutional means, the further extension of slavery . . . and those who think that the acquisition of Cuba will add to the political strength of the South, are laboring under a great delusion.”54 Jacob Collamer of Vermont asked, “Will the people of the free states contribute their substance to enter upon this policy for the purpose of aiding the South in obtaining power to govern the North in the Union?”55 New Hampshire’s John Hale mused, “If slavery were to be abolished in Cuba . . . I believe the same administration which today seeks Cuba at an expense of $100,000,000, would give $100,000,000 rather than take it.”56 Even northern Democrats who had initially backed Buchanan for partisan reasons stayed largely silent during this debate, turning against annexation whenever it became identified with extending slavery.57
As powerful as such arguments were amidst the sectional tensions of the late 1850s, Cuba’s opponents focused even more sharply on the character of its roughly one million inhabitants.58 Seward described Cuba as “a foreign country” containing “a population different entirely from the citizens of the United States; different in language, different in race, different in habits, different in manners, different in customs, and radically different in religion; a population that will, practically, forever hold the power to exclude all American immigration, at least to exclude it as effectually as the old states of Europe exclude our migration there.”59 Royce followed his other arguments by declaring, “The objection with me to the acquisition of Cuba, which is paramount to all others, is the character of its people. . . . The people of Cuba are wholly unfitted to share in the benefits of our government, or to participate in its administration; and the introduction of such a population must weaken instead of adding strength to the republic.”60 Hale proclaimed, “The genius of a free government requires the genius of a Protestant religion. I am willing that the Cubans shall have any faith they please . . . but when the proposition is made to annex them . . . I do not consider the acquisition of Cuba desirable.”61
Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky summarized his own concerns with an analogy: “We do not want the trouble and expense of governing other people; much less do we want to bring into the bosom of our republic people who, like the Asiatics that came to Rome, governed Rome. . . . I do not want to see our Anglo-Saxon race; I do not want to see our American tribe, mingled up with that sort of evil communication. I mean evil in a political sense. They do not understand our rights; they do not think as we think; they do not speak as we do.”62 Collamer challenged his expansionist colleagues: “Well, now, what are the people of Cuba? . . . They are undrilled, unintelligent, speaking the Spanish language, unacquainted with ours. How are you going to make such a people as that become a part of a society like ours, with our schools, our churches, our institutions of learning, our notions of popular self-government? What are we to take them in for? To help us administer our own government? To assist us, by their enlightenment and power, to select a president? To aid us here in shaping the institutions of our own country?”63 Connecticut Senator James Dixon added to the earlier arguments on slavery “another objection which, it seems to me, may be made with great force to the present acquisition of Cuba. . . . I allude to the character, the habits, and the peculiarities of the people inhabiting that island. . . . Are these people fit to come into our government as equals?” He explained, “The difficulty is in the race. All southern senators claim that the black portion of that population are unfit for self-government, and they constitute a large proportion. How is it with the whites? They are not of our race. They are of a race which has never yet succeeded with self-government. . . . They are totally unfit to come into the Union today as citizens of a republican government. . . . I doubt whether the race is capable of self-government.”64
Expansionists countered not by championing Cuban assimilation but by maintaining there was nothing to worry about because Cuba would be Americanized. As secretary of state in 1848, Buchanan had written that U.S. territorial expansion “is always subject to the qualification that the mass of the population must be of our own race. . . . It is true that of the 418,291 white inhabitants which Cuba contained in 1841, a very large proportion is of the Spanish race; still, many of our citizens have settled on the island, and some of them are large holders of property. Under our government it would speedily be Americanized, as Louisiana has been.”65 Keitt expected Cuba to be flooded with Anglo-American settlers, saying, “ Take it, I care not in what manner—and then we will roll into it a Gulf Stream of Southern population that will make it truly the gem of the Antilles.”66 Congressman Augustus Wright of Georgia was similarly confident that “our element of population will naturally soon predominate.”67 Georgia Senator Robert Toombs replied to Seward by referencing previous U.S. annexations: “As to the diversities of population, which the senator urges as an objection, we have had them at all our acquisitions. We had diversities of language and race when we acquired Louisiana, when we acquired Florida, when we acquired Texas, and when we acquired California . . . but we have molded them into one American people. . . . We shall get Spaniards, Englishmen, free negroes, slaves, and coolies, when we acquire Cuba. . . . We can Americanize them.”68
Anti-expansionists rebutted these counterarguments by noting that such analogies were misplaced: previous acquisitions had been sparsely populated, and the relatively dense population of Cuba was a much more serious deterrent. Dixon observed, “In Louisiana there were scarcely any people; in Florida there were not many; and at this very day, they send no Spaniards here to represent them in the Senate. They send men with good Anglo-Saxon names, and with good Saxon blood running in their veins. Those people never were a foreign people. That was not the annexation of a foreign country. . . . It was the annexation, for the most part, of virgin soil, not peopled.”69 Collamer observed that Louisiana was “almost utterly uninhabited, with only a French settlement down at the mouth of the Mississippi, and here and there a scattered Indian post. . . . It was clearly seen that when that country was settled up to any considerable extent, it would be Americanized.” Similarly, “Florida, a large country, with a small, scattered Spanish population . . . was a country which we could assimilate to our own. . . . Texas . . . was very sparsely peopled, and therefore furnished the opportunity for our people to Americanize that too. . . . [T]he people who were there were ours; there was a comparatively small number of Mexicans.” In contrast, he objected that Cuba “is thickly populated, for the number of people in proportion to the square mile is as large as it is in Virginia or in Tennessee. It is a well-inhabited country; comparatively, a populous country.”70
Slidell withdrew his bill once it became clear that northern senators would block it from ever coming to a vote.71 Although he pledged to reintroduce it in the next session, the Democrats lost control of the House heading into the 36th Congress, guaranteeing that the venture would be denied funding even if a Cuba bill did somehow pass the Senate.72 Calls for Cuban annexation continued emanating from the South in the lead-up to the 1860 presidential election, featuring prominently in the platforms of both Democratic candidates, while the Republican platform openly opposed the spread of slavery.73
Abraham Lincoln’s election confirmed to southern leaders that they had lost any hope of controlling the federal government. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed quickly by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana; Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina followed suit by May 1861. Crittenden led one final effort to avoid civil war by restoring the Missouri Compromise, which allowed slavery south of Missouri, but Northern Republicans refused to go along for fear that the compromise “would be holding out a premium for filibustering against Mexico & Cuba, in order to make new slave states.”74 President-elect Lincoln rejected the compromise because acceding to the secessionists’ demands would trap the federal government in a cycle of extortion: “A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union. . . . There is, in my judgment, but one compromise which would really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against acquiring any more territory.”75 By the end of the Civil War the sectional balance that was tipped by California had been destroyed by the admissions of Minnesota in 1858, Oregon in 1859, Kansas in 1861, West Virginia in 1863, and Nevada in 1864. Calls for the annexation of Cuba disappeared after the war.
Cuba would have given the United States natural resources, population, and the gates to the Gulf of Mexico. U.S. leaders recognized these material benefits, yet expansionists in positions of power consistently failed to mobilize enough support to annex Cuba. Contrary to profitability theory, their failure was not caused by annexation’s military costs. Several presidents considered conquering the island from a Spanish military they had disparaged as far back as the 1810s. Instead, as domestic impact theory predicts, northerners in Congress consistently denied southern ambitions because they feared annexation’s domestic consequences.
Fifty miles east of Cuba lies Hispaniola, an island divided into French and Spanish colonies for more than a century before its unification in 1821 under independent Haiti. In 1844 an uprising in the formerly Spanish eastern portion of the island brought tenuous independence to the Dominican Republic, also known as Santo Domingo. Dominican leaders repeatedly invited the United States to annex their country during the decades that followed, but U.S. leaders rejected their offers. Profitability theory predicts that their refusals should have been spurred by low opinions of its material benefits or a reluctance to incur high military costs, while domestic impact theory predicts the blame should fall with its domestic consequences. Why didn’t the United States annex the Dominican Republic?
The same southern-oriented administrations that pursued Cuba before the Civil War also considered the Dominican Republic, but they shied away from it because under Haitian rule slavery had been abolished throughout Hispaniola.76 Haiti tried to reconquer its neighbor in the decade after Dominican independence, prompting the terrified Dominican dictator, Pedro Santana, to approach any great power willing to listen with proposals for an alliance, protectorate, or annexation.77 President Polk responded to one such entreaty in 1846, sending naval officer David Porter to report on the island’s abundant natural resources and its excellent site for a naval base at Samaná Bay. Further action was delayed by the Mexican–American War and then deferred in favor of pursuing Cuba.78 In 1854 President Pierce sent Texas businessman William Cazneau to negotiate the creation of a coaling station at Samaná Bay, but the talks fell apart over the Dominicans’ misgivings regarding racial discrimination against local inhabitants, doubts encouraged by European agents.79 President Buchanan renewed Cazneau’s mission in 1859, again to no avail.80 As the United States headed toward civil war, Spain accepted Santana’s invitation and resumed colonial rule in March 1861, but it withdrew again four years later amidst a bloody insurrection.
As the dominant regional power after the Civil War, the United States faced a prime opportunity to expand. Secretary of State William Henry Seward toured the Caribbean during the winter of 1865–66 and, impressed by the naval potential of Samaná Bay, sent his son Frederick with Porter to negotiate its purchase or lease.81 The Dominican president, José María Cabral, agreed to lease the bay in return for cash and weapons, but he was overthrown before the deal could be implemented. Buenaventura Báez assumed power in May 1868 and renewed the lease offer, but with his own regime faltering, Báez offered to sell the bay that July for a price to be named later if the United States would send immediate support. By October he invited the United States to annex the Dominican Republic altogether.82 A willing local leader, an overwhelming military advantage over neighboring Haiti, and disinterested European powers made the military costs of annexation as low as ever.
