The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  His voice echoed in the Senate through Lodge, who repeated the argument that the Canal would make a Cuba a “necessity.” As extra inducement to Senators more materially than strategically minded, he expanded on how that “splendid island … still sparsely settled and of almost unbounded fertility” offered great opportunities for the investment of American capital and as a market for American goods. Roosevelt, although he had no such forum, was earnestly pleading the same cause wherever he had a hearing. The vociferous campaign he and Lodge were waging reached an august listener who was not pleased.

  President Charles William Eliot of Harvard, the “topmost oak” of New England, speaking in Washington on the much-debated issue of international arbitration, denounced the doctrine of jingoism as “offensive.” Associated with countries where there had always been a military class, it was, he said, “absolutely foreign to American society,… yet some of my friends endeavor to pass it off as patriotic Americanism.” He then laid down firmly the principles which he believed made America different from the old nations. “The building of a navy and the presence of a large standing army mean … the abandonment of what is characteristically American.… The building of a navy and particularly of battleships is English and French policy. It should never be ours.” The American policy was reliance upon strength in peace, whereas Jingoes were a creation “of the combativeness that is in man.” He specifically identified Lodge and Roosevelt as Jingoes and privately, it was learned, called them “degenerated sons of Harvard.”

  Eliot spoke with unmatched authority. Descended from Eliots and Lymans who had been settled in New England since the Seventeenth Century, he belonged to a group who felt themselves the best. “Eliza,” protested Mrs. Eliot when a friend joined the Episcopal church, “do you kneel down in church and call yourself a miserable sinner? Neither I nor any of my family will ever do that!” His father, a mayor of Boston and a Congressman, was also, as treasurer of Harvard, a member of the seven-man Corporation, Harvard’s governing body, which an English observer called “government by seven cousins.” His own quarter of a century as president of Harvard had been an unremitting battle against the traditionalists to transform the college from an Eighteenth Century backwater into a modern university. During that time he had, as President Hyde of Bowdoin said, been “misunderstood, maligned, misrepresented, hated,” and Eliot himself confessed that in all his public appearances during those years, “I had a vivid sense that I was addressing a hostile audience.” Being a fighter, this did not halt him. He was not naturally an ingratiating man. Over six feet tall, with “an oarsman’s back, a grave and sculptured head,” he was a “noble presence” born to command. A strawberry birthmark which covered one side of his face and pulled a corner of his lip into a seeming superciliousness had set him apart from boyhood and given him a quality of loneliness. With this to overcome and the additional handicap of being, as Professor of Chemistry, a scientist, he had nevertheless been named president of Harvard at thirty-five. His ideal of behavior, in his own words, was that of “a gentleman who is also a democrat.” He was inflexible about what he thought was right. When a star baseball player was left off the Harvard team because of low marks, Eliot was heard to remark that this was no loss because he was a player who resorted to deception. “Why,” he explained, “they boasted of his making a feint to throw a ball in one direction and then throwing it in ANOTHER!”

  Against the strenuous lethargy of the diehards he succeeded in opening the curriculum to modern studies, introducing the elective system, assembling a faculty that gave Harvard its golden age, raising the Law School and Medical School to prestige and prominence and through his influence modernizing the whole American system of higher education. When in 1894 at the age of sixty he celebrated his twenty-fifth anniversary as president, opposition had given way to respect and admiration. He was suddenly recognized as Harvard’s greatest president and the “first private citizen of the country.” It was said that the Boston Symphony could not open without him and the sanguine birthmark appeared no longer as a blemish but as “an emblem of triumph over the handicaps of life.”

  To Roosevelt, then thirty-eight, Eliot himself seemed one of the die-hards who refused to understand that America’s manifest destiny lay outward. Having imbibed deeply from Mahan, Roosevelt felt urgently the need of his country to equip itself for the role of greatness which the times were shaping. The distaste for that role of many of the influential men of his time made his voice shrill with frustration. “If ever we come to nothing as a nation,” he wrote Lodge after learning that they had been called “de-generated sons of Harvard,” “it will be because the teaching of Carl Schurz, President Eliot, the Evening Post and futile sentimentalists of the international arbitration type” will produce “a flabby timid type of character which eats away the great fighting features of our race.”

