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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  On the side of the Anti-Imperialists was a strong sentiment, growing out of the troubles with the Negroes after the Civil War, of reluctance to take on new colored populations. Nothing but more trouble would accrue, said Godkin harshly in the Nation, from “dependencies inhabited by ignorant and inferior races” with whom Americans had no union “other than would be necessary for purposes of carpet-baggery and corruption.” Carl Schurz used the same argument against the Canal, saying that “once fairly started on a career of aggrandizement” the imperialists would insist that the Canal be bordered on both sides by American territory and would want to annex countries “with a population of 13,000,000 Spanish-Americans mixed with Indian blood” who would flood Congress with twenty Senators and fifty or sixty Representatives. Hawaii, where Orientals greatly outnumbered the whites, posed the same threat.

  The Anti-Imperialists did not sweep up with them the Populists and followers of Bryan and those soon to be known as Progressives. While these groups opposed standing armies, big navies and foreign entanglements and were in theory anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and anti-European, they were simultaneously imbued with a fever to fight Spain as a cruel European tyrant stamping out liberty at America’s doorstep. Bryan called for war as loudly as Theodore Roosevelt and in sincere flattery, if less promptly, had himself appointed Colonel of the Third Nebraska Volunteers, too late to see action in Cuba. Most vociferous of all was a young lawyer from Indianapolis, already famous at thirty-six as a political orator and soon to become a leader of the Progressives. The taste of empire, the rising blood of nationalism expressed in terms of wide-flung dominion, found in Albert Beveridge its most thrilling trumpet. Like Bryan, he possessed that dangerous talent for oratory which can simulate action and even thought. The war sent Beveridge into transports of excitement.

  “We are a conquering race,” he proclaimed in Boston in April, even before the victory of Manila Bay. “We must obey our blood and occupy new markets and if necessary new lands.… In the Almighty’s infinite plan … debased civilizations and decaying races” were to disappear “before the higher civilization of the nobler and more virile types of man.” Pan-Germans in Berlin and Joseph Chamberlain in England also talked of the mission of the superior race, variously Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon, but Beveridge had nothing to learn from them; it was all his own. He saw in present events “the progress of a mighty people and their free institutions” and the fulfillment of the dream “that God had put in the brain” of Jefferson, Hamilton, John Bright, Emerson, Ulysses S. Grant and other “imperial intellects”; the dream “of American expansion until all the seas shall bloom with that flower of liberty, the flag of the great Republic.” It was not so much liberty as trade that Beveridge saw following the flag. American factories and American soil, he said, were producing more than the American people could consume. “Fate has written our policy for us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours.… We will cover the ocean with our merchant marine. We will build a navy to the measure of our greatness.… American law, American order, American civilization will plant themselves on those shores hitherto bloody and benighted but by those agencies of God henceforth to be made beautiful and bright.”

  Beveridge was so carried away by the opportunities for greatness that the sword he waved flashed almost too nakedly. He spoke of the Pacific as “the true field of our operations. There Spain has an island empire in the Philippines.… There the United States has a powerful Squadron. The Philippines are logically our first target.”

  During the summer while others volunteered and fought in Cuba and sickened of yellow fever and over five thousand died of disease, Beveridge’s personal obedience to the call of blood remained rhetorical. He poured scorn on the Anti-Imperialist arguments. “Cuba not contiguous? Porto Rico not contiguous? The Philippines not contiguous?… Dewey and Sampson and Schley will make them contiguous and American speed, American guns, American heart and brain and nerve will keep them contiguous forever!… Who dares to halt it now, now when we are at last one people, strong enough for any task, great enough for any glory destiny can bestow?” In the following year Beveridge was elected Senator. “We’re a gr-reat people,” remarked Mr. Dooley. “An’ the best iv it is, we know we ar-re.”