Seward correctly anticipated that domestic politics would stand in the way, however, observing that it was “unlikely . . . that Congress would entertain . . . the annexation of Dominica.”83 Tension was high between the executive and legislative branches, Republicans in Congress frequently passing legislation over Johnson’s veto and falling only one vote short of removing him in 1868. Many in Congress were disinclined to support his foreign policy initiatives.84 The only island acquisition Congress approved in the 1860s, Midway, was uninhabited, so “there was nothing offensive morally or financially in the acquisition and no politics in opposing it.”85 In January 1869 Congressman Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts proposed a protectorate over Hispaniola, which, though underdeveloped, was seen as offering attractive opportunities for American investment.86 The effort failed by a vote of 126–36, opponents branding it a plot for annexation “by indirection,” recognizing “a speculation in it,” and marveling at the notion of wanting “more negroes brought within our limits” amidst Reconstruction.87 A fresh Dominican annexation offer two weeks later prompted Indiana Congressman Godlove Orth to propose admitting the Dominican Republic “as a territory of the United States . . . with a view to an ultimate establishment of a state government,” but that too was quickly defeated, 110–63.88
The most meaningful push for annexation came from President Grant. Soon after his March 1869 inauguration, he met Joseph Fabens, a partner of Cazneau with financial interests in the Dominican Republic, who convinced him of its material benefits. Grant composed a private memorandum titled “Reasons Why San Domingo Should Be Annexed to the United States,” outlining arguments that would feature prominently in his public speeches over the ensuing months. Touting the Dominican Republic’s “unequaled fertility” and geographic position, he observed that “it has but a sparse population and that in entire sympathy with our institutions,” and he saw the island as “capable of supporting the entire colored population of the United States, should it choose to emigrate.”89 Grant looked forward to breaking the British “cordon of islands . . . commanding the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico,” and he worried that Dominican leaders might look to Europe for security again if the United States passed up this opportunity.90 Applauding Dominican timber, coffee, sugar, tobacco, tropical fruits, dyes, and chocolate, he concluded, “Can anyone favor rejecting so valuable a gift who voted $7,200,000 for the icebergs of Alaska?”91
Grant sent General Orville Babcock to meet with Báez in July, telling him to report on Dominican natural resources and economic production as well as the racial composition of the local population.92 Babcock returned the following winter, reporting that the population of roughly 150,000 was composed in equal parts of white, black, and mixed races.93 He also brought a signed treaty of annexation, much to the surprise of the Cabinet members, who assumed that Babcock had exceeded his authority.94 Yet the treaty delighted Grant, who quickly submitted it to the Senate for ratification.95
Grant’s enthusiasm notwithstanding, the treaty was tepidly received by both the Senate and the public, owing in large part to xenophobic attitudes toward the Dominican population.96 Secretary of State Hamilton Fish had been less than enthusiastic from the start, telling British Ambassador Edward Thornton in May 1869 that “however possible it might be for the United States to annex countries inhabited by the Anglo-Saxon race and accustomed to self-government, the incorporation of these people by the Latin race would be but the beginning of years of conflict and anarchy.”97 By February 1870 Fish grew openly skeptical of the treaty’s prospects, citing “doubts honestly entertained by many of the policy of acquiring insular possessions, and of the effect of the tropical climate upon the race who inhabit them” as well as the Senate’s “habit of criticism, if not of opposition” to initiatives emanating from the executive branch, especially under secretive, potentially corrupt conditions.98
While the Senate Foreign Relations Committee studied the treaty, its advocates sought to strengthen their hand. Hoping that a strong sign of Dominican support would catalyze action in the Senate, Báez staged a referendum producing 15,169 votes for annexation and only 11 opposed. Such skewed results betrayed rampant election fraud, including announcement of the vote only four days earlier, misrepresenting the question, recording nonvotes as positive votes, and threatening opponents with lost jobs, imprisonment, exile, or execution. Even the 11 no votes were cast “at the suggestion of Báez to preserve appearances.”99 Meanwhile, Grant dispatched U.S. warships to support Báez, instructing Rear Admiral Charles Poor to “inform the present Haitian authorities that this government is determined to protect the present Dominican government with all its powers.”100
The gambit failed. The committee’s chairman, Charles Sumner, reported the treaty on March 15 with a scathing condemnation that ranked among the most powerful speeches of his career.101 Although it was delivered in executive session, newspapers reported that his primary argument centered on the Dominican population, including remarks that “the character of the people would render acquisition of their country undesirable” and that “the negro and foreign populations there would not be desirable citizens.”102 Proclaiming that the United States was “an Anglo-Saxon republic, and would ever remain so by the preponderance of that race,” he declared, “To the African belongs the equatorial belt and he should enjoy it undisturbed.”103 Sumner also questioned the purported European interest in the island and highlighted its civil unrest and considerable debt, problems widely assumed to be inherent to supposed inferior races.104 In the days that followed word spread that the House Appropriations Committee “appeared to be unanimous in opposition to recommending an appropriation for the purchase should the Senate ratify the treaty.”105
Advocates of annexation tried to rally in the wake of Sumner’s speech, and as in previous cases they fought Sumner’s live-and-let-live brand of xenophobia with visions of Americanization. Describing the Dominican Republic as worth “ten Alaskas,” Indiana Senator Oliver Morton countered Sumner’s race-based portrayal of debt and unrest by asserting that the island’s chronic violence had actually served U.S. interests by depleting the local population, which he agreed was the main impediment to annexation. He concluded, “The question in this light presents a vast territory open to the hand of art and science and industry, and almost without inhabitants.”106 Others shared Grant’s hope that Dominican annexation would be an outlet for black migration from the continent. As the historian Nicholas Guyatt has observed, “Most Republicans thought deeply about the effects of annexation on Reconstruction,” but even its advocates were deeply divided over whether a Dominican U.S. state would relieve racial tensions or serve as a laboratory for racial mixing.107 With concerns over the demographic future of the United States undercutting annexation’s prospects, the treaty’s ratification window lapsed at the end of March without a vote.
Undeterred, Fabens returned from the Dominican Republic on April 27 with an extension of the treaty deadline. Grant pulled out all the stops in his final push, lobbying senators directly at the Capitol (an unheard-of measure) and offering appointments to their friends in return for votes.108 In the most egregious example of his dealing, he was accused of dismissing Attorney General Ebenezer Hoar because “a concession to the Southern states seemed necessary & that for that purpose the Judge would have to make way for a Southern man.”109 Grant wrote a fresh appeal to the Senate on May 31, describing the Dominican Republic as “one of the richest territories under the sun,” warning that a European power stood poised to seize it, and observing that it “commands the entrance to the Caribbean Sea and the Isthmus transit of commerce.”110 Practically begging at this point, he invited the Senate to append whatever “amendments as may suggest themselves to the minds of senators to carry out, in good faith, the treaty.”111
Grant’s appeals stood little chance of success, especially when early June produced damning public revelations: the financial interests of Fabens, Cazneau, Báez, and others in annexation; the fact that Báez and Babcock had deliberately prolonged the imprisonment of Davis Hatch, an American salt trader, because they feared his release would undermine Báez’s public image; diplomatic improprieties, including Babcock’s circumventing of Fish; and Grant’s deployment of U.S. naval forces to support Báez’s regime.112 This growing list of malfeasances combined with “the danger of annexing an alien tropical people” to turn public opinion “decidedly against the treaty,” and the Senate formally rejected it on June 30 by a vote of 28–28, far short of the two-thirds majority required.113
Still, Grant persevered, writing to Báez the following October, “My interest in extending the authority of the United States over the territory, and people of San Domingo is unabated.”114 In his annual message two months later Grant reiterated his arguments for annexation and urged Congress to authorize a commission for that purpose.115 Morton proposed Grant’s commission to the Senate, sparking a series of vitriolic opposition speeches.116 Sumner condemned the proposition as aiming “to commit Congress to the policy of annexation,” which he denounced as menacing to Haiti and likely to result in a “bloody dance” like Spain experienced in the 1860s. He declared the “conclusive” argument to be the fact that “the island of San Domingo, situated in tropical waters and occupied by another race, never can become a permanent possession of the United States.”117 Senator Thomas Bayard of Delaware objected to transforming the United States “into an imperial government of outlying and distant dependencies with a foreign population, strangers to us in race, in blood, in customs, in all their systems, political, social, moral, and religious.” He warned that “such a scheme of empire, if indulged in, will destroy our republican system of government. The population of this island . . . can never be governed by a constitutional government like ours. They are utterly unfitted for it, permanently, naturally disqualified for it.”118 Although he had “no objection to expansion in the direction of the people . . . who are, by race, habits, and education, homogeneous with ourselves,” Congressman John Farnsworth of Illinois reminded his colleagues that “the moment we annex San Domingo its people become citizens of the United States and voters . . . a motley mixture of French, Spanish, and other Europeans, with Indians, savages, and negroes from every part of western Africa. . . . If any man wants such people as these incorporated as fellow-citizens of the United States he must be a man of an ‘unbounded stomach.’”119
The most eloquent opposition in this instance came from Missouri’s Carl Schurz, who declared, “If you incorporate those tropical countries with the republic of the United States, you will have to incorporate their people too. . . . You cannot exterminate them all; you must try to incorporate them with our political system.”120 Schurz saw only two possible outcomes, both abhorrent to his mind. The first, permanent imperialism, would produce “satrapies . . . nurseries of rapacity, extortion, plunder, oppression and tyranny, which will, with the certainty of fate, demoralize and corrupt our political life beyond any degree yet conceived of, and impart to our government a military character most destructive of its republican attributes.” The second option involved granting a large alien population representation in the federal government, a prospect he considered equally undesirable: “Fancy the senators and representatives of ten or twelve millions of tropical people . . . people who . . . have neither language nor traditions nor habits nor political institutions nor morals in common with us; fancy them sitting in the halls of Congress, throwing the weight of their intelligence, their morality, their political notions and habits, their prejudices and passions, into the scale of the destinies of this republic . . . fancy this, and then tell me, does not your imagination recoil from the picture?”121
As Tanisha Fazal notes, “The main reasons for senatorial opposition were related more to domestic than to international politics.”122 Rather than endanger U.S. democracy or absorb a large alien population, Congress rejected the annexation of the Dominican Republic. It eventually approved Grant’s commission as a face-saving allowance for the president and the Republican Party, but only with the strict amendment “that nothing in these resolutions contained shall be held, understood, or construed as committing Congress to the policy of annexing the territory of said republic of Dominica.”123 Grant submitted the commission’s report to Congress in April 1871 along with a vindictive letter justifying expansionism, condemning its opponents and expressing his hope that the public might yet rally behind him. It did not, and there the issue lay. With his legacy in mind, Grant felt compelled to offer one more defense of his ambitions in his final annual message of 1876, but the speech came and went without any renewed expansionism.124
The Spanish–American War is frequently identified as a watershed moment in U.S. expansionism. For the first time, the United States soundly defeated a European military and embarked on decades of overseas imperialism. Yet the Spanish–American War was a humanitarian intervention, not a land grab. Had U.S. leaders desired Cuba, there could have been no better opportunity to annex it, yet they explicitly rejected Cuban annexation before, during, and after the war. Why?
