Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  2. CLEVELAND’S SECOND PRESIDENCY

  The U.S. economy was rocked by a new perturbation when the London merchant bank Barings failed and there was a disorderly unloading of American securities, causing a stock market crash with some panic selling, aggravated by a reduction in federal government revenues from reduced imports attributable to the McKinley Tariff and the increased expenses of the selective welfare system provided by the engrossed military pension scheme. U.S. gold reserves descended below $100 million on April 21, 1893, and declined further to $80 million in October. Nearly 500 banks and about 15,000 commercial institutions failed in 1892–1893. By 1897, one-third of railway mileage was in the hands of receivers. Amidst these tidal changes, Darwinian upheavals occurred in the economic well-being of millions, but nothing undermined the inexorable advance of the size of the American economy.

  Cleveland determined to stop the diminution of gold reserves and summoned a special session of Congress for the summer of 1893, which repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. This was a bitter battle that split his party (the Democrats) almost as grievously as Douglas had done with the Kansas-Nebraska Act and “popular sovereignty” in 1854. Gold reserves dipped to $41 million and attempts to float bond issues failed. Cleveland called on legendary financiers J. Pierpont Morgan and August Belmont, who underwrote a $62 million issue, on which they trousered a $7 million profit. The Populists and bimetallists became very agitated, and when that facility expired, reserves dipped again to under $80 million. The administration did float a public issue directly and confidence in the inviolability of the gold standard hovered through the 1896 election and then revived strongly.

  The advocates of silver, bimetallists, took the agrarian and working classes out from under the more conservative Democrats, especially in the East and South, and after the period from 1876 to 1892 when the Democrats won the popular vote in four elections out of five, and only lost in 1880 by 7,000, the political landscape shifted again. Just as the ability of the Republicans to win by waving the “bloody shirt,” quoting Lincoln, and paying off everyone related to a Union army or navy veteran was groaning to an end, they attached themselves like limpets to hard money, pure capitalism, individual enterprise, the ruggedness of the American spirit, and the alleged clear path to patriotism and godliness. There were great agitations by groups of unemployed, often calling themselves “armies.” Coxey’s Army, led by Jacob Coxey of Massillon, Ohio, called for a march of the unemployed on Washington in late 1893. In April, about 400 of them had arrived and they presented a petition calling for a job-creating public works program to dispense up to $500 million. Coxey and his chief collaborators were arrested for trespassing at the Capitol and the movement dispersed and disintegrated. American confidence in the inexorable rise of their country and the invincible strength of meritocracy was not going to be shaken easily. The mighty engine of growth soon resumed and swept up most of the malcontents in its train.

  American economic and demographic growth was astounding throughout the period from the Civil War to 1929, but it moved in lurching fluctuations, and unevenly between industrial sectors. What grew consistently was the Gross National Product of the country and the per capita income derived from it, but within those exhilarating surges, there were sharp graphic changes in all directions. Consumer prices (1910–1914=100: Warren-Pearson Wholesale Price Index) moved from the end of each administration: 1865 (Lincoln) 132; 1869 (Johnson) 97.7; 1877 (Grant) 56; 1885 (Arthur) 56.6; 1897 (Cleveland) 46.6; 1901 (McKinley) 56.7; 1909 (Roosevelt) 70; 1913 (Taft) 70; 1921 (Wilson) 154; 1923 (Harding) 100.6; 1929 (Coolidge) 95.3. Throughout this time there were huge accretions of industrial capacity and output, and the price fluctuations did not necessarily imply increases or declines in prosperity, as there was little inflation, and declining prices generally meant increasing investment in supply. Stock prices (U.S. Bureau of the Census, taking 1926 as 100), moved: 1877 (Grant) 24.8; 1893 (Harrison) 43.9; 1897 (Cleveland) 35.2; 1913 (Taft) 63.8; 1921 (Wilson) 64.2; 1923 (Harding) 67.7; and the huge rise in the twenties, 1929 (Coolidge) 190.3.