  Theodore Roosevelt in these months was at the front. Though he held a high and crucial office he had made up his mind in advance to give it up, if war came, for active service. Men like himself, as he wrote privately to a friend, having been taunted with being “armchair and parlor Jingoes,… my power for good whatever it may be, would be gone if I didn’t try to live up to the doctrines that I have tried to preach.” He resigned as Assistant Secretary of the Navy immediately after Manila, declined the command of a volunteer cavalry regiment which was offered him by Secretary of War Alger, but asked to serve as Lieutenant Colonel on condition that the command was given to his friend Colonel Leonard Wood of the regular army. This was done. By June 24, two months later, he was in action at San Juan Hill. By July 3 the land fighting was over, the ebullient Rough Rider was a hero and was triumphantly elected Governor of New York in November.

  Meanwhile in a Congress flushed with war, advocates of the annexation of Hawaii saw renewed opportunity. Still unable to muster two-thirds of the Senate, they had decided to resort to annexation by a Joint Resolution, which required only a simple majority. The resolution had been introduced in the Senate on March 16 but Reed had been able to prevent its coming to the floor of the House all during the excitement in April. His ruthless command, commented the Washington Post on April 15, made him “the most dangerous antagonist in public life.” He was in fact the only man whom the dauntless Beveridge did not care to take on. When urged to write to Reed to persuade him not to oppose expansion, Beveridge replied, “I feel that any effort of mine upon the Gibraltar-like mind and will of the Speaker would be absolutely ineffectual.”

  After the war reached the Pacific, however, even Reed was finding it hard to maintain his iron control. Exasperated, he told Champ Clark of Missouri he wished Dewey would “sail right away from that place. It will make us trouble for all time to come if he does not.” The annexationists argued that if the United States did not take Hawaii, Great Britain would, or alternatively Japan, who was already plotting to gain control by encouraging the influx of Japanese subjects subsidized by their government. Besides, it now lay clearly in the American path. “We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California,” McKinley told his secretary, George Cortelyou, on May 4. “It is Manifest Destiny.”

  On May 4 the resolution was introduced in the House. Reed stifled it for three weeks against growing pressure. The excuse that control of Hawaii was necessary for the defeat of Spain in the Pacific he regarded as a pure pretext conceived by the sugar interests and imperialists. In this he was at odds with the President, almost all his party in Congress and with friends outside. “The opposition now comes exclusively from Reed, who is straining every nerve to beat Hawaii,” Lodge wrote to Roosevelt. Reed even went to the length of enlisting help from the Democrats. When the future Speaker, Champ Clark, a good friend though a Democrat, asked Reed to put him on the Ways and Means Committee, Reed begged him to go on the Foreign Affairs Committee instead, where he needed Clark’s help as “a man who believes as I do and who is a fighter.”

  “If you put it that way,” Clark replied, much affected, “I’ll stand by you.” He agreed to sacrifice the place he had long coveted to help his party’s most uncompromising opponent.

  Restiveness in Reed’s own party was increasing. On May 24 Republican members of the House took the unusual step of signing a petition for a caucus to consider the resolution. It presented Reed with a frontal challenge of all that he had fought for in his battle against the silent quorum. The fundamental premise of that battle and of Reed’s Rules was that the will of the House as expressed by the majority must prevail. Reed knew that from his unassailable height above the floor and with his mastery of procedural techniques he could, with Cl
ark’s collaboration, fend off a vote on the Hawaii Resolution, but he could not change sentiment. He knew that his own, the majority, party wanted annexation and that the House on the whole was in favor of it. By summoning all his authority he might frustrate the resolution, but if he did, his success would nullify what he had earlier won: the reform which assured that the House really controlled itself, that no tricks of procedure, no arbitrary rules of a Speaker could obstruct the will of the majority. The purpose of the quorum battle had now come to a test, and with tragic irony, against himself. He would have to choose between his hatred of foreign conquest and his duty as Speaker; between, on the one hand, his own deepest beliefs, and on the other, Reed’s Rules.

  There was only one choice he could make. Knowing too well the value of what he had accomplished in the Fifty-first Congress, he bowed to the majority. Debate opened on June 11, and on June 15 the resolution passed by 209 to 91 with practically unanimous Republican support. Reed was not in the Chair. Representative Dalzell, substituting, announced before the vote, “The Speaker of the House is absent on account of illness. I am requested by him to say that were he present he would vote No.” Reed had taken a stand, said the Nation, “absolutely alone” among his party. “Courage to oppose a popular mania, above all to go against party, is not so common a political virtue that we can afford not to pay our tribute to the man who exhibits it.”