Profitability theory predicts that U.S. leaders should decline to annex territories they see as unaffordable, but there is no evidence of such views playing a major role in this case. Cuba’s natural resources and geopolitical position remained desirable, and U.S. military forces won the war convincingly. Most U.S. leaders headed into the war sharing Grover Cleveland’s expectation that “we shall find Spain so weak and inefficient that the war will be short.”125 Senator William Chandler of New Hampshire predicted that the war would last “from fifteen minutes to ninety days,” while New York Congressman William Sulzer predicted that “Spain will be humiliated in the dust” and “compelled to get out of Cuba in twenty-four hours.”126 As it happened, U.S. forces suffered 345 battle deaths in driving Spain from Cuba.127 The island was an easy target, yet U.S. leaders preferred to fight for its independence rather than its annexation because, as domestic impact theory predicts, they feared the domestic consequences of absorbing its 1.6 million inhabitants.128
Southern motives to annex Cuba vanished after the Civil War overturned the sectional balance of power and abolished slavery, and decades passed without any renewed pursuit. When Cuban revolutionaries launched a bid to overthrow Spanish rule in the Ten Years’ War of 1868–78, calls for action among the U.S. public tended to favor Cuban independence rather than annexation, and even as they pursued the Dominican Republic, Grant and Fish prioritized only the protection of U.S. interests in Cuba.129 Fish even offered to help Cuba purchase its independence by acting as a mediator, convincing British leaders that the United States held no hidden expansionist motives because it “could not undertake to manage so alien a population.”130 His views had evidently not changed since 1855, when he had visited Cuba and reflected, “With its present population, the island of Cuba is anything other than a desirable acquisition to the United States, and I can see no means of getting rid of a population of some 450,000 called white but really every shade and mixture of color.”131 Even the 1873 Virginius Affair, which saw the Spanish navy seize a U.S. ship for aiding the rebels and execute dozens of its crew, was defused through diplomacy rather than used as a pretext for conquest.132 Looking back two decades later, President Grover Cleveland reflected that “no other great power, it may safely be said, under circumstances of similar perplexity, would have manifested the same restraint and the same patient endurance.”133
U.S. leaders spent the late 1870s and 1880s focused not on annexation but on preventing Germany and France from establishing colonies in the Caribbean.134 In December 1881 Secretary of State James Blaine wrote to the U.S. minister to Hawaii that “if ever ceasing to be Spanish, Cuba must necessarily become American,” a comment frequently interpreted as evidence of enduring U.S. expansionism. Yet Blaine referenced an “American” Cuba not as a state of the Union but as an independent country in the American hemisphere. “Cuba must necessarily become American,” he wrote, “and not fall under any other European domination. . . . The material possession of Hawaii is not desired by the United States any more than was that of Cuba. But under no circumstances can the United States permit any change in the territorial control of either which would cut it adrift from the American system, whereto they both indispensably belong.”135 Far from advocating the annexation of either island, Blaine was restating the long-standing U.S. desire to pursue its commercial interests in a Western Hemisphere free of European influence. Moreover, like Fish, Blaine shared his contemporaries’ view that the “‘mixed and mongrel people’ of the island of Cuba would be too difficult for the United States to digest and assimilate.”136
By 1894 reciprocal tariff reductions had turned the Cuban economy heavily toward the United States, which accounted for 90 percent of Cuba’s exports and 40 percent of its imports. Instead of using this economic dependence to pursue annexation, however, Congress passed the Wilson–Gorman Tariff reinstituting a massive tax on Cuban sugar.137 Combined with retaliatory Spanish policies and a sudden drop in global sugar prices, the tariff devastated Cuba’s economy. Sugar production fell by more than three-quarters over the next two years, local prices for basic foodstuffs like wheat and corn rose tenfold, and thousands of plantation laborers found themselves out of work.138 In response, the surviving leaders of the Ten Years’ War renewed their struggle against Spanish rule.
Whereas expansionist U.S. leaders might have used the rebellion as a pretext, President Cleveland observed that “many of the fairest talkers in favor of intervening . . . are opposed to incorporating the country into the United States system.”139 Instead, Cleveland looked to protect U.S. commerce, citizens, and property on the island.140 Judging them safer under Spanish rule than a potentially independent Cuban regime, he issued a neutrality proclamation to dissuade U.S. citizens from aiding the rebels, resolving minor crises diplomatically rather than using them to justify intervention.141 As Britain’s minister to Spain reported, Cleveland “disliked the insurrection altogether and was opposed either to the annexation or the independence of Cuba.”142 By 1896 he grew increasingly concerned about the rebels’ scorched-earth strategy.143 That April Secretary of State Richard Olney complained to Spanish Ambassador Enrique Dupuy de Lôme that “outside of the towns still under Spanish rule, anarchy, lawlessness, and terrorism are rampant. The insurgents realize that the wholesale destruction of crops, factories, and machinery . . . drives into their ranks the laborers who are thus thrown out of employment. The result is a systematic war upon the industries of the island.”144 Still, Cleveland backed Spain and shunned talk of an intervention, though U.S. peace proposals based on local autonomy were rejected by both the Spanish (who demanded the rebels lay down their arms) and the Cuban rebels (who demanded independence).145
Meanwhile, Congress called for a military intervention.146 Republicans had controlled both the Senate and the House since the Panic of 1893 under-cut the Democratic president’s support, and they saw Cleveland’s deference to Spain as an opportunity to score further political points heading into the 1896 presidential election. Yet although modern accounts often label them “expansionist,” these Republicans championed Cuban independence, not annexation.147 Their 1896 platform praised “the heroic battle of the Cuban patriots against cruelty and oppression” and declared that “the United States should actively use its influence and good offices to restore peace and give independence to the island.”148
The Republicans succeeded in electing William McKinley as the next president, but in a turn that revealed the partisan nature of their previous calls for an intervention, McKinley maintained Cleveland’s quest for a negotiated peace in Cuba, proclaiming in his first inaugural address, “We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression.”149 With McKinley embracing diplomacy, Democrats launched their own partisan attacks calling for an intervention. As George Auxier wrote of newspapers at the time, “Immediately after the election in November, Republican editors reversed themselves and advised a Cuban policy equally as cautious as that which the Democrats had pursued under Cleveland . . . [whereupon] Democratic editors . . . pointed out the inconsistencies of their political foes and sought to embarrass them precisely as they had been embarrassed by the Republicans during Cleveland’s regime.”150 This partisan flip-flop stood out to some observers. As a friend reflected to Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, “A war is a damned sight too big a chip to play party poker with.”151 Nevertheless, public pressure on McKinley regarding Cuba stayed relatively low through the end of 1897, prompting Cleveland to complain, “How differently the present administration is treated though pursuing the same policy as the last.”152
McKinley used this relative calm to assess his options, sending William Calhoun to gather firsthand intelligence on the situation in Cuba. Calhoun’s June 1897 report described a nightmare: “The country outside the military posts was practically depopulated. Every house had been burned, banana trees cut down, cane fields swept with fire, and everything in the shape of food destroyed. . . . I did not see a sign of life, except an occasional vulture or buzzard sailing through the air. The country was wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.”153 Since February 1896 General Valeriano Weyler had led a Spanish campaign to fight the insurgency by laying waste to the countryside, the rebels’ main source of support, and herding rural Cubans into concentration camps where hundreds of thousands died of starvation and disease.154 As Secretary of State John Sherman remarked, the Spanish strategy “attempts to make Cuba worthless to the Cubans.”155 By October U.S. consuls at Matanzas and Havana were reporting dozens of deaths from starvation every day, describing the situation as “beyond belief ” and “simply indescribable” and observing that “in some towns one-third to one-half the population has disappeared.”156 Newspapers such as Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal had spent the previous years sensationalizing events in Cuba to generate higher circulation (earning their nickname “yellow press” in the process), but mounting evidence from Cuba left little room for embellishment. As Senator Shelby Cullom of Illinois observed, “The press did not create the facts. . . . [T]he situation is so full of horrors it cannot be overstated, cannot, indeed, be adequately stated in all the length and breadth of its appalling horribleness.”157
The news that Spain had matched the rebels’ scorched-earth policy with a de facto genocide crystallized McKinley’s belief that more assertive diplomacy was needed, but not war. He lodged repeated protests that summer through Sherman and U.S. Minister to Spain Stewart Woodford, who told his British counterpart, “The island is being literally destroyed. . . . [T]he policy now pursued by the Spanish government can only restore peace by producing a graveyard that shall be as large as Cuba herself.”158 Spain removed Weyler and reformed its approach to Cuba during the months that followed, prompting McKinley to urge patience in his first annual message that December. Insisting that Spain “should be given a reasonable chance” to resolve the crisis, he supported its effort “to give full autonomy to the colony . . . yet conserve and affirm the sovereignty of Spain.” He went on to declare, “I speak not of forcible annexation, for that cannot be thought of. That, by our code of morality, would be criminal aggression.”159 Even two major crises in February 1898, the publication of an insulting letter by De Lôme and the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor, failed to turn McKinley away from diplomacy. In the end, De Lôme resigned and Spain agreed to arbitrate the Maine claims.160
The key turn on the road to war came in March, when U.S. leaders realized how ineffective the Spanish reforms had been.161 For many in Congress the tipping point was a March 17 speech by Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont, a moderate Republican who had visited Cuba skeptical of the yellow press and wishing to assess the situation for himself. Proctor reported, “It is desolation and distress, misery and starvation. . . . [T]here is no human life or habitation” outside the concentration camps. He stressed that “what I saw . . . [i]t must be seen with one’s own eyes to be realized.” Confirming that Spain’s reforms had achieved “little or no practical benefit,” he declared, “To me the strongest appeal is not the barbarity practiced by Weyler nor the loss of the Maine . . . but the spectacle of a million and a half of people, the entire native population of Cuba, struggling for freedom and deliverance from the worst misgovernment of which I ever had knowledge.”162
