4

McKinley and America’s Emergence as a World Power

The [Spanish-American] War itself was small, glamorous, a thing of charging rough riders and flashing sabers to many. It was relatively cheap to all save those who suffered and died. But its consequences were far-reaching. Placid, insular America was gone. “No war in history has accomplished so much in so short a time with so little loss,” wrote Ambassador Horace Porter from Paris. “The nation has at a bound gone forward in the estimation of the world more than we would have done in fifty years of peace,” said Senator [Redfield] Proctor.

H. Wayne Morgan, America’s Road to Empire

 

For all that he had never been abroad, William McKinley did not enter the White House as a novice in global relations. His years in Congress had produced a wide acquaintance with foreign tariffs, trade, industry, and wage scales. The politics of credibly pursuing an international agreement on currency bimetallism kept him conversant with British, French, German, and other national positions respecting gold and silver. As governor of Ohio and a potential presidential candidate, he followed foreign policy issues through a daily set of clippings from major newspapers, widely recognized as among the era’s best sources of information on international developments. Visitors to his office in Columbus sometimes caught him reading books on tariffs.

International references were common in his speeches, and politicians were often surprised at how much he knew. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, visiting in December 1896, afterward told a friend that “his whole attitude of mind struck me as serious, broad in view, and just what we ought to desire.”1 According to one biographer, “[T]hroughout his presidency, men seemed to be surprised when McKinley showed himself to be well-informed on international bimetallism, the annexation of Hawaii, the tariff laws of the nation’s trading partners, or the currents of world politics generally.”2

Somewhat ironically, historians have been more willing to credit McKinley with foreign rather than domestic policy achievement. They usually cite his prominence as a hinge president—the prime decision maker during America’s rise to world power. From 1897 to 1901, he presided over the fruition of the Northern or Yankee version of U.S. expansionism, a commercial manifest destiny tied to increasing American exports. The surge in those exports was little short of stunning—a near doubling from $833 million in 1896 to $1.488 billion in 1901. The successful conduct of the war with Spain, itself a milestone of U.S. alliance building, foreign policy transformation, and new popular global interest, owed much to the skill for staff work and military planning that had made young Major McKinley a divisional chief of staff at twenty-two.

In the White House, he helped to shape and preview America’s early-twentieth-century alliances and hostilities: on one hand, entente with Britain and an off-and-on commitment to the territorial integrity of China, and on the other, mounting Caribbean and Pacific tensions with Germany and Japan. Often, as one century ends, some contours of the next appear. So it was in 1898 and 1899. McKinley’s further ability to implement military reforms, establish executive office telephone and telegraph communications, display the utility of presidential commissions in international affairs, and enlarge the White House staff helped create an institutional capacity frequently described as the first “modern presidency.”

WESTWARD, HO: THE ORIGINS OF YANKEE EXPANSIONISM

Far from emerging in the 1898 seizure of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from a defeated Spain, American territorialism was as old as the rapacity of its seventeenth-century colonial settlements. Just as the English revolutionary government of Oliver Cromwell had goals in the Caribbean to match any king’s, Cromwell’s Puritan cousins in Massachusetts Bay pushed their political ambitions and territory north into what is now Maine and New Hampshire, while angling for much of current-day Rhode Island. Mid-eighteenth-century invasions sailed from Boston to eject the French from what soon became Nova Scotia, and expansionist Massachusetts planted settlements there, too. By the time of the American Revolution, immigrants from Yankee Massachusetts and Connecticut had settled portions of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania and cast their eyes on what would soon be Ohio. By the Civil War, Yankee New England had settled a broad region from the Great Lakes west across the prairie to Washington and Oregon.

Southerners were no less territorially minded. As colonials, they struck at Spanish Florida and in the nineteenth century pushed west across the cotton belt to Texas and the southwest, simultaneously coveting Cuba and a half dozen Mexican states from Sonora to Yucatán. Yankee rivals in Congress blocked Southern hopes of admitting pieces of Mexico and the Caribbean to the Union as slave states, but Dixie’s thwarted ambitions had been fierce. For twenty-five years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Southerners and Northerners alike were busy filling in the continent until the Western frontier superficially closed in the 1890s. Northern eyes then refocused on a new Pacific frontier that stretched from Alaska, with its beckoning goldfields, to Hawaii, with its New England settlements, and south to Samoa, a favorite stopping place for Yankee sailors even before Herman Melville’s Polynesian portraits.

Southerners were less drawn to that frontier, given the Pacific Basin’s potential to compete with Dixie in existing crops like cotton, sugar, citrus, hemp, and tobacco. Besides, the push was led by New Englanders who for a century had traded by sailing around Cape Horn and now sought a commercial shortcut across the isthmus of Panama. As the 1890s lengthened, so did the catalogue of Republican-sponsored Pacific expansion: the annexation of Hawaii, stepped-up battleship construction, an Isthmian canal, and, after 1898, control of the Philippines. All won their greatest support in Congress from the Yankee Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Pacific. McKinley pushed all four. The Spanish-American War was only a catalyst. Expansionism was ingrained in the American psyche.

The first independent American voyage to the Orient came in 1784, when the Massachusetts brig Empress of China sailed to Canton. This began a commerce that would flower through the 1840s and leave a dozen U.S. cities, including McKinley’s in Ohio, named for the great Chinese entry port. By McKinley’s inauguration, the American push westward into the Pacific had a long naval and mercantile chronology.