  In foreign affairs, the chief issues of the second Cleveland administration were further afield than the paltry concerns of fish and seals and the lynching of a few people that had inconveniently arisen in the nearly 30 years since Seward had expelled Napoleon III from Mexico. The United States had owned tropical fruit plantations and used the naval anchorage and replenishment station of Pearl Harbor, near Honolulu, for some years. The large, and mainly American, planters had generated a revolution in 1887 that produced a rather liberal and easily suggestible (to their interests) government. The damage done by the McKinley Tariff to Hawaiian sugar interests coincided with the defeat of the pro-American political faction and the accession of a patriotic leader, Queen Liliuokalani, who revoked the liberal constitution and assumed powers to rule by royal decree. The leading American plantation owner, Sanford B. Dole, whose name would soon become famous in the kitchens of America, staged a coup in 1893, and the American minister, John L. Stephens, by prearrangement, purported to legitimize this movement and ordered the landing of a small number of Marines from the visiting cruiser Boston, supposedly to defend American life and property. The Marines effortlessly occupied government buildings, raised the U.S. flag over them, proclaimed the Hawaiian Islands a U.S. protectorate, and recognized Dole as president of Hawaii. A treaty of annexation was composed, but filibustered by Democrats and not ratified by the Senate while Harrison was president. Cleveland withdrew the treaty in March 1893, and appointed a commissioner to investigate the whole status of Hawaii. The commissioner, ex-congressman James Blount, a liberal Democrat, withdrew recognition of the Dole regime, hauled down the American flag, and excoriated Stephens and the Dole-led planters, and said that the majority of Hawaiians were opposed to annexation.

  Cleveland sent a new commissioner with orders to restore Liliuokalani, as long as she restored the 1887 constitution; amnestied the rebels (i.e., Dole and his friends); and honored the debts of the Dole administration. Dole magnificently improvised that as the United States (under Harrison) had recognized his government, the actions of Blount and Cleveland were an intrusion in the internal affairs of a foreign country. Cleveland declined recourse to force to remove Dole and restore the queen, deplored Dole’s actions, but recognized his government in August 1894. It was an absurd cakewalk that left the world’s other major powers gape-mouthed at American amateurism and naïveté.

  Another somewhat silly and overblown controversy blew up over the border between British Guyana and Venezuela, which became important because of gold discoveries in the disputed area. Britain had taken over the largest part of Guyana from the Dutch in 1814, during the War of 1812, as the Netherlands was liberated from Napoleon’s First Empire, and 10 years before the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed. The British had surveyed the border in 1840 and produced a line that was not accepted by Venezuela. After the gold discoveries in 1887, Britain withdrew its 1840 proposal and claimed areas to the west of it; Venezuela rejected this claim, severed relations with Britain, and asked for U.S. mediation, which Britain declined. Cleveland’s last secretary of state, Richard Olney, produced a very robust amplification of the Monroe Doctrine, claiming that any British attempt to pressure Venezuela constituted a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Olney flexed America’s muscles with scarcely more diplomatic subtlety than Daniel Webster had employed in his letter to the Austrian minister Johann Hülsemann in 1850. He advised the eminent British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, that “the United States is practically sovereign on this continent, and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it confines its interposition. Why?” (as if he were conducting a tutorial with the British leader, who was in his third term as prime minister of the world’s greatest empire, after having spent two highly successful years as foreign secretary). And then Olney graciously answered: “It is because, in addition to all other grounds, its infinite resources combined with its isolated position render it master of the situation and pra
ctically invulnerable as against any or all other powers.”

  Salisbury replied, with the suavity of his office and the confidence of the head of the Cecils, probably Britain’s greatest and most influential family since Elizabethan times and through three dynasties and the Cromwell interregnum, that Great Britain did not recognize that the Monroe Doctrine had anything to do with it, since at issue was a border that antedated that doctrine. He declined the American offer of arbitration and all but invited Olney to be gone. Salisbury was technically correct, and Olney was bumptious, but Britain could not win this argument and was being challenged in naval strength and in several