Proctor’s account was soon bolstered by testimonials from other senators who had also visited the island. John Thurston of Nebraska professed, “I went to Cuba firmly believing that the condition of affairs there had been greatly exaggerated by the press. . . . There has been no exaggeration, because exaggeration has been impossible.” Accusing even Proctor of understatement, he described the plight of those in the concentration camps: “Their only hope is to remain where they are, to live as long as they can on an insufficient charity, and then die.”163 Jacob Gallinger of New Hampshire labeled the conflict “a war of starvation and extermination—a war more cruel than any the world has ever known.” He recalled, “The scenes in the streets of Havana are harrowing beyond description. People in want and suffering are everywhere seen and walking skeletons meet one on every hand. Naked children, emaciated and ragged women, and diseased and starving men throng the streets. . . . What a chapter of horrors and death is that! And still the tragedy goes on.”164 Hernando Money of Mississippi observed that even if the camps were closed and the Cubans were permitted to return home, “most of the men have died; they have neither homes to go to, oxen to plow, implements to use, seeds to sow, nor have they the strength in their starved bodies to use them if they had them.”165 All agreed that any prospect of a resolution based on Cuban autonomy under the Spanish Crown had long since disappeared.166
McKinley reacted to these reports by threatening intervention if Spain did not immediately close the concentration camps, impose an armistice, and allow U.S. humanitarian aid. “We do not want Cuba,” he stressed, “[but] we do wish immediate peace in Cuba.”167 Spanish leaders accepted most of his demands, but they refused to extend an armistice, as did the rebels unless independence was attached.168 Meanwhile, calls for action in the Senate were growing so loud that McKinley complained, “Congress is trying to drive us into war with Spain.”169 Congress’s fervor stemmed from two main motivations. The first was genuine horror at the atrocities being committed in Cuba and a sense of responsibility to do something about mass suffering so near U.S. borders. Congressman William Harris of Kansas was among the many who voiced frustration at McKinley’s slow diplomacy, saying, “The Spaniard has planned and carried on the destruction by starvation of a whole race. If blood and tears and death are the price of liberty, the Cubans have earned it, and more dearly than any nation of earth. . . . All over this land there is the cry ‘Why do you wait?’”170 Senator George Perkins of California agreed, noting that “a little more delay, and we should become accessories to the greatest crime of modern times.”171 When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee finally issued its report calling for U.S. intervention in Cuba, it presaged the twenty-first-century doctrine known as the Responsibility to Protect, proclaiming that “the state which thus perverts and abuses its power thereby forfeits its sovereignty. . . . Justification for intervention is strengthened in such cases as the present, where the oppressions by a state of its subjects have been so inveterate, atrocious, and sanguinary as to require intervention by other nations in the interests of humanity and the peace of the world.”172 Several senators branded the Spanish concentration camps a “crime against humanity.”173
The second reason Congress demanded war was rooted in domestic politics. Republican leaders knew that U.S. voters cared about the Cubans’ plight, and though they supported McKinley many were growing uneasy that his diplomatic ineffectiveness would leave them vulnerable in the upcoming midterm elections. Lodge warned the president, “If the war in Cuba drags on through the summer with nothing done we should go down in the greatest defeat ever known before the cry ‘Why have you not settled the Cuban question?’”174 Vice President Garret Hobart told McKinley that pressure in the Senate was growing so great that it might soon declare war on its own authority: “They will act without you if you do not act at once.”175 Prominent histories of the war have concluded that “it was those political considerations, the erosion of support within his own party and the fear of electoral losses that led McKinley finally to acquiesce to the demands for intervention” and that “Republican legislators made war on Spain not to obtain control of Cuba but to retain control of Washington.”176 McKinley himself later reflected that “but for the inflamed state of public opinion and the fact that Congress could no longer be held in check, a peaceful solution might have been had.”177
McKinley’s war message, submitted to Congress on April 11, met wide approbation in the House, which two days later voted 325–19 to authorize him “to intervene at once to stop the war in Cuba, to the end and with the purpose of securing permanent peace and order there and establishing by the free action of the people thereof a stable and independent government of their own in the island of Cuba.”178 In the Senate, McKinley’s war message set off an intense debate that saw a fifteen-minute time limit imposed on speeches because so many senators wanted to be heard. The debate was not about whether the United States should go to war, though: a strong majority supported the intervention. Nor was it about whether to annex Cuba, which senators opposed almost unanimously. Rather, the debate revolved around the question of whether the Senate resolution should immediately recognize Cuban independence.179
A careful reading of the documents reveals that no fewer than thirty senators used the occasion to publicly declare their opposition to annexation, while only one offered a timid expression in its favor.180 The consensus was so broad that Massachusetts Senator George Hoar asked whether there was “any person, in the Congress or out of it, representing any considerable American sentiment, who desires either to conquer Cuba or annex Cuba. . . . It is disclaimed by the president, disclaimed by the committee, disclaimed by everybody, so far as I am aware.”181 Many who disavowed annexation in this case did so succinctly, but those who explained their motivations echoed their predecessors’ xenophobia. Proctor announced during his influential report on conditions in Cuba, “I am not in favor of annexation . . . because it is not wise policy to take in any people of foreign tongue and training, and without any strong guiding American element.”182 Thurston exclaimed during his own report, “God forbid! I would oppose annexation with my latest breath. The people of Cuba are not our people; they cannot assimilate with us.”183 These views accorded with McKinley’s own position, expressed to Archbishop John Ireland on March 10, that his administration “did not wish to annex the island because it did not want two Cubans voting in the Senate.”184
Even those who thought Cuba would eventually join the United States foresaw annexation only after the island had been Americanized. Donelson Caffery of Louisiana predicted that Cuba’s “heterogeneous population” would succumb to periodic revolutions once independent and gradually give way to Anglo-American immigration: “I do not say . . . that I desire to see Cuba a state in the American Union. Certainly not until after a long tutelage of the population under Federal guardianship. That tutelage will be found necessary to fit the mass of the inhabitants there for the duties of citizenship as we understand them.”185 Even as he rejected the absorption of its current population, Proctor looked forward to U.S. commercial penetration of Cuba: “Americans will furnish them lines of transportation by land and water, will sell them their food and wares and merchandise, will rebuild their mills, restore and people the solitude Spain has made and called peace. In short, full commercial annexation will come quickly. If political annexation ever comes, it should not be until the island is sufficiently Americanized to fully warrant it.”186
Though they agreed on rejecting annexation, the senators bitterly debated whether to recognize Cuban independence immediately or withhold recognition until the rebels had formed a stable government.187 Illustrating yet again their lack of territorial ambitions, one of the strongest arguments in favor of recognition was that it would dispel international misperceptions of a U.S. desire to annex Cuba. Florida Senator Samuel Pasco was among those who insisted, “Such a recognition will relieve us of any well-founded charge of aggression or self-aggrandizement if we thus make it clear that we propose to claim no power, when the victory has been won, to force upon an unwilling people unwelcome rulers.”188
Toward that end Henry Teller of Colorado proposed an amendment “disclaiming any disposition or intention to exercise jurisdiction or control over said island except for the pacification thereof and a determination when that is accomplished to leave the government and control of the island to the people thereof.”189 Since the Teller Amendment publicly disavowed annexation while sidestepping recognition, it won broad approval and was enshrined in the joint resolution McKinley ultimately signed. McKinley’s biographer Margaret Leech attributes the amendment’s success to a “general repugnance to the idea of admitting to the Union an alien and insubordinate people, Roman Catholic in faith, with a large admixture of Negro blood. The advocacy of recognition of the insurgent republic had been partly motivated, in all sincerity, by the apprehension that neutral intervention savored of a desire for conquest.”190 The documents reveal little reason to question her assessment.
Military operations proceeded swiftly after McKinley signed the joint resolution on April 20, and in early July a decisive U.S. naval victory outside Santiago Bay drove Spain to sue for peace.191 The two sides signed an armistice on August 12, Spain pledging to relinquish sovereignty over Cuba and evacuate the island.192 Had U.S. leaders wanted to annex Cuba they had one more chance to do so when the commissioners met that October to negotiate a peace treaty, yet McKinley’s instructions to them remained consistent with his previous statements. He explained, “We had no design of aggrandizement and no ambition of conquest” when intervening in Cuba. “This country was impelled solely by the purpose of relieving grievous wrongs and removing long-existing conditions which disturbed its tranquility, which shocked the moral sense of mankind, and which could no longer be endured.”193
Spain repeatedly offered up Cuba during the negotiations, hoping to foist its debt, rumored to be several hundred million dollars, on the United States. Had U.S. leaders accepted it, this debt would have been a substantial cost, and hence it represents the most viable possible deterrent for profitability theory. Although it arose occasionally during the debate, no senators invoked Cuba’s debt as something that regretfully precluded its annexation. Rather, they invoked the debt to advocate recognizing Cuban independence immediately, lest international law see the United States as assuming responsibility for the debt by conquest.194 The point was moot anyway since U.S. leaders had no interest in annexing Cuba. The U.S. negotiators consistently rebuffed Spain’s offers, signing a treaty on December 10 that guaranteed Cuban independence.195 Although the United States would practice informal imperialism in Cuba in the future, calls to transform this emergent influence into formal annexation continued falling on deaf ears in Congress. When former Secretary of State Richard Olney advocated annexation in 1900, citing familiar arguments that “its command of the Gulf of Mexico” made Cuba “essential to our security against foreign aggression,” former President Cleveland aptly summarized prevailing opinion in replying, “I am afraid Cuba ought to be submerged for a while before it will make an American State or Territory of which we will be particularly proud.”196
U.S. leaders may have refused to annex Cuba in 1898, but they did annex Hawaii. Their interest in Hawaii was long-standing: various administrations had opposed foreign interventions there since the 1840s, signed a reciprocity treaty in 1875 to undercut growing Hawaiian–British trade, and acquired Pearl Harbor as a coaling station in 1887 to ensure “paramount influence” there.197 Calls for annexation ebbed and flowed throughout those decades.198 Why did the United States annex Hawaii in 1898? Given its geopolitical importance, ease of acquisition, and limited population, both profitability theory and domestic impact theory correctly predict that U.S. leaders should have pursued annexation in this case. The theories diverge in their predictions for U.S. decision-making, though, especially regarding how Hawaii’s population factored into U.S. leaders’ discussions of annexation. Profitability theory expects U.S. leaders to have considered Hawaii’s population primarily in terms of its economic value and potential resistance, while domestic impact theory expects them to have emphasized its normative fitness to join U.S. society. What arguments featured most prominently in the U.S. decision to annex Hawaii?