  It was maddening to him that now, when war with Spain was in prospect, just such a flabby timid character was in the White House. Roosevelt was determined that there should be someone inside the Administration alert and capable of making ready for great events. He had set his heart on bringing together the man who understood the new destiny—himself—with the instrument upon which all depended—the Navy. McKinley’s Secretary of the Navy was an easygoing and friendly gentleman and former Governor of Massachusetts, John D. Long. Roosevelt believed that if he himself were appointed Assistant Secretary he could, through superior force of energy and ideas, take over the real command of that office.

  So did everyone else. Long somewhat apprehensively said, “Roosevelt has the character, standing, ability and reputation to entitle him to be a Cabinet minister—is not this too small for him?” The only thing against him, Lodge wrote to his friend after seeing McKinley on his behalf, was “the fear that you will want to fight somebody at once.” Nevertheless McKinley, persuaded as usual by more forceful characters, appointed Roosevelt on April 5, 1897, and he was confirmed on April 8. S. S. McClure, the exposive and perceptive editor of McClure’s Magazine, sensed whence the appointment came and where it would lead. “Mahan must be seen and talked to at once,” he wrote to his co-editor. “He is the greatest naval biographer and student of this century and his field is going to become more and more popular.” An identical twin of his time, McClure knew what his twin would do. “Roosevelt seems big from here,” he continued. “Write to him and try to get his naval stuff. Mahan and Roosevelt are just our size.” This was indeed so. McClure shared their feeling of power and muscle and largeness of opportunity. When in the last year of the century he wanted Walter Hines Page for an editor, he telegraphed him, “Should see you immediately. Have biggest thing on earth.” When Page agreed to come, McClure was jubilant and replied that they would make the strongest editorial combine in the world. “Oh my dear boy, we are the people with the years in front of us!”

  Now the long-thwarted annexation of Hawaii was revived. Roosevelt in the effort to galvanize McKinley reported to him on April 22 that the Japanese had sent a cruiser to Honolulu. He wrote to Mahan asking him how to solve the political problem of acquiring the islands. “Do nothing unrighteous,” was the classic answer, “but take the islands first and solve afterward.” If he could have his way, Roosevelt replied, they would be annexed “tomorrow,” and Spain turned out of the West Indies and a dozen new battleships built at once, half of them on the Pacific Coast, He reported a regrettable disposition on the part of Congress to stop naval building until finances were firmer. “Tom Reed to my astonishment and indignation takes this view.”

  Still firm in command of the Republican members, Reed could subdue any unhealthy lust among them for annexation, but as Speaker he was bound to pilot Administration policy through the House. The question was, what was Administration policy: the soft reluctance of McKinley or the “outward” drive of Lodge and Roosevelt powered by the ideas of Mahan and the persuasions of the sugar trust? The answer came in June, when a new treaty of annexation was concluded with the Hawaiian government, sig
ned by McKinley and sent to the Senate for ratification. Although there was little likelihood of assembling two-thirds of the Senate in favor of it, the anti-expansionists were worried. Carl Schurz, whom McKinley, always anxious to please, had earlier assured of his disinterest in Hawaii, faced him with the issue after dinner in the White House, over cigars. Very uncomfortable, McKinley pleaded that he had sent the treaty to the Senate only to get an expression of opinion. Nevertheless, Schurz left with a heart “heavy with evil forebodings.” In England the Spectator said somewhat nervously that the treaty marked “an end to the historic policy of the Republic since its foundation … and will mean its gradual evolution into a less peaceful and possibly militant power.”