  Annexation of Hawaii was formally ratified on July 7, four days after the war in Cuba was brought to an end by a naval battle off Santiago. There the Spanish fleet, attempting to run the American blockade, was destroyed by the superior fire of the five so-lately-built battleships, Indiana, Oregon, Massachusetts, Iowa and Texas. With the surrender of Santiago two weeks later, Spanish rule came to an end, defeated, not by the Cuban insurgents, but by the United States. When it came to negotiation of peace terms, all the passion lavished during the past three years on the cause of Cuban liberty, all the Congressional resolutions favoring recognition of an independent Cuban Republic and disclaiming intention to annex it proved a serious obstacle to Senator Lodge’s “necessity.” To take Cuba as the fruit of conquest was impossible, however alluring its strategic and mercantile advantages, but a smaller island, Porto Rico, at least was available. Required to renounce Cuba and cede the smaller neighbor, Spain was eliminated from the Western Hemisphere. The degree of Cuba’s independence and nature of her relations with the United States was left to be worked out in the presence of an American occupation force. The result was the Platt Amendment of 1901, establishing a virtual American protectorate.

  In the meantime preliminary peace terms were signed in Washington on August 12, leaving the even more troublesome question of the Philippines to be negotiated by peace commissioners who were to meet in Paris to conclude a final settlement. Drawing up a balance sheet of the war, Lodge could say with some satisfaction, “We have risen to be one of the great world powers and I think we have made an impression upon Europe which will be lasting.” Mahan writing on the same subject to Mrs. Roosevelt was rather more pompous: “The jocund youth of our people now passes away never to return; the cares and anxieties of manhood’s years henceforth are ours.”

  At home the Anti-Imperialists—through meetings, protests, speeches, articles, petitions, and public conferences—were attempting to hold their country back from plucking the archipelago in the Pacific which seemed to glow with the fatal evil of the apple in the Garden of Eden. Carl Schurz urged McKinley to turn the Philippines over as a mandate to a small power, such as Belgium or Holland, so that the United States could remain “the great neutral power of the world.” In France it was the “Dreyfus summer,” and Americans, too, in those months felt that their country had reached a moment critical for its character and future. In public and private the debate raged whether to keep the Philippines or turn them over to self-government by the Filipinos. Even the usually hard-headed Mahan caught the fever of righteousness and wrote to an English friend about America’s duty to keep the Philippines, “Deus Vult! It was the cry of the Crusader and the Puritan and I doubt if man ever utters a nobler.”

  A three-day conference to consider “some of the most momentous problems in the history of the Republic” was convened at Saratoga in August by leaders in public life both for and against expansion. The favored theme of the expansionists, which called forth their most energetic arguments, was a vision of the vast untapped markets of the Orient with their limitless opportunities for American enterprise. Speaking for the Anti-Imperialists, Henry Wade Rogers, president of Northwestern University and chairman of the Conference on opening day, forcefully made the point that it was not necessary to annex territory in order to trade with it. But he could not summon passion equal to that of Judge Grosscup, notorious as the man who had issued the injunction in the Pullman strike, who delivered an exuberant paean to “the new career of commercial activity upon which I trust we are about to enter.” With the Philippines and Hawaii in her hands, the United States would control the path to Asia, a whole continent with “doors swinging inward that will lead us to one half the desirable territory and one third the population of the earth.”

  Samuel Gompers spoke against conquest of foreign lands not only as a betrayal of American principles but as a danger to the standards of American wage-earners. Strange combinations were wrought in the cause of anti-imperialism. When, at a later meeting in Chicago, Gompers declared that retention of the Philippines would show that “our war was without just cause,” Andrew Carnegie sent him a telegram of congratulations saying, “Let us stand together to save the Republic.”