The military costs of annexation were relatively minimal. The U.S. military had a long presence in the islands, which had been governed since 1893 by a cadre of Anglo-American planters who had overthrown Queen Liliuokalani and wanted to join the United States.199 Meanwhile, annexation’s urgency was heightened by fears that U.S. influence over the islands—and hence over the Pacific Ocean—was slipping. A recent wave of Japanese immigration threatened to erode the planters’ authority by sheer demographic weight, and when they denied entry to hundreds of new immigrants in 1897 Japanese leaders deployed a warship to Honolulu.200
This assertiveness alarmed McKinley, who feared that Japan might seize Hawaii if the United States did not annex it. He responded by requesting anti-Japanese war plans, fresh naval deployments to deter further escalation, and the negotiation of an annexation treaty as a clear “hands off ” signal.201 He told Massachusetts Senator George Hoar, “We cannot let those islands go to Japan. . . . Her people are crowding in there. . . . If something be not done, there will be before long another revolution, and Japan will get control.”202 Sensitive to annexation’s potential domestic costs, however, McKinley left it to “the wisdom of Congress” to figure out how to ratify the treaty while “avoiding abrupt assimilation of elements perhaps hardly yet fitted to share in the highest franchises of citizenship.”203
When the House of Representatives took up the issue, its members widely praised Hawaii’s material benefits. Many echoed the esteem of Nevada’s Francis Newlands for its “soil of great fertility, unsurpassed climate, and an incomparable harbor,” with Charles Henry of Indiana calling it “an earthly paradise.”204 Joseph Graff of Illinois anticipated that “it will aid in our commercial expansion,” and others joined John Lacey of Iowa in labeling Hawaii “the key to the trade of the Pacific Ocean.”205
Far and away the most widely discussed benefit was the security Hawaii would afford. In the age of steamships, a midocean coaling station was a virtual necessity for any Asia-based navy to attack the U.S. Pacific coast, and congressmen quoted a wide array of naval strategists to argue that Hawaii’s annexation would secure that coast for the foreseeable future. Freeman Knowles of South Dakota called it “as necessary to our defense as is the picket line of an army.”206 James Mann labeled Hawaii “the fort which protects the Pacific coast,” and his fellow Illinoisan Robert Hitt noted that annexing that “strategic point” would “paralyze any fleet, however strong . . . before it can attack our coast.”207 To Michigan’s Edward Hamilton, the fact that it would “preempt . . . the only coaling station and base of supplies from which a hostile fleet could make descent upon our western coast” was “the most powerful argument in favor of annexation.”208 As the Senate Foreign Relations Committee later summarized, “The Hawaiian treaty was negotiated for the purpose of . . . preventing any other great power from acquiring a foothold there, which might be adverse to the welfare and safety of our Pacific coast in time of war.”209
Many congressmen shared McKinley’s fear that a U.S. failure to act would hand the islands to Japan, given its recent immigration and increasing assertiveness. De Alva Alexander of New York quoted naval historian Alfred Mahan in remarking that “the people of Hawaii are in danger of passing under the domination of Japan ‘by a peaceful process . . . of overrunning and assimilation.’”210 The islands were widely expected to be a focal point of future conflict if they were not annexed.211 Nevertheless, proponents struggled to find the two-thirds majority needed to ratify the treaty throughout 1897 and early 1898. Tariff policy and the Cuban crisis monopolized attention, and promoters faced vocal opposition from anti-imperialists who feared that subjecting the Hawaiian population would weaken U.S. democracy, sugar interests worried about competition from Hawaiian planters, and labor organizations afraid of Asian immigrants taking American jobs.212 George Dewey’s victory in the Battle of Manila Bay in May 1898 not only earned him a promotion from commodore to rear admiral, it rejuvenated annexation’s advocates by adding the need to support his fleet during the ongoing war with Spain. As Samuel Barrows of Massachusetts observed, “Admiral Dewey has taught us some lessons in geography and as to the necessities of modern naval warfare. They clinch the argument for the annexation of Hawaii.”213
Opponents largely accepted Hawaii’s economic and geopolitical benefits, though some protested that it was too far away. William Bate of Tennessee exclaimed, “We might as well contemplate a part of the moon as a point of defense as look to Hawaii.”214 Advocates countered by noting that steamships made travel to Hawaii faster than travel to New Orleans or Alaska had been when those territories were annexed. Instead of disputing its material benefits, opponents overwhelmingly rejected annexation based on the character of its inhabitants.215 James Richardson of Tennessee labeled its “population of about 109,000 . . . about fifteen-sixteenths, or nearly 16 to 1, being Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and natives of the Sandwich Islands, wholly unfit for free representative or local self-government.” Reflecting the views of many of his colleagues, he gasped, “Is it to become a state of the American Union? Heaven forbid!”216
The Native Hawaiians drew criticism from congressmen like Kentucky’s John Rhea, who deemed them “wholly undesirable . . . moral vipers and physical lepers,” and Missouri’s James Clark, who considered them “not fit to vote” and hence thought the islands as attractive as “a dog with the rabies.”217 Henry Johnson of Indiana protested, “Why, sir, these mongrel denizens of the Tropics are utterly incapable of self-control, to say nothing of self-government. What, pray, do they know about free institutions, and what can they be taught concerning them, for that matter? Confer statehood and suffrage upon them, and they will not only be in confusion themselves, but they will also work irreparable injury to the whole Union.”218 William Howard of Georgia seconded those thoughts, saying, “I am opposed to it because I believe that the introduction of that heterogeneous population is not a desirable addition to our population.”219
Beyond disparaging the Native Hawaiians, opponents objected to Hawaii’s many Japanese and Chinese laborers, who, they speculated, would use annexation as a stepping-stone to circumvent U.S. immigration laws and lower wages in the continental United States. Marcus Smith of Arizona called Hawaii a “virus,” reminding his colleagues, “We have passed laws against Chinese immigration to this country . . . yet in this one act you make American citizens, or at least American residents, of 25,000 Chinese.”220 North Carolina’s Romulus Linney warned that “the hordes from which they come are inexhaustible,” while John Fitzgerald of Massachusetts asked, “Are we to have a Mongolian state in this Union?”221 Clark insisted that “a Chinaman never can be fit for American citizenship. His color, his diet, his mental conformation, his habits of thought, his methods of conduct, his style of living, his ideas of government, his theory of the domestic relations, his code of morals, his religion, his passiveness in servitude, his ultra conservatism, his manners, his amusements, the very fashion of his dress, are radically un-American.”222 Arguing that to accept Chinese immigration “is surely to write the epitaph of free government on this continent,” he asked his colleagues, “How does the prospect of heathen-Chinese domination suit you?”223
Many also feared that Hawaii would lead to further annexations of objectionable peoples. John Bell of Colorado warned, “If you annex Hawaii, I expect to see you hold the Philippines, I expect to see you hold Puerto Rico, and you will find that they will never be Americanized.”224 Clark beseeched his colleagues, “If we annex Hawaii . . . twenty years hence, it may be that you will have a polyglot House and it will be your painful duty to recognize ‘the gentleman from Patagonia,’ ‘the gentleman from Cuba,’ ‘the gentleman from Santo Domingo,’ . . . or, with fear and trembling, ‘the gentleman from the Cannibal Islands,’ who will gaze upon you with watering mouth and gleaming teeth. In that stupendous day there will be a new officer within these historic walls, whose title will be ‘interpreter to the Speaker.’”225 He reminded them that “the way to remain sober is to resolutely refuse the first drink.”226
Judging its people unfit for U.S. citizenship and its tropical climate unfit for Anglo-American settlement, some observed that ruling Hawaii would require an imperial regime corrosive to American democracy.227 Johnson warned that imperialism “would establish in this great republic by legal enactment the hateful rule of caste, and create an oligarchy under the American flag as tyrannical and brutal as any that ever flourished in the despotisms of the Old World. . . . We cannot remain a republic and at the same time practice the methods of a despotism.”228 Bell cautioned his colleagues, “It will require a government by the bayonet rather than the ballot to make this heterogeneous people harmonize with our institutions.”229
Advocates responded effectively to this vocal opposition by contending that annexation’s domestic costs were being oversold. Their arguments coalesced around two points: (1) some of Hawaii’s population was actually desirable, and (2) the objectionable groups would rapidly disappear after annexation. First, they emphasized that Americans already controlled both Hawaii’s government and the vast majority of its property. Hamilton affirmed that “the controlling intelligent forces of Hawaii are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. In the annexation of Hawaii we merge no alien nationality. We annex American institutions, American holidays, American courts, and American laws.”230 Amos Cummings of New York echoed these observations in saying, “The ferry is longer, but the business and government of the island are essentially American. . . . The islands have been civilized by Americans. They are governed by Americans, men of our kith and kin, anxious for the union.”231
The Native Hawaiians were essentially American as well, proponents maintained, since American missionaries had been educating them for decades.232 Alexander recounted that “for seventy years they have been living under the influences of American civilization. They speak and study our language; the Stars and Stripes are as familiar as their own flag; their laws are copied from those of the United States.”233 Given that history, Charles Grosvenor of Ohio insisted, “It is a mistake to let it be understood that we are trying to annex a barbarian population.”234 Albert Berry of Kentucky noted the Hawaiian literacy rate, which exceeded 85 percent, as evidence that “education is more universal in the Hawaiian Islands than it is in the state of Georgia. They are not the savages which some of our friends here would have us believe.”235 Pennsylvania’s Horace Packer pointed to previous acquisitions, asking, “Have any of our people residing in territories heretofore annexed had such a training and preparation for American citizenship as have the people of Hawaii?”236
Whether or not the Native Hawaiians were desirable additions to the United States, annexation’s supporters emphasized that they were too few in number to impose formidable domestic costs and that they would not be a long-term problem because they were disappearing anyway. Albert Todd of Michigan observed that only thirty-one thousand Hawaiian aborigines remained of the four hundred thousand that the British explorer James Cook had found on the islands in 1778, noting that just like the tribes of North America, “all authorities agree that in but a few years a once happy people of trustful and confiding ‘children of nature’ will be extinct.”237 Hitt observed that Hawaii’s population was “not equal in people to a congressional district represented on this floor,” and Lacey agreed: “Fortunately the population is not large enough to involve us in any difficult social problems.”238 Unlike the Filipinos, Newlands observed, the Native Hawaiians were “inconsiderable” and “gradually becoming extinct.”239