So strategic were the Hawaiian islands by the 1840s that President John Tyler extended the hemispheric shield of the Monroe Doctrine to include them. In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry visited Japan and negotiated a treaty that opened up the ports of Shimoda, Hakodate, and later Nagasaki to U.S. trade. Perry even urged that the United States take control of Formosa. By that same year, resolutions in Congress to annex Hawaii to the United States began to get serious attention.

The Civil War briefly eclipsed the Orient, but in 1867, U.S. naval expeditions visited Wake Island and occupied Midway—its position was halfway between California and Japan—to establish a coaling station and cable relay. The purchase from Russia in 1867 of Alaska, with its Aleutian island chain pointing toward Asia, pushed American territory even closer to Japan.

In 1871, the U.S. Navy leased facilities in Samoa, and in 1875, the Republican administration of U. S. Grant established trade reciprocity with Hawaii, still at least nominally an independent kingdom. Pago Pago became a naval coaling station in 1879.

Imitating Perry in Japan, U.S. Navy Commodore Robert Shufeldt, under presidential instructions, in 1882 forced Korea to sign a treaty opening itself to American commerce. In 1885, when Hawaii gave the United States exclusive rights to Pearl Harbor as a coaling and naval repair station, President Cleveland called the islands “the stepping-stone to the growing trade of the Pacific.” Shufeldt evoked a commercial boudoir: “The Pacific is the ocean bride of America.… China and Japan and Korea are the bridesmaids, California is the nuptial couch, the bridal chamber, where all the wealth in the Orient will be brought to celebrate the wedding.”3

The year 1889 brought a tripartite British, American, and German division of Samoa. January 1893 saw a revolution in Hawaii led by Americans, many of them New Englanders, out to force annexation by the United States. The naval presence of the Germans and Japanese was starting to be a concern.

Expansion in the Pacific was becoming a bone of party contention. In February 1893, Republican President Harrison could not get a treaty annexing Hawaii ratified by the Senate before Democrat Cleveland, inaugurated that March, moved to withdraw it. Cleveland’s refusal to take Hawaii, as well as his proposal to abandon Samoa to the British and Germans, became minor 1896 campaign issues. McKinley, after taking office in 1897, resumed the fight to annex Hawaii.

By this point, it is fair to talk of a larger Republican policy loosely including a powerful battleship-led navy, construction of the canal across Nicaragua or Panama, and further stimulus of already burgeoning U.S. exports through trade reciprocity—the so-called bargaining tariff. Foreign access to the U.S. market would be used to persuade the governments of commodity producers, principally in South America, to accept more U.S. manufactured exports in return for selling their commodities. This was a latter-day Hamiltonian vision for the next stage of American industrial development, and its several components became Republican priorities.

Old empires, meanwhile, were tottering. One of Europe’s dynastic sick men, the Ottoman Empire, was destabilizing the Balkans as it declined; the senility of a second, imperial Spain hinted at power realignments in the Caribbean and Pacific. The death of Spain’s empire could be the birth of an American one, creating a naval and world power better positioned to hold international markets. A band of mostly Republican war hawks including Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Colonel Leonard Wood, and Navy Captain A. T. Mahan hoped for exactly that.

MCKINLEY AND THE WAR WITH SPAIN

Heeding an 1896 Republican platform that called for Cuban independence, McKinley’s firm attitude during 1897 toward Spain’s behavior in its Caribbean colony had produced several concessions: the recall to Madrid of the brutal Spanish commander in Cuba, General Valeriano Weyler, an end to the practice of reconcentration (de facto detention camps), amnesty for political prisoners, and the release of all Americans held in Cuban jails.

But the president, unlike many other Americans, did not leap at war with Spain in order to free Cuba, even after the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor one night in February 1898. Not a few in Congress criticized this reluctance. In fact, politics and economics, to say nothing of the usual casualty lists of war in the tropics, made McKinley’s reluctance understandable. Incremental pressures on Spain were having measurable results; war had uncertain perils.

Back in 1861, portions of the nation’s business and financial community, especially in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, had considered Lincoln’s policies too provocative, worrying that a civil war would disrupt business and cause losses for Northern holders of Southern commercial paper and state bonds. Wartime closure of the Mississippi to North-South commerce did indeed produce enough economic dislocation to hurt Lincoln and the GOP in the Midwest in the 1862 midterm elections. Thirty-six years later, in early 1898, mercantile interests were apprehensive over the potential consequences of the first U.S. war with a European nation since 1812.

Hawkish sentiment in the nation and in Congress, though, was being whipped up by a newer form of enterprise: the major metropolitan newspapers now mushrooming in circulation and anxious to parade their new power. Nevertheless, the reluctance of the broader business and financial communities to fight Spain over Cuba was shared, at least through March 1898, by many House and Senate GOP leaders. Speaker Thomas Reed, Appropriations Committee Chairman Joseph Cannon, and Senators Nelson Aldrich, Oliver Platt, William Allison, and Mark Hanna generally agreed that U.S. pressure eventually would make Spain end its suppression. War was unnecessary.