  With regard to Cuba, the country was becoming increasingly excited. Reed regarded the Hearst-fabricated furor over Spain’s oppression with contempt and Republican espousal of Cuba’s cause as hypocrisy. He saw his party losing its moral integrity and becoming a party of political expediency in response to the ignorant clamor of the mob. Without compunction he suppressed the resolution recognizing the belligerence of the “Republic” of Cuba. He too took to the magazines to argue against expansion—in an article whose title, “Empire Can Wait,” became a rallying cry for the opponents of Hawaii’s annexation. It spoke the awful name; as yet the outright words “empire” and “imperialism,” which connoted the scramble for Africa then at its peak among the European powers, had not been used in the United States. James Bryce, perhaps the only Englishman who could have been allowed to give advice, urged Americans to have nothing to do with a policy of annexation. America’s remote position and immense power, he wrote in the Forum, freed her from the burden of armaments crushing the European powers. Her mission in the world was “to show the older peoples and states an example of abstention from the quarrels and wars and conquests that make up so large and lamentable a part of the annals of Europe.” To yield to the “earth-hunger” now raging among the European states would be “a complete departure from the maxims of the illustrious founders of the republic.” Behind his sober words could be sensed the love a man feels for the object of his life’s work and a pleading to America not to contradict the promise that hung about her birth.

  Mahan’s mind, planning the strategy of a war with Spain, had already leapt beyond Hawaii to the far-off Spanish possession of the Philippines. What motivated him was not earth-hunger but sea power, the controlling idea which had drawn from him the grand orchestral words about the British Navy in the Napoleonic wars: “Those far distant, storm-beaten ships upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world.” At the end of 1897 he entered the rising debate with a book, The Interest of America in Sea Power, in which were collected his major articles over the past seven years. He also advised Roosevelt on the appointment of a new commander of the Asiatic Squadron who could be trusted to act with vigor when the test should come. The chosen officer was Commodore George Dewey and his task was foreseen. “Our Asiatic Squadron should blockade and, if possible, take Manila,” Roosevelt wrote to Lodge on September 21, 1897, and he took care to obtain the necessary coal to prepare the Asiatic Squadron for action.

  On February 15, 1898, the United States armored cruiser Maine blew up and sank in the harbor of Havana with the loss of 260 lives. Although the cause of the explosion was never ascertained, it was impossible in the mood of the time to assume other than a dastardly Spanish plot. The proponents of war burst into hysteria; the peace-minded were outshouted. McKinley hung back, but fearful of a split in his party, soon gave way to the clamor. Speaker Reed did not. During the two months in which negotiations aimed at forcing Spain into war were being pursued, he did his best to hold back the wave, limiting time for debate and quashing resolutions recognizing Cuban independence. When Senator Proctor, who owned marble quarries in Vermont, made a strong speech for war Reed commented, “Proctor’s position might have been expected. A war will make a large market for gravestones.” He was attacked by the pro-war press and his rulings aroused resentment in the House, which, on the whole—like the country—wanted war. “Ambition, interest, land-hunger, pride, the mere joy of fighting, whatever it may be” acknowledged the Washington Post, “we are animated by a new sensation.… The taste of Empire is in the mouth of the people even as the taste of blood in the jungle.”

  It was too strong for Reed to control. Asked by reporters one morning at breakfast at the Shoreham for comment on the stampede for war, he showed a letter he had just opened from Governor Morton of New York urging him to step down from the chair to the floor of the House and dissuade the members from intervention. “Dissuade them! The Governor might as well ask me to step out in the middle of a Kansas waste and dissuade a cyclone!” He could not keep the ultimatum to Spain from coming to the floor, and the vote for it in the House of 311 to 6 was a measure of the cyclone. To one of the six Reed said, “I envy you the luxury of your vote. I was where I could not do it.”

  War was declared on April 25, 1898. Mahan, then in Rome, asked by reporters how long he thought the war would last, replied with what proved dead reckoning, “About three months.” Returning at once he was appointed one of the three members of the Naval War Board. Roosevelt sent him a plan of campaign for action in the Philippines and on receiving his comments wrote, “There is no question that you stand head and shoulder above the rest of us. You have given us just the suggestions we want.”