Advocates told their colleagues not to fret over Hawaii’s forty-six thousand Japanese and Chinese laborers because they would be forced to emigrate once U.S. laws banning immigration from Asia had been extended to cover the islands. Edwin Ridgely of Kansas was one of many who insisted that “when we have taken political control we will at once apply our national policy by shutting the gates against a further influx of the Asiatic races.”240 Todd announced, “Objection is made that Asiatics will be thus allowed citizenship. . . . If this were true, I should oppose the measure with all my power. Happily both the facts and effects are the opposite.”241 Alexander anticipated that “within ten years after the sources of supply are cut off as effectually as in the United States the Orientals of Hawaii will be found infrequently, and then only washing the dirty linen of a superior and more prosperous people.”242
In place of the Native Hawaiians and East Asian laborers residing there, advocates expected Hawaii to quickly fill with Anglo-American settlers. Newlands predicted that “by the peaceful processes of emigration from our own country the entire character of the population will be changed.”243 Linney agreed, declaring, “American immigration would quickly make them truly American. . . . I wish no possession that we cannot Americanize. I wish nothing where the population is so large that a final difference must be made between the colonist and the homeborn.”244 Packer thought that “the danger consequent upon a mixture of the races and blending of foreign customs and habits is more fancied than real,” not because such blending would be beneficial but because he expected Anglo-American settlers to quickly descend on Hawaii and believed that “the stronger races always have and always will dominate the weaker.”245
Finally, many champions of annexation observed that they could easily manage its domestic costs by delaying statehood for Hawaii until they judged it ready. As William Smith of Michigan noted, “It has been said by some opposed to annexation that the population is undesirable; possibly that may be so, but the same argument was used against the admission of California and Texas into the Union, but the undesirable element in both states was soon lost sight of in the sturdy immigration that stable government attracted, and so it will be with these islands.”246 Iowa’s William Hepburn reminded his colleagues that Montana was held as a territory “for eighty-six years before it was given statehood” and that nothing required that Hawaii be admitted any sooner if they deemed it unworthy.247 Some shared the “doubt” of Massachusetts’ Frederick Gillett that Hawaii would “ever attain a population or importance entitling it to statehood.”248
Most congressmen joined Lacey in “conceding the disadvantages involved in taking nearly a hundred thousand people of an alien race into our population” but considered those people “a small incumbrance when compared with the great importance that these islands must be to our commerce on the one hand and to the defense of our Pacific coast on the other.”249 The House voted 209–91 for annexation on June 15, 1898.250 The arena of debate then shifted to the Senate, where proponents had already made their case during an executive session and opponents now used the public spotlight to make familiar arguments in one final effort to defeat the measure.
Warning his colleagues that Hawaii would eventually become a state, William Bate of Tennessee remarked, “I do not, for one, desire to see here the character of representatives that would come from there. . . . In Hawaii there can be no popular will, no people’s consent. The Asiatics must be denied participation in consent, the natives are too ignorant of all governmental responsibility.”251 South Carolina’s Benjamin Tillman agreed: “We are to annex under this resolution one group of these islands with only 6,700 white men, women, and children on them and 103,000 . . . aliens in blood, aliens in language, aliens in thought and feeling.”252 He concluded, “I will vote for the annexation of Hawaii upon one condition . . . that the government there shall be extended only to and participated in by those with white blood in their veins.”253 Donelson Caffery of Louisiana, William Allen of Nebraska, and Richard Pettigrew of South Dakota all complained about the Chinese and Japanese workers in Hawaii and despaired that its tropical climate made Anglo-American resettlement impossible.254 They expected annexation to produce “a quasi-military government,” a “naked despotism” that would transform the United States into “an oligarchy, if not into absolute monarchy itself.”255 Assuming that Hawaii would lead to the annexation of the Philippines, Cuba, and other islands, Allen complained that “they will come to reduce the standard of civilization in all the occupations in this country among our legitimate population. . . . [O]ur society cannot carry the load; civilization will stagger under it.”256
Confident of their majority, annexation’s sponsors in the Senate pressed for a vote after George Hoar of Massachusetts stood forth to offer the familiar counterarguments. Hoar sympathized with the logic that was motivating opposition to the measure, declaring, “If we are ourselves to be governed in part by peoples to whom the Declaration of Independence is a stranger; or, worse still, if we are to govern subject and vassal states, trampling as we do it on our own great charter which recognizes alike the liberty and the dignity of individual manhood, then let us resist this thing in the beginning, and let us resist it to the death.”257 But it was not so in Hawaii, he insisted. The Native Hawaiians were “a perishing people,” the Chinese and Japanese laborers “will get out when we get proper American labor laws,” and the Hawaiian Islands “will not come in as a state unless they are fit to be a state. If they have got hereafter a population of a million or fifteen hundred thousand of American lineage and American character and American ideals . . . they will come in and we shall welcome them. But if they are unfit, they will not come in; we never have been in a hurry about this thing.”258 Well versed in Hawaii’s geopolitical benefits and the Japanese threat there, the Senate approved the joint resolution for annexation 42–21 on July 6, and McKinley signed it the next day.259
The annexation of Hawaii fits the expectations of both profitability theory and domestic impact theory given its high material benefits, low military costs, and low domestic costs. Nevertheless, the contents of these congressional debates provide overwhelming evidence that U.S. leaders were thinking just as domestic impact theory predicts and that profitability theory is insufficient to understand their decision-making. The major counterarguments focused not on questions of affordability but on the character of Hawaii’s people and the domestic political and normative implications of assimilating them. Accordingly, a strong argument can be made that U.S. leaders would not have annexed Hawaii had its population been comparable in size to the other islands discussed in this chapter.
If U.S. leaders raised their eyebrows at Hawaii’s 100,000 mixed-race inhabitants, they found the prospect of absorbing 7.6 million Filipinos downright terrifying, driving them to embrace overseas imperialism as an alternative to annexation. Wars often outpace their original motives, and the Spanish–American War (undertaken to free Cuba from Spanish tyranny) led to the U.S. conquest of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. Unlike previous acquisitions, though, U.S. leaders chose not to annex these islands and instead created a new designation for them: unincorporated territories—areas falling under U.S. sovereignty but outside the United States. The twentieth century saw that designation extended to American Samoa, the Panama Canal Zone, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and more than a dozen other islands, reefs, and atolls.
Why did U.S. leaders choose imperialism instead of annexing those island territories or leaving them independent? Profitability theory predicts that this decision should have been based on a material cost-benefit analysis: U.S. leaders should have pursued imperialism because they judged it the most profitable option. In contrast, domestic impact theory predicts that leaders should have weighed the domestic consequences of each approach, including the identities of the islands’ populations. Does accounting for annexation’s domestic impact help explain the U.S. turn to imperialism?
Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam were all secondary targets, featured in U.S. war plans only to impair Spanish reinforcements or “injure Spain at little cost to the United States.”260 U.S. leaders knew little about them when the war began. Commodore George Dewey found the most recent naval intelligence report on the Philippines to be more than twenty years old, later remarking, “The Philippines were to us a terra incognita.”261 Dewey’s victory over the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, only one week into the war, caught President McKinley without a follow-up plan, and only after British leaders inquired about U.S. intentions there did his Cabinet discuss what to do with the archipelago.262 A small U.S. fleet captured Guam in June on its way to reinforce Dewey, and a late-July invasion of Puerto Rico, launched after the Spanish fleet at Santiago had already been destroyed, was cut short by the war’s end.263 Heading into the peace negotiations, McKinley instructed his commissioners to demand U.S. sovereignty over Puerto Rico and Guam, but he left the Philippines’ status undetermined for four weeks until finally deciding to take them on October 26.264
All three territories occupied strategically valuable geographic positions and offered economic benefits. Puerto Rico flanked a gateway to the Caribbean Sea that would be useful for securing the Central American canal envisioned by expansionists like Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt.265 After leading McKinley’s fact-finding commission there in 1899, Henry Carroll reported that it exported more than $12 million of coffee, $4 million of sugar, and lesser amounts of tobacco, molasses, and hides.266 That tropical produce appealed to congressional leaders interested in reducing U.S. dependence on imports, and it offered opportunities for investors ready to provide the island with sorely needed capital and production technologies.267 Senator Chauncey Depew of New York described the island as “one of the most fertile territories on earth. From seashore to mountain top it can be cultivated. With capital, enterprise, and modern machinery the possibilities of increase in its productiveness cannot be calculated.”268
In the Pacific, Guam offered a useful coaling station and the Philippines a local gateway to Asia’s lucrative markets. Depew underscored “the tremendous advantages of position from Manila for reaching the limitless markets of the Orient,” while Lodge praised its “enormous material benefits to our trade, our industries, and our labor,” declaring further that the Philippines’ “value to this country is almost beyond imagination.”269 Amid growing European efforts to control the China market, the Wall Street Journal noted that the Philippines would allow the United States “to protect, not only the existing trade with the Far East, but the enormously greater trade likely to be developed in the next 25 years.”270 Given these material benefits and the fact that U.S. forces had already seized these islands from Spain, profitability theory predicts relatively straightforward annexations after the war.