They also had a practical reservation: that national recovery from the deep 1893 depression could be snuffed out by a war. Despite signs of recovery since summer, the autumn 1897 gubernatorial elections had gone against the GOP. Party candidates lost in Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, and Kansas, and party margins were narrowed in Ohio and Pennsylvania. As we have seen, each Republican administration since Grant’s had suffered major midterm losses tied to recessions—in 1874, 1878, 1882, and 1890. Another in 1898, should war prove economically disruptive, could bring in a Democratic Congress and wipe out the programmatic promise of McKinley’s solid victory in 1896.

In retrospect, it is easy to say that Spain had to be a pushover. Yet the uncertainties of spring 1898 mixed fear of Spanish attacks on the U.S. East Coast with speculation that other European nations might be drawn to support Spain.4 At the Navy Department, Theodore Roosevelt had theorized about a U.S. naval attack on Cádiz, even about the fleet entering the Mediterranean to swoop down on Barcelona. Along the East Coast, Americans in the first days of war recalled that as late as the eighteenth century, Spanish warships had threatened Nantucket and Delaware Bay. As war became reality, Portland, Maine, howled for naval protection and Boston bankers toyed with moving their securities to inland Worcester. In Europe, only Britain favored the United States, while Spanish sympathizers in France, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary hinted that if early fighting showed U.S. weakness, demands for a cease-fire and arbitration could be expected. Complications were possible.

In short, caution made sense. However, McKinley was also influenced by a personal distaste. To his White House physician, Leonard Wood, the president remarked, “I shall never get into a war until I am sure God and Man approve. I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.” He had said in his inaugural address a year earlier, “We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression. War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed; peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency.”5

His reluctance had an important corollary of emphasis on humanitarian assistance. One example, as we have seen, was the winter help he obtained for the Hocking Valley miners in 1895—partly with his own private funds—after their 1894 strike when troops had been sent in. The needs in Cuba were much greater. Between 1894 and 1896, sugar exports to the United States plummeted, partly because of the sugar tariffs restored in 1894, but also because of the Spanish policy of reconcentrating rebels in cities and camps, leaving the countryside derelict.

In 1897, McKinley sent William Calhoun, one of his political operatives, to Cuba on an inspection tour. He reported back, “I traveled by rail from Havana to Matanzas. The country outside of the military posts was practically depopulated. Every house had been burned, banana trees cut down, canefields swept with fire, and everything in the shape of food destroyed.”6 To Spain, the president protested that fire and famine violated the rules of war. But if the Spanish torched the canefields, so did the rebels. According to one account, Cuban patriot leader Maximo Gomez “destroyed property to keep the issue alive in the United States and to provoke American intervention.”7

McKinley asked for humanitarian assistance, and in May 1897, Congress responded by appropriating money to assist suffering American citizens in Cuba. Then, in December, McKinley obtained permission from Spain to send food and medicines, and on the day before Christmas, the State Department put out a circular asking for public contributions to a fund for relief to be provided through the American consul in Havana. The president himself anonymously donated five thousand dollars.8

His psychologies, meanwhile, were pulled from two sides. What was happening in Cuba was awful. But U.S. war involvement would also have a human cost. Of the troops Spain sent to Cuba in the 1890s, by 1898, some fifty thousand were dead and another fifty thousand disabled by disease and wounds. In 1762, when a British military expedition with a large contingent of American colonial soldiers captured Havana from Spain, the huge casualties had come from disease and debilitation, not the actual fighting.

In mid-March of 1898, business and Wall Street opposition to U.S. military involvement notably softened following a very influential Senate speech by Republican Senator Redfield Proctor, Vermont marble multimillionaire and former secretary of war, following his recent visit to Cuba. Among other things, Proctor noted that of the four hundred thousand Cubans driven into concentration camps, “one half have died and one quarter of the living are so diseased that they cannot be saved.”9 Humanitarian considerations were beginning to gain the upper hand.

As important financiers shifted toward war and the drumbeat from religious publications began to match that of the Yellow Press, Republican politicians sensed a tidal wave. Senator Thomas Platt warned that a Bryan campaign on the issues of “Free Silver and Free Cuba” might carry the 1898 and 1900 elections.10 Vice President Garret Hobart, whose views McKinley credited, advised, “I can no longer hold back action by the Senate; they will act without you if you do not act at once.”11 When asked if he couldn’t stem the bellicosity of the House, Speaker Reed said he might as well “stand out in the middle of a Kansas waste and dissuade a cyclone.”12

McKinley was losing his options. Biographers agree that the period from February 15, 1898, when the Maine exploded, to April 24, when war finally began, was a difficult one for him. Dark circles deepened around his eyes; he needed drugs for sleeplessness. He had hoped, through moderation and diplomatic attention to Spanish punctilio, or pride, to convince the government in Madrid that aroused U.S. public and government opinion left Spain no alternative but to withdraw from Cuba.

Foes charged him with vacillation and indecision, of which there was some. But most of his postponements, ambiguities, and hesitations were legitimate. Capital war hawks were infuriated with McKinley’s delay and his equivocal language in a March 28 letter sending Congress a naval inquiry board report that the explosion fatal to the battleship Maine was external and thus no accident. However, not only Spanish investigators in Cuba but many Americans believed an internal explosion was responsible, among them Fitzhugh Lee, the U.S. consul general in Havana, Captain Sigsbee, the Maine’s commanding officer, and most Washington-based U.S. naval officers surveyed by the Washington Star.13

Ultimately, the skeptics turned out to be correct: the explosion was indeed internal and accidental, caused by a combustion of coal gases, not Spanish wickedness. McKinley must have believed as much, but lacked proof. Open disagreement with the official navy findings would have been impolitic with war fast approaching, not least because of the certain vituperation of the new mass-circulation newspapers. The presumption of the press lords—openly proclaimed by the Hearst press, for example—was that they, not the government, spoke for the American people.

Diplomatic reasons also justified some temporization and delay. The haste by some in Congress to specifically embrace the Cuban revolutionaries, in addition to Cuban independence, was a mistake, and cooler heads on Capitol Hill eventually sided with McKinley’s refusal. In April, the president properly delayed hostilities so that Americans had time to leave Cuba. Still another purpose for delay was to give the pro-American British government time to emphasize McKinley’s moderation and to smooth the feathers of other European nations inclined to take Spain’s side. However, there is a fanciful aspect to the president’s later contentions that with a little more time, if Congress had kept quiet, he could have negotiated a satisfactory Spanish exit from Cuba.

No evidence exists that Spanish pride was amenable to that degree of concession; late-twentieth-century historians, including biographers Morgan and Gould, generally agree that the terms communicated to Washington on April 10 spurned U.S. mediation and said nothing of ultimate Cuban independence.14 This did not constitute acceptance of current McKinley demands. Other scholars have argued that Spanish honor made it necessary for the government in Madrid to fight rather than submit, because “it was an enduring part of Spanish mythology that the empire had been bestowed by God as a reward for the reconquista, the liberation of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 from Islam.”15 On April 11, the president sent Congress a message that put the United States on a two-week pathway to a declaration of war.

Its reception on Capitol Hill was lukewarm, being without trumpets and drum rolls. Of the four reasons listed for intervention, his first was for humanity’s sake and to end the devastation of Cuba.16 Senator Charles Fairbanks later recalled that just prior to the war, McKinley remarked, “I do not care for the property that will be destroyed nor the money that will be expended … but the thought of the human suffering that must enter many households almost overwhelms me.”17 William Day, acting secretary of state during the war, told Professor John Bassett Moore of Columbia that for any diplomatic history of the war to be really intelligible, it should discuss the conditions in Cuba and the failure of Spain to better them.18 These causes were also asserted by senators ranging from Proctor to the leading Southern war backer, Senator John Morgan of Alabama, and George Hoar of Massachusetts, among the most reluctant Republicans. Biographer Morgan argues that humanitarian considerations were among the scales McKinley most relied upon in coming down on the side of war. If so, this was another unusual facet of an unusual politician.

Militarily, one could argue that the six weeks gained by delays in March and April were vital to increased U.S. naval preparedness. Of the $50 million additional spending for defense voted by Congress in March at the president’s request, some $37 million went to the navy. Part was used to buy two modern cruisers being built for Brazil in British yards, ships that Spanish agents, too, had inquired after. The delays also gave the U.S. Asiatic Squadron under Commodore George Dewey time to assemble along the China coast, take on ammunition and coal, make repairs, and be ready to steam for Manila when the notice of war arrived on April 25. On May 1, just a week after war was declared, a well-prepared Dewey smashed a weaker Spanish fleet in Manila Bay, along with European hopes of imposing an armistice on an embarrassed United States. Had Dewey’s first encounter been inconclusive or marked by loss of any U.S. ships, that might not have been the case. The partial caveat to this preparedness rationale for delay, though, is that McKinley, with his seeming humanitarian calculus, never asserted it.

From March’s public jeers, when he seemed to stand against the nation’s gathering war fever, McKinley’s stock soared after May 7, when the news of the U.S. naval triumph arrived from Hong Kong. The public was ecstatic. One chronicler noted, “Manila Bay was hailed as the greatest naval victory in history, and Dewey as the equal of the transcendent Nelson.”19 The president shared in the credit, especially as military success followed military success. The U.S. Army was woefully unprepared to fight overseas, but luckily, not too many Americans had to do so. Most histories mention at least two small battles on land—El Caney and San Juan Hill in Cuba, both on July 1—but the bookends of easy victory were naval: Manila Bay as the opener, then the nearly total destruction of a second Spanish flotilla outside Santiago, Cuba, on July 3.

With the government in Madrid asking for terms by late July, a protocol was signed on August 12 that a peace treaty would be finalized that autumn in Paris. Hostilities were to conclude on the following terms: Spain was to free Cuba and cede Puerto Rico and Guam to the United States, and the United States was to occupy Manila pending the peace treaty’s final disposition of the Philippines. No other war declared by the United States has been shorter.

Once the fighting began, McKinley’s experience as a wartime staff officer and adjutant made him an unusually competent commander in chief. He took over control of both foreign policy and the direction of the U.S. military, setting up space in the White House, well equipped with telephone and telegraph connections, that became the first presidential “war room.” A switchboard with twenty telegraph wires gave McKinley access to French and British cable lines that ran to Cuba and other points in the Caribbean, as well as to U.S. cable lines that connected him to the soldiers in the field. At the peak of the Cuban fighting, the president could exchange messages with the army commander, General William R. Shafter, in twenty minutes.

To determine and implement strategy, McKinley presided over more or less daily meetings that included the secretaries of war and the navy, as well as top officers from both services. Planning for campaigns at sea gave rise to a new Navy Advisory Board. In army matters, McKinley was soon bypassing the current “Commanding General,” Nelson A. Miles, whom he thought too much like his nickname, the “peacock.” Instead, McKinley made the adjutant general of the army, Henry Corbin, into a de facto army chief of staff.

Nor was the president at all reluctant to directly intervene in military decision making. When General Shafter was slow to embark his troops from Florida to Cuba, McKinley wired, “Sail at once.” A mid-June directive to General Miles on troop dispositions was in McKinley’s own hand. In July, when Miles recommended acceptance of a Spanish offer to abandon Santiago if they could retain their arms and retreat into the interior, McKinley cabled a blunt refusal: “What you went to Santiago for was the Spanish army. If you allow it to evacuate with its arms, you must meet it somewhere else. This is not war. If the Spanish commander desires to leave the city and its people, let him surrender and then we will discuss the question as to what should be done with them.”20

Most scholars have given him full credit. Military historian David Healy concluded that “whatever the achievements and blunders of the war effort, there was no question who was in charge. McKinley’s admirers and critics alike agreed on his central role, particularly in the troubled affairs of the War Department. Charles G. Dawes, who saw much of McKinley during the war, wrote admiringly: ‘The President by his constant watchfulness and supervision of the War Department saved [Secretary of War Russell] Alger from many blunders. His strong hand was always on the helm.… If it had not been, the result would have been demoralization.’”21

To be sure, some of the painfully long hours the president kept reflected his own ill-advised, politically conventional War and State Department appointments. John Sherman, at seventy-four showing unexpected senility, was too old to be secretary of state. He had been chosen—to his own initial satisfaction—to cap his career with the cabinet’s premier post, as well as to open up an Ohio U.S. Senate seat for Mark Hanna. However, his inadequacy became clear as the demands of the State Department burgeoned. He finally resigned on April 25, the day war was declared. Alger, in turn, was a lumber millionaire and state governor who had done good work for the president in Michigan during the 1896 campaign. His appointment was a reward. But he was not an effective war leader, so McKinley took over personal direction of that department, too, until Alger was forced to leave in 1899.

The scandal over “embalmed” wartime beef supplies, for which Alger was somewhat unfairly scapegoated, didn’t stick to the administration in political terms. Neither did the loss of 2,500 officers and men from disease—principally typhoid, malaria, and yellow fever—a much higher number than died carrying arms. Indeed, the minimal battlefield losses—27 officers and 318 enlisted dying in combat or from wounds—go far to explain the public memory of what John Hay called “that splendid little war.”

Despite the beef scandals and army mismanagement of health conditions, the public was pleased by U.S. military prowess. With so few killed, one historian observed, “[E]ach of the fallen became the focus of wide civic and even statewide homage.” When early in the fighting, Ensign Worth Bagley of North Carolina became the one naval officer to be killed by the foe, the funeral was “attended by two thousand soldiers in training and by the whole community [Raleigh] and hundreds from all over the state, with tributes of flowers from Washington and Annapolis. He was buried with the honors of a brigadier general.”22 Carl Sandburg later recalled that ten thousand people turned out at the train depot when Bagley’s Company C returned to Galesburg, Illinois.

Even before the peace protocol with Spain, McKinley used his new popularity and support in Congress to promote his agenda for U.S. expansion. The Senate approved annexation of Hawaii on July 7. August’s protocol, while stipulating that Puerto Rico and Guam would be ceded by Spain to the United States and that Cuba would be freed, left Cuba’s exact status unclear; that of the Philippines, also torn by internal revolution, remained completely unsettled. Because acquisition of the Philippines has been taken as the beginning of the American empire, McKinley’s intentions became a twentieth-century focus.

One 1993 overview, “William McKinley’s Enduring Legacy: The Historiographical Debate on the Taking of the Philippine Islands,” published by the Naval Institute Press, found a growing consensus that McKinley was “an able president who, particularly after the Battle of Manila Bay, dominated decisions on the islands.”23 Some historians have gone further, imputing a Machiavellian cleverness to his pursuit of imperialism. Others, more restrained, argue that once McKinley knew of the destruction of the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay and quickly took action to increase the ground troops in the Philippines to some 10,000, he may have been reaching a tentative decision to take possession.

Biographers Morgan and Gould, pressing this latter viewpoint, cited the analysis that McKinley himself offered some time later. Letting Spain keep the archipelago would be “cowardly and dishonorable,” transferring it to France or Germany would be “bad business,” and independence, for which the Filipinos were still unfit, “would soon have anarchy over there worse than Spain’s was.”24 These were all sound points. Had McKinley begun to think in May and June about keeping all or most of the Philippines, not just a single island or a naval base, it would have been like the man, Morgan reasoned, to keep that thinking to himself until he could bring the public and the Congress around to that same conclusion.25 Doubtless his view would not have been set in cement until he saw the public’s favorable response to his arguments that autumn.

*   *   *

On October 1, just twenty-three weeks after McKinley had sent his war message to Congress, his peace commissioners began meeting with Spanish counterparts in Paris. No disposition of the Philippines was to be announced until November, minimizing debate in the 1898 midterm elections. In the meantime, McKinley, with Mark Hanna’s advice, opted for something unusual: a mid-October presidential campaign tour in six Midwest states.

The one precedent was not auspicious. Andrew Johnson, successor to the assassinated Lincoln, had been the last chief executive to stump the country for the midterm elections of 1866, and the voters repudiated his efforts and themes. Still, McKinley was an elected president, personally popular, the economy was coming out of a long slump, and he had just won a war—added to which, he had a long record as a highly effective speaker.

On October 14, he began a two-week trip involving fifty-seven appearances and major speeches in Omaha, St. Louis, and Chicago. He did not speak for Republican candidates, but talked in a presidential vein about the conduct and motivations of the war and America’s need to accept the territories and responsibilities that came with victory and a new world role. For the moment, at least, he had wrapped the Philippine conundrum in the flag and a rekindling national prosperity. “Duty determines destiny,” the president said, and this time he was out to lead public opinion toward a redefinition of both.26

The response of his beloved Midwest was warm. One newspaper said his return through Indiana and Ohio brought a “continuous ovation,” and when the votes were counted on Election Day, the Republicans had held control, losing only nineteen seats in the House and expecting six new U.S. senators from newly chosen state legislatures. The record books showed it was the best midterm result for a post–Civil War Republican administration—a net of only thirteen GOP seats lost versus the closest previous net decline of twenty-one in 1870.

Continuing U.S. warfare in the Philippines, sometimes against the same insurgents who had battled Spain, would be a bone of contention in future elections. Keeping the Philippines, seemingly against the wishes of many inhabitants, fed the negative portraiture of empire. What would not become a domestic political issue until 1914–16, although they reshaped global geopolitics, were two new emerging polarities and one new entente: the crystallizing rivalries between Britain and Germany and between the United States and Japan, and the reemerging collaboration of the English-speaking peoples.

THE EMERGING ANGLO-AMERICAN ENTENTE

The forebears of William McKinley, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt were, respectively, Scots-Irish and English, largely English, and Dutch-English. But each man went through an intriguing evolution in his attitude toward ancestral Britain: prickly sensitivity and anger at perceived inattention or commercial injury in the 1870s and 1880s gave way to cousinship and incipient alliance in the 1890s as the American place in the world climbed toward Britain’s.

Both stages had their logic. In the 1870s and 1880s, upper-class Northerners like Lodge and Roosevelt had been miffed by British ignorance of the United States and condescension toward it, especially by high Tories. McKinley, attuned to labor and commerce, resented what he saw as using the United States as a dumping ground for cheaper British manufactures made possible by Britain’s lower wages, bigger factories, greater economy of scale, and access to raw materials. Absent protective tariffs, McKinley argued in the 1870s and 1880s, British manufactured goods would overpower fledgling U.S. industries and erode America’s much higher wage levels.

By the late 1890s, America’s expanding navy, soaring fortunes, ballooning manufacturing industries, and booming exports were building confidence in all three men, even if TR and Cabot Lodge grumbled about America’s upper classes being full of jumped-up usurers and linoleum makers. British aristocrats had been marrying U.S. heiresses in ever-larger numbers, while Londoners were coming to rely on ingenious Americans for their electrical industry and for the construction of their “tube,” or subway. U.S. export capacity now scared the British as opposed to the reverse situation in 1850 or 1870. A British writer, W. T. Stead, found “the Americanization of the world” to be well under way. Even the British Admiralty was starting to contemplate its own reluctant nuptials: Royal Navy supremacy in European, African, and Asian waters would be wed to U.S. Navy dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

In the eighties, the Democratic party under Cleveland was the one preferred by the British elites. One British minister to the United States, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, had to return home after writing a foolish letter, which became public, recommending a vote for Cleveland. Upper-class Britain favored free trade, opposed U.S. tariffs, and disliked the industrial plutocracy, and for that matter had disproportionately supported the cavalier-seeming Democratic South in the Civil War. The politics of the Protestant British immigrant population in the United States, however, was quite different.

Taken together, English, Scottish, Welsh, and Scots-Irish immigrants in the United States circa 1890 were almost as numerous as the Germans or Catholic Irish. Overall, they were more Republican than any native-born Protestant American stock save greater New England Yankees. In a few industrial locales, the Protestant British-born population—mechanics, miners, engineers, managers, and shop foremen—outnumbered the other immigrant groups. Most were pillars of the tariff system, knowing that it sustained pay scales 50 or even 100 percent higher than those of their brothers and cousins in Britain.

McKinley’s section of northeastern Ohio was particularly full of British Republicans. Some were Welsh coal miners and foremen who called the GOP plaid werinol, Welsh for the party of the people. Others were English wheat farmers and sheep raisers who had flocked to this part of Ohio after Britain’s repeal of agricultural protection in the 1840s. In 1893, six hundred kilted Scottish steelworkers marched in a large McKinley parade in Akron. Columbiana County, on the eastern edge of McKinley’s old congressional district, was the center of the U.S. clay and ceramics industry, run and substantially manned by thousands of immigrants from the similar potteries of England’s West Midlands.

Under McKinley, and with the help of American imperialists like Lodge, TR, and Admiral A. T. Mahan and Anglophiles like John Hay, secretary of state from 1898 to 1905, the Republicans quietly became the more British-connected party. It also helped that Bryan and the Democrats, in their Populist incarnation, had attacked British finance as the evil senior partner of Wall Street.

As war clouds thickened in 1898, British support for the United States against Spain was so obvious that the Madrid government briefly strengthened its fortifications on the border with Gibraltar. McKinley, in turn, was pro-British from his first months in office. He supported—without success—a far-reaching arbitration treaty before the U.S. Senate in 1897 by which Britain and the United States promised to submit their differences to such resolution. He relied on Britain in 1898 for covert assistance during the war months and reciprocated by muting U.S. sentiment against Britain in the 1899–1901 Boer War (McKinley had to squelch a pro-Boer plank in the 1900 GOP platform). Through John Hay, McKinley worked closely with London regarding China and the Boxer Rebellion, evolving the Open Door policy (1900), which sought to maintain Chinese territorial integrity while opening the Chinese empire to “equal and impartial trade” with all powers.

To cement the informal alliance taking shape, the British also worked out satisfactory conclusions on two other matters: resolution of the controversial boundary between Alaska and Canada (1903) and replacement of the old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with the new Hay-Pauncefote Treaty (1901), giving British blessings to the U.S. construction and fortification of a Panama Canal. Both were signed under Theodore Roosevelt but set in motion under McKinley.

The spurs to entente included shared ancestry and the rising reference to that bond in both nations. Besides which, the no-longer-vexing North American frontier squabbles had given way to an embryonic sense of shared Anglo-Saxon globalism. The biggest factor, though, involved the new roles and rivalries creeping onto the world stage.

Several historians have argued that the Anglo-American goodwill surrounding the war was too transient to mark a watershed. Although true as stated—by 1900, the Boer War did pour some cold water over earlier mutual enthusiasm—overemphasis on one particular clump of trees loses sight of the changing geopolitical forest. If the Spanish-American War made one thing clear to British diplomats and military theorists, it was the awesome strength that the United States could be expected to deploy as its global military and commercial objectives matured. In the words of Lord Bryce, “[T]he Republic is as wealthy as any two of the greatest European nations, and is capable, if she chooses, of quickly calling into being a vast fleet and a vast army. Her wealth and power has in it something almost alarming.”27

Stewart Woodford, the U.S. minister to Spain in 1898, reported how stunned the Spanish had been to see the U.S. Congress vote $50 million more for unspecified defense out of unneeded treasury funds. The odd stickler for absolute naval supremacy aside, British leaders saw more pluses than minuses. In 1890, the U.S. Navy had ranked twelfth internationally, behind China and Turkey. By 1900, the United States was sixth, with shipbuilding rising apace; and in 1906, Jane’s Fighting Ships for the first time actually placed the U.S. Navy second to the British.28 Britain’s naval edge might be at risk in a contest with Germany, but the combined naval supremacy of the English-speaking powers was safe and climbing.

Moreover, just as turn-of-the-century Anglo-German relations were souring, the United States, too, became increasingly suspicious of the kaiser’s new ambitions in the Pacific and Caribbean. First whetted in the 1880s in Samoa, Washington’s displeasure was aroused again in 1895 by German attempts to secure a coaling station in Haiti, coupled with reports of Berlin’s interest in buying Cuba from Spain. War with Spain in 1898 brought these tensions to new heights.

By July 1898, a month after Dewey had beaten Spain’s Asian squadron, the German navy had sent six ships to Manila Bay, including a troop transport with fourteen hundred men. Told that command of Far Eastern waters would pass to the power controlling the Philippines, the kaiser’s government had its eye on the Sulu Archipelago, the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, the Carolines, and all of the Samoan group. At first, the German ships outgunned Dewey’s squadron, and, according to one naval observer, “acted as if Manila Bay were absolutely in their possession.” They also kept in close touch with Spanish authorities, who openly expected the German flotilla to come to their aid.29 Dewey thought he might have to fight the Germans and requested reinforcements before U.S.-Spanish peace terms were resolved. These were sent, and German belligerence eased, albeit Berlin made clear its desire for whatever territory the Americans left to the Spanish in the Philippines and vicinity.

In September, Germany and Spain reached a secret understanding that Berlin would get the Caroline and Ladrone (Marianas) Islands. When Spain’s Far Eastern divestiture was finalized in December, the kaiser wound up with the Marianas (less Guam, taken by the United States), the Carolines, and the Palaus, with Germany having already bought the Marshalls in 1895, and the new acquisitions completed an island chain that reached fifteen hundred miles from the Bismarck Archipelago to the Marianas.

German activity in the Caribbean also increased. When the kaiser’s government used gunboat diplomacy against Haiti in November 1897, a U.S. senior naval officer sent to investigate German penetration predicted that “before many years have passed, Germany will succeed in acquiring one or more territorial possessions in the Western Hemisphere.”30 The next U.S. concern, over possible German interference in an independent Cuba, led in January 1901 to the congressionally drawn Platt Amendment, which Cuba’s constitutional convention was required to accept that spring. Cuba undertook not to impair its independence through a treaty with a foreign power, specifying that the United States could intervene “for the preservation of Cuban independence and the maintenance of stable government.”31

American concern about Japan also intensified during the late 1890s, first over Hawaii and then over the Philippines. The insistence in the 1896 Republican platform that the United States should control Hawaii and exclude foreign interference prompted McKinley’s quick request for annexation in 1897. That spring, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s own concurring report likewise identified strategic considerations as “the main argument in favor.” According to the senators, “The issue in Hawaii is not between monarchy and the Republic.… The issue is whether, in that inevitable struggle, Asia [i.e., Japan] or America shall have the vantage ground of the naval ‘key of the Pacific,’ the commercial ‘Cross-roads of the Pacific.’”32

Because of an influx of agricultural laborers, Hawaii’s Japanese population was already one quarter of the islands’ total, outnumbering Americans by more than three to one. When the Hawaiian government refused in March 1897 to admit more Japanese, Tokyo sent a warship, the cruiser Namiwa, while senior officials hinted at even stronger action. The McKinley administration, even while pursuing Hawaiian annexation, drafted a possible war plan against Japan and sent three U.S. warships to Honolulu. In June, naval authorities instructed the local U.S. commander that if the Japanese invaded, he should “land a suitable force and announce officially provisional assumption of protectorate pending a treaty of annexation.”33 As the Senate could not mobilize a two-thirds majority for an annexation treaty, the president told Massachusetts Senator George Hoar that “if something [annexation] be not done, there will be before long another Revolution, and Japan will get control.” However, in December, the Japanese backed off and began turning their attention in the Pacific elsewhere—to the Philippines.

When the battle of Manila Bay was fought, two Japanese warships were also visiting, and after Dewey’s victory suggested Spain’s local rule was near its end, Japan officially offered to oversee the Philippines if the United States declined to take up that role.34 After the Spanish departure when Filipino rebels under Emilio Aguinaldo kept fighting against the United States, it was Tokyo that Aguinaldo pressed hardest for recognition of his revolutionary regime.35

Not just expansion, then, but global geopolitics underpinned the desire of both nations, Britain and the United States, for close relations as the twentieth century unfolded. Henry Adams surmised that “The sudden appearance of Germany is the grizzly terror which in twenty years … frightened England into America’s arms.”36 In the United States, meanwhile, Admiral Dewey could declare by 1899 that America’s next war would be with Germany. And by 1902 and 1903, after Germany’s part in a coercion of Venezuela, the British ambassador in Washington reported to Whitehall that “suspicion of the German emperor’s designs in the Caribbean sea is shared by the Administration, the press and the public alike.”37 To complete the triangle, John Hay wrote to Senator Lodge from London that “the jealousy and animosity felt toward us in Germany is something which can scarcely be exaggerated.… The Vaterland is all on fire with greed and terror of us.”38

Few histories of the Spanish-American War give this larger context the attention it deserves. But, in short, the decisive geopolitics of the first half of the twentieth century—that Britain and the United States as allies would defeat Germany and Japan—took a critical leap forward under McKinley.

MCKINLEY AS A PIVOTAL FOREIGN POLICY PRESIDENT

The evidence for this judgment ranges from his skilled wartime leadership and institutional innovations to his successful exertion on behalf of U.S. trade expansion and reciprocity, international arbitration, Anglo-American entente, the enablement of the Panama Canal, and the U.S. emergence as a two-ocean naval and military power. McKinley, more than anyone else in Washington from 1897 to 1901, managed and promoted the transformation of the United States from the still internally preoccupied and globally uninvolved nation of the early 1890s to the world power of the 1900s.

Because his first cabinet officers for the State and War Departments, Sherman and Alger, were political choices born of the older, more parochial nineteenth-century United States and its relaxed priorities, the president himself had to take over much of the leadership of these departments as global tensions deepened in late 1897 and 1898. In crisis terms, it may have been the making of him. By the time that Woodrow Wilson, who voted for McKinley over Bryan, published the fifteenth edition of Congressional Government in 1900, his preface acknowledged the transformation brought about by McKinley:

When foreign affairs play a prominent part in the politics and policy of a nation, its Executive must of necessity be its guide; must utter every initial, take every first step of action, supply the information on which it is to act, suggest and in large measure control its conduct. The President of the United States is now, as of course, at the front of affairs, as no president, except Lincoln, has been since the first quarter of the nineteenth century.39

Not only did he fill both departmental roles with considerable skill during the transition before he could identify successors, but his choices were men who were to win kudos, John Hay and Elihu Root. To them, he handed over departmental, although not overall, decision making. In a memorial address in 1902, Hay had this to say of the man he served:

In dealing with foreign powers he will take rank with the greatest of our diplomatists. It was a world of which he had little special knowledge before coming to the presidency. But his marvellous adaptability was in nothing more remarkable than in the firm grasp he immediately displayed in international relations. In preparing for war and in the restoration of peace he was alike adroit, courteous and far-sighted.40

Both Hay and Root became pillars of the GOP foreign policy establishment, as did other McKinley appointees who went on to become president or vice president: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Charles G. Dawes, and Charles Fairbanks. One can argue, reasonably, that McKinley identified and advanced a considerable part of the high-level Republican talent pool for the 1896–1932 period in which the GOP generally governed. Roosevelt, Taft, Dawes, Fairbanks, Hay, and Root all lived longer than the man who advanced or appointed them, and they left many favorable comments on McKinley and hardly any that were otherwise. They all knew who made the major decisions, and it was one of his unique attributes not only not to hog the credit or limelight, but to let his subordinates have their share and sometimes more. Personal public relations was neither his skill nor his preoccupation.

It is now time to turn to a related argument: that McKinley was not merely the political architect of the realignment of 1896 and America’s new world role, but the senior coarchitect of much of the modernism and reformism, domestic and international, that is too often thought to have begun with Theodore Roosevelt.