  On April 30 Commodore Dewey’s squadron steamed into Manila Bay and with a day’s bombardment, loosed by the classic order, “You may fire when ready, Gridley,” destroyed or put out of action the Spanish squadron and shore batteries. Never had the country felt such a thrill of pride. GREATEST NAVAL ENGAGEMENT OF MODERN TIMES was one headline. It faced the country suddenly with a new problem which none but a few had thought of: What to do next? The American people on the whole, as Mr. Dooley said, did not know whether the Philippines were islands or canned goods, and even McKinley confessed “he could not have told where those darned islands were within 2,000 miles.” The disciples of Mahan knew well enough where they were and what must become of them. Within four days of Dewey’s victory Lodge wrote, “We must on no account let the islands go.… The American flag is up and it must stay.” Since there had been a Filipino independence movement in existence for thirty years, for which many had fought and suffered prison, exile and death, Senator Lodge’s simple solution took little account of the consent of the governed. Its leader was Emilio Aguinaldo, a young man of twenty-eight who had been in exile in Hong Kong. Upon Dewey’s victory, he had returned at once to the Philippines.

  In America the outbreak of a war to be carried to the enemy and posing no danger to the homeland did not silence its opponents but galvanized them. Suddenly they became an entity with a name: the Anti-Imperialists. Professor Norton, now over seventy, brought upon himself torrents of abuse and threats of violence to his house and person by urging his students not to enlist in a war in which “we jettison all that was most precious of our national cargo.” Although a Boston Irish politician proposed to send a lynching party for him and the press called him a “traitor” and even Senator Hoar of Massachusetts denounced him, Norton’s grief at his country’s course was too great to be contained. At a meeting of the Congregational Church in Cambridge he spoke of how bitter it was that now, at the end of a century which had seen the greatest advance in knowledge and the hope of peace, America should be turning against her ideals and “plunging into an unrighteous war.”

  Others in Boston spoke out. Moorfield Storey, president of the Massachusetts Reform Club and Civil Service Reform League, and a former president of the American Bar Association, was one; Gamaliel Bradford, a rampant critic of government known for his one-man crusades through a flow of letters to newspapers, was another. The first Story (minus the e) had settled in Massachusetts in 1635 and Bradford was descended from the first Governor of the Plymouth Colony. Together they assembled a meeting of protest at Faneuil Hall, and here on June 15,
1898, three days after Aguinaldo in the Philippines issued a declaration of independence, the Anti-Imperialist League was founded. Its president was the eighty-year-old Republican George S. Boutwell, former Senator from Massachusetts and former Secretary of the Treasury under President Grant. Its stated purpose was not to oppose the war as such, but to insist that having been undertaken as a war of liberation, it must not be turned into one for empire. The quest for power, money and glory abroad, the League maintained, would distract from reform at home and bring in its train a strong central government destructive of traditional states’ rights and local liberties. Americans had enough to do to solve the problems of municipal corruption, war between capital and labour, disordered currency, unjust taxation, the use of public office for spoils, the rights of the colored people in the South and of the Indians in the West, before taking alien peoples under their rule.

  These were the problems that absorbed reformers—many of whom, together with independents and dissenters of various kinds and distinguished Democrats who had perforce become the anti-expansion party, now banded together under the banner of the League. Its forty-one vice-presidents soon included ex-President Cleveland; his former Secretary of War, William Endicott; former Secretary of the Treasury, Speaker Carlisle; Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman; President David Starr Jordan, of Stanford; President James B. Angell, of the University of Michigan; Jane Addams; Andrew Carnegie; William James; Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, and numbers of other Congressmen, clergymen, professors, lawyers and writers. The novelist William Dean Howells thought the war “an abominable business.” When his friend Mark Twain came home from an extended trip abroad, he too became a member of the League. Besides Godkin’s Evening Post, its chief voices were the Boston Herald, the Baltimore Sun and the Springfield Republican, while two other Republican papers, the Boston Evening Transcript and the Philadelphia Ledger, also gave it support.