Yet McKinley agonized for months over what to do with the Philippines, ultimately backing into his decision mainly for fear of provoking war between Germany and Japan.271 German leaders sent an outsized force of five warships to Manila after Dewey’s victory, positioning to assume control if McKinley did not, and German newspapers clamored for the Philippines throughout the summer.272 Meanwhile, Japanese leaders made no secret of their own ambitions, volunteering “to join with the United States” in governing the archipelago.273 U.S. Minister to Japan Alfred Buck reported in July, “It is well understood that Japan would like to have the Philippine Islands added to her possessions, and high officials of the government do not disguise their desire in that direction.”274 After consulting with recently returned military officers in late September and early October, McKinley concluded that “we could not give them . . . to any European power for we should have a war on our hands in fifteen minutes,” that independence would produce the same result, and that keeping anything short of the whole archipelago would leave “hostile territory” within a “stone’s throw.”275 He finally informed his peace commissioners that “the cession must be of the whole archipelago or none. The latter is wholly inadmissible and the former must therefore be required . . . believing that this course will entail less trouble than any other.”276
There is thus a good argument to be made that apprehension over military costs drove McKinley’s decision to take the Philippines rather than leave them independent, but it is far more difficult to argue that profitability logic drove U.S. leaders to choose imperialism over annexation. Imposing the U.S. imperial regime required a three-year war that killed more than sixteen thousand Filipino insurgents and four thousand U.S. soldiers.277 Neither McKinley nor Congress justified that war on the grounds that it was more efficient than placing the Philippines on a path to statehood. Logic suggests the opposite: cooperating with the local resistance against Spain to establish local political representation may have undercut their opposition to U.S. efforts. Yet McKinley had little sympathy for Emilio Aguinaldo’s rebels, considering them “unfit for self-government” and liable to produce “anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was.”278 He instructed U.S. forces in August 1898 that “there must be no joint occupation with the insurgents,” authorizing them to “use whatever means in your judgment are necessary to this end.”279 Congress was similarly unconcerned with avoiding military costs, as reports of Filipino insurgents attacking U.S. forces in early February 1899 galvanized the peace treaty’s ratification by the Senate.280
If military costs did not drive U.S. leaders to reject annexation, what about domestic costs? With a population of only nine thousand, Guam was too small to be a realistic candidate for statehood, but Puerto Rico’s roughly nine hundred thousand inhabitants were a central focus of congressional debate.281 Unlike other island populations, Puerto Ricans were regarded by many U.S. leaders as promising future citizens. Carroll’s fact-finding report labeled 64 percent of Puerto Rico’s population “whites,” 27 percent “mixed,” and 9 percent “blacks,” emphasizing that “the colored classes are decreasing.”282 He described them as “a kindly, hospitable, polite people” who welcomed U.S. sovereignty and “knew pretty well what the rights and privileges of American citizenship were.”283 Declaring them “capable of self-government,” Carroll judged that “the people as a whole are a moral, law-abiding class, mild in disposition, easy to govern, and possess the possibilities of developing a high type of citizenship.”284
Many in Congress echoed that assessment during debate over the Organic Act establishing Puerto Rico’s civilian government. Senator Henry Teller of Colorado declared, “The people of Porto Rico are fit for self-government to-day.”285 Mississippi Congressman Thomas Spight saw Puerto Rico as “contiguous territory,” its people “of Caucasian blood, knowing and appreciating the benefits of civilization” and “desirous of casting their lot with us. They know much of our system of government, the beneficence of our institutions and the blessings of civil and religious liberty.”286 Congressman William Lorimer of Illinois observed that Puerto Ricans had “embraced the civilizing Christian religion many years ago,” while Senator Alexander Clay of Georgia saw “830,000 of them belonging to the Caucasian race” as evidence that “the people of Porto Rico will become valuable and useful citizens of the United States and will at no distant day in the future ask and receive the privileges of statehood.”287 Congressman John Gaines of Tennessee emphasized that the islanders “came willingly under our flag,” while Maryland Senator George Wellington emphasized that “the Porto Rican is an American laborer; he now belongs to the American family.”288
Not all U.S. leaders saw the Puerto Ricans as a kindred people. Some criticized the island’s 85 percent illiteracy rate and lack of previous experience with representative government; others questioned their racial whiteness or objected to their Catholicism.289 Yet many critics remained optimistic that Puerto Rico was small enough and close enough to be sufficiently Americanized over time. Desiring “above all things . . . that the Union shall be limited to states composed of our own people,” Senator John Spooner of Wisconsin maintained that most Puerto Ricans had “not the intelligence which would fit them for citizenship” and “know nothing of our ways . . . nothing of our institutions,” yet he allowed that “there is no haste about it” and “someday conditions may be changed.”290 California Senator George Perkins complained that “more than one-third of the entire population is of the negro or mixed race; the balance are mostly of Spanish origin. . . . [T]heir beliefs and customs are not those of the Anglo-Saxon,” yet even as he labeled the Puerto Ricans “foreign to our institutions and our civilization,” he anticipated future statehood “when the island, through education and experience, becomes American.”291 After assuring his colleagues, “I do not believe that we will incorporate the alien races, and civilized, semicivilized, barbarous, and savage peoples of these islands into our body politic as states of our Union,” Depew predicted that “order, law, justice, and liberty will stimulate and develop our new possessions. Their inhabitants will grow . . . beyond their wildest dreams of the results of that self-government they now so vaguely understand.”292
Had it been the only island acquired from Spain in 1898, Puerto Rico may well have been incorporated into the United States like previous annexations. After all, the weight of precedent was on its side, and Congress was in no rush to turn territories into states. New Mexico and Arizona had been waiting half a century by then and Oklahoma almost a full century to be deemed worthy.293 Consistent with their relatively positive views of Puerto Rico’s inhabitants, Senator Joseph Foraker of Ohio and Congressman Sereno Payne of New York initially drafted bills granting them U.S. citizenship and free trade.294 But Puerto Rico was not the only new acquisition, and its chances for quick incorporation were doomed by the emerging view that Congress’s treatment of it would establish a precedent for the Philippines.295 As Tennessee Senator William Bate remarked, “There is something behind Porto Rico . . . a political dagger in shape of the Philippines. . . . That is the real question. Porto Rico is but its front shadow.”296
If Puerto Ricans’ fitness for U.S. citizenship was debatable to turn-of-the-century U.S. leaders, the prospect of assimilating 7.6 million Filipinos was a complete nonstarter.297 Former senator Carl Schurz urged McKinley not to absorb “a large mass of more or less barbarous Asiatics,” saying, “I suppose no sane American thinks of taking them into the Union as states to help govern us,” a prospect “too monstrous to be seriously thought of even by the wildest imperialist.”298 Bate propagated ugly stereotypes in his attack: “The Philippines . . . is like Pandora’s box, full of ills. . . . Let us beware of those mongrels of the East, with breath of pestilence and touch of leprosy. Do not let them become a part of us with their idolatry, polygamous creeds, and harem habits.”299 Senator Stephen White of California disparaged the Philippines’ “heterogeneous compound of inefficient Oriental humanity,” while Missouri Congressman James Clark vowed, “no matter whether they are fit to govern themselves or not, they are not fit to govern us.”300 Nebraska Senator William Allen announced, “I am not willing to incorporate in our population, as citizens of the United States, 15,000,000 people belonging to alien races, the most of them ignorant, brutal, hostile, and savage, and reduce the standard of our home civilization to that of a low and brutal Asiatic population.”301 Senator Hoar similarly cautioned, “We must change all our constitutional methods of procedure before we can undertake the government of millions of people at a distance who cannot be admitted to our self-government.”302
Unlike those of Puerto Rico, Guam, and Hawaii, the acquisition of the Philippines represented a paradigm shift, forcing U.S. leaders to reevaluate their historical approach to territorial expansion. As Spooner reasoned, “It has been hitherto for a great many years a matter of comparatively trifling importance what constitutional relation the territories sustain to the United States, because our territories have been peopled by those of our own blood and kindred.” In contrast, “the Spanish war . . . has placed under our control . . . territory containing eleven or more millions of people, a sixth of the population of this country, strangers to us, strangers to our language, strangers to our institutions, strangers to our aspirations and to our race. And that control . . . brings with it responsibility of the gravest sort.”303 Senator Albert Beveridge of Indiana concurred: “This question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial.”304 Xenophobia thus emerged once again as “a formidable obstacle to expansion,” so formidable, in fact, that “not a single expansionist proposed that the privileges of citizenship be extended to the Philippines.”305
Since imperialists and anti-imperialists agreed that annexing the Philippines was not an option, the congressional debate was not annexation versus imperialism but rather imperialism versus independence, and both sides focused primarily on assessing imperialism’s domestic consequences rather than its profitability.306 Anti-imperialists stressed that an empire abroad would undermine American democracy at home, reviving arguments from the 1840s all-Mexico debate. Senator George Vest of Missouri insisted that “under the Constitution of the United States no power is given to the federal government to acquire territory to be held and governed permanently as colonies.”307 Lorimer wondered “whether or not it is best for the nation to remain true to its republican principles or abandon them for the policy of empire.”308 Virginia Congressman James Hay protested that “the bill violates every principle of our form of government. It sets up an oligarchy, a form of government in no sense republican . . . which denies the right of self-government to a portion of the people of the United States.”309 Spight objected that the Filipinos “are of wholly different races of people from ours—Asiatics, Malays, negroes, and mixed blood. They have nothing in common with us and centuries cannot assimilate them. . . . They can never be clothed with the rights of American citizenship nor their territory admitted as a state of the American Union, nor can we hold and govern the islands as colonies nor their people as vassals without the utmost violence to the basic principles upon which our system of government is founded.”310
Those who rejected imperialism tried to outlaw it by proposing that “all territory acquired by the government . . . must be acquired and governed with the purpose of ultimately organizing such territory into states suitable for admission into the Union,” a resolution which would have limited U.S. options to independence or annexation (with the deck stacked heavily against the latter).311 Their efforts failed, however, as imperialists like Senator Orville Platt of Connecticut denied that “there is any constitutional or moral obligation to fit the territory for statehood or to ever admit it as a state.”312 Michigan Congressman Edward Hamilton responded to anti-imperialist claims that “the Constitution follows the flag” by retorting, “That is not true. The Constitution follows the flag or not as we please and when we please.”313 Foraker agreed: “The mere acquisition of territory by the United States does not make the Constitution applicable to it, but that it is a question for the Congress.”314 Acquisition could not be synonymous with annexation, Perkins argued, for “suppose the Chinese Empire should fall to us as a war indemnity. We would have acquired a territory with 400,000,000 population, of a class that we have spurned from our shores as we would a pestilence. Should those unassimilative people be permitted to overrun us and affect the body politic and our institutions with a leprosy worse than death itself ?”315 As Spooner summarized the emerging distinction, “Territory belonging to the United States, as I think Puerto Rico and the Philippine Archipelago do, become a part of the United States in the international sense, while not being at all a part of the United States in the constitutional sense.”316
The imperialists argued that imperialism was the best of both worlds. Unlike independence, it furthered U.S. commercial and geopolitical interests abroad, and unlike annexation, it preserved democracy at home. Senator Jonathan Ross of Vermont claimed that denying representation to island populations undermined democracy no more than having a minimum voting age: “In a representative government the right to govern is not derived from the consent of the governed until they arrive at a stage of advancement which will render them capable of giving an intelligent consent. . . . Doubtless the boys of fifteen in this country are better prepared to give an intelligent consent than are the inhabitants of those islands.”317 Moreover, the new empire would be explicitly temporary and good for the Filipinos, Platt argued, providing “the most liberal, just, and beneficent government which they may be capable of enjoying . . . in the hope that they may be finally fitted for independent self-government.”318
The treaty that ended the Spanish–American War made no mention of territorial status or citizenship rights for the islands’ populations, specifying only that “the civil and political status of the native inhabitants of the territories hereby ceded to the United States shall be determined by Congress.”319 Republican leaders, who controlled both houses of Congress as well as the presidency, thus felt empowered to remove the assimilating measures from early drafts of Puerto Rico’s Organic Act and impose overtly imperial rule on all of the islands acquired from Spain. The version that passed in April 1900 created a distinct Puerto Rican citizenship, applied a temporary tariff, and empowered the president to appoint the island’s governor and executive council (which held veto power over legislation passed by a popularly elected lower house). Congress replicated these measures in the Philippine Organic Act two years later, while Guam was ruled by the United States Navy until receiving its own Organic Act in 1950.320
Failing to stop their imperialist colleagues in Congress, the anti-imperialists went to court, where they were defeated again in the Insular Cases, a series of Supreme Court rulings underscoring the fact that acquisition need not equal annexation.321 As Justice Henry Brown argued in Downes v. Bidwell, the United States might acquire territory for numerous reasons, and “if those possessions are inhabited by alien races, differing from us in religion, customs, laws, methods of taxation, and modes of thought, the administration of government and justice according to Anglo-Saxon principles may for a time be impossible.”322 A 5–4 majority in that case decided that Puerto Rico was “belonging to the United States, but not a part of the United States,” or, as Justice Edward White wrote in his concurring opinion, “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense . . . not . . . incorporated . . . but . . . merely . . . a possession.”323 In contrast, the Supreme Court decided in Hawaii v. Mankichi and Rassmussen v. United States that Congress had incorporated Hawaii and Alaska by granting citizenship to their Anglo-Saxon/European residents, paving the way for their eventual statehood.324
The Supreme Court’s decisions in the 1901 Insular Cases applied arguments made two years earlier by Abbott Lowell of Harvard University, who wrote in the Harvard Law Review that “territory may be so annexed as to make it a part of the United States . . . but that possessions may also be so acquired as not to form part of the United States,” within which “constitutional limitations . . . do not apply.” Which form should any particular acquisition take? Lowell concluded that many “rights guaranteed to the citizens . . . are inapplicable except among a people whose social and political evolution has been consonant with our own.”325 This conviction was at the core of his Atlantic Monthly article nine months earlier, in which he asserted among other things that New Mexico’s inhabitants “of Spanish race” were “not sufficiently trained in habits of self-government,” that “Indians . . . in the tribal state . . . are not men,” and that “the argument that the Chinese could never be assimilated . . . was sound.”326 Whereas “the application of . . . equal political rights” in previous acquisitions was “justified by the fact that the population of states and territories has been substantially homogeneous,” Lowell claimed that “to let the Filipinos rule themselves would be sheer cruelty,” that “even in case of the people of Porto Rico, who stand on an entirely different footing, self-government must be gradual and tentative,” and that Hawaii’s “Anglo-Saxon” leaders deserved representation but “it would be a gross blunder to attempt to extend the franchise to” its “Japanese . . . Chinese . . . Kanakas and Portuguese.”327
As recent scholars have observed, the distinction between incorporated and unincorporated territories that U.S. leaders made after the 1898 acquisitions (and that remains in use today) was “transparently an invention” to legitimize imperialism over territories populated by people they considered not “racially qualified to be equal citizens.”328 As in other cases, U.S. leaders’ decisions not to annex these territories was driven by their fear of annexation’s domestic consequences. Congress’s subsequent restrictions on corporate exploitation of the Philippines’ natural resources reinforce the fact that U.S. imperialism was driven by more than profitability, as do successive presidents’ calls to keep the archipelago’s future independence in view.329 The 1916 Philippine Autonomy Act established “a more autonomous government,” Congress reinforcing that “it is, as it has always been, the purpose of the people of the United States to withdraw their sovereignty over the Philippine Islands and to recognize their independence as soon as a stable government can be established therein.”330 After the 1934 Philippine Independence Act started a countdown to independence, Congress granted the Philippines independence in 1946. As for Puerto Rico and Guam, Congress recognized their smaller, more kindred populations, gradually extending local governance and U.S. citizenship as the twentieth century progressed, but it continued to withhold the prospect of statehood and firmly maintained its final say on their status.331
The cases explored here vividly illustrate how U.S. leaders’ approach to annexation continued to be colored by its domestic costs as their gaze turned overseas. Cuba’s implications for the sectional balance of power put it on the agenda for southern leaders before the Civil War, and those same implications drove northern leaders to block its annexation. When the Civil War shattered the sectional balance, it didn’t open the door to a campaign of conquest; instead, the xenophobia that had driven their predecessors to avoid southern Mexico was magnified among U.S. leaders during the late nineteenth century. Their low esteem for the populations of the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and the Philippines—a judgment rooted in normative, not material, concerns—effectively deterred the United States from annexing any of those territories. Xenophobia failed to prevent annexation only in Hawaii, where there were few enough people to justify visions of its Americanization.
These case studies confirm the expectations of domestic impact theory. U.S. leaders regularly evaluated the domestic consequences of annexation alongside its material benefits and military costs, and domestic costs overwhelmed material incentives in all four cases where they were significant. This history defies profitability theory, which predicts that the United States should have seized all of these opportunities. It can account reasonably well for the annexation of Hawaii given the high material benefits and low military costs involved, but it cannot explain either the substance of the congressional debates or why a century’s worth of will-they-or-won’t-they speculation produced no annexation of Cuba despite its arguably greater material benefits.
As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, U.S. leaders increasingly pursued informal imperialism to prevent European powers from interfering in their neighborhood, yet repeated military interventions into various island neighbors produced no further annexations. The 1901 Platt Amendment authorized the United States to intervene in Cuba, but subsequent calls for annexation from Cubans who were disenchanted with their own government fell on deaf ears in the United States.332 President Theodore Roosevelt similarly “rebuffed Haitians and Dominicans who dropped proannexation hints” despite claiming the right to intervene in any Latin American country under his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.333
Temporary military interventions became standard U.S. practice when nearby countries fell into trouble, as did accompanying disclaimers of any long-term territorial ambitions. The Dominican experience alone provides abundant examples. Seizing control of Dominican customs to prevent a European intervention in 1905, Roosevelt told the Senate, “It cannot be too often and too emphatically asserted that the United States has not the slightest desire for territorial aggrandizement. . . . We do not propose to take any part of Santo Domingo.”334 President Woodrow Wilson accompanied his own 1916 Dominican intervention (intended to head off a potential German one) with the vow, “The United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest,” and the commander of the intervening force, Admiral William Caperton, reassured the Dominicans that “it is not the intention of the United States Government to acquire by conquest any territory in the Dominican Republic.”335 President Lyndon Johnson repeatedly proclaimed, “We covet no territory” amidst his Dominican intervention in 1965.336 There is plenty of room to debate the merits and demerits of these interventions, but in each case the disclaimer proved accurate: U.S. forces came and went, leaving the Dominican Republic independent.
Rather than describe U.S. imperialism in 1898 as coming late to the European game, it may be viewed more usefully as the country’s first experience with temporary stewardship over foreign territory, a formal experiment with the informal imperialism that would come to characterize much of U.S. foreign policy moving forward. The interim nature of later U.S. military interventions helps square the circle of “Americans’ understanding of the United States not only as a nonempire, but as an antiempire.”337 Had their calculations been rooted primarily in profitability, it is hard to imagine that U.S. leaders would not have found other appealing targets for annexation during the twentieth century. Instead, their refusal to consider annexing the Philippines spurred U.S. leaders’ embrace of imperialism, the rise of military interventions and overseas bases as instruments of U.S. foreign policy, and their renunciation of annexation as a foreign policy goal.