  President McKinley, after soul-searching and prayer, had arrived at the decision desired by his advisers and popular with his party: the Philippines must be kept. In Paris, Spain’s commissioners were given to understand that the time for dickering was over; possession talked. They would have to yield or face renewal of the war. A token payment of $20,000,000 was offered to grease acceptance of the inevitable. On December 10 the Treaty of Paris was signed, transferring sovereignty of the Philippines to the United States, with the $20,000,000 to follow upon ratification. “We have bought ten million Malays at $2.00 a head unpicked,” remarked Reed acidly, and in the most prescient comment made by anyone at the time, he added, “and nobody knows what it will cost to pick them.”

  Although by now it was half expected, Aguinaldo and his forces learned of the settlement in bitterness and anguish, many of them hardly able to believe that their liberators and allies had turned into a new set of conquerors. Without an organized army or modern weapons, they prepared to fight again, while waiting for a still possible default. The strong anti-imperialist current in the United States was known to them and there was hope that the Senate would fail to ratify the treaty.

  Reopening on December 5, 1898, the winter session of Congress was dominated by the fight over the treaty, more intense than that over Hawaii. Every vote counted. To gather their two-thirds, the Republicans led by Lodge as chief Whip had to utilize every artifice, every argument, every avenue of pressure upon their own members and whatever Democrats might be amenable, while the anti-expansionists struggled to hold firm just enough Senators to make a third plus one. In the House at this time certain members proposed to Reed a coalition of Democrats and anti-imperialist Republicans in order to pass a House resolution against the treaty which would lead to its defeat in the Senate. Though it was no secret in Washington’s inner circles by now that he “despised” the Administration, Reed refused. While he remained its pilot, he was not prepared to lead a revolt against it. His task as Speaker was filled with gall. “Reed is terribly bitter,” wrote Lodge to Roosevelt, “saying all sorts of ugly things about the Administration and its policy in private talks so that I keep out of his way for I am fond of him and confess that his attitude is painful and disappointing to me beyond words.”

  The public was not happy about the Philippine adventure and confused as to its duty. Democrats and Populists especially had felt the war in Cuba t
o be in the cause of freedom. Now, through some sorcery of fate, the war had turned into a matter of imposing sovereignty over an unwilling people by right of conquest. America had become the new Spain. In this unhappy moment impressive advice was offered through the combined effort of two men with the same extraordinary sensitivity to history-in-the-making. On February 1, 1899, S. S. McClure published in a two-page spread in his magazine an exhortation in verse by Rudyard Kipling addressed to the Americans in their perplexity.

  Take up the White Man’s burden

  Send forth the best ye breed,

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need;

  To wait in heavy harness

  On fluttered folk and wild,

  Your new-caught sullen peoples,

  Half-devil and half-child.…

  Take up the White Man’s burden

  The savage wars of peace,

  Fill full the mouth of Famine

  And bid the sickness cease.…

  Ye dare not stoop to less—

  The note of righteousness was reinstated; Kipling had struck the perfect combination of noble destiny and unselfish mission. Widely reprinted and quoted, the poem spread across the country within a week, doing much to reconcile the hesitant to the imperial task.

  In Washington it appeared as if opponents of the treaty might be successful, for the Republicans lacked one vote to make up the two-thirds for ratification. Suddenly, William Jennings Bryan arrived in Washington and to the amazement of his followers urged them to vote for the treaty. As leader of the Democratic party, he fully intended to be the standard-bearer himself in 1900, but he recognized the need of a new standard. Calculating that he could not win on a repetition of the silver issue, he was perfectly prepared to give it up in favor of imperialism, a new crown of thorns. He was sure that retention of the Philippines would be productive of so much trouble as to make a flaming campaign issue—but it must be consummated first. Consequently, he told his party, it would not do to defeat the treaty. This extraordinary reasoning astounded and even shocked those legislators who had thought a principle was involved. Senator Pettigrew, the “silver” Senator of South Dakota, was “so incensed that I finally told him he had no business in Washington on such an errand.” In the delicate balance that prevailed, the most important issue since Secession depended on the votes of one or two vacillating Senators. Some were affected when Bryan argued that to ratify the treaty would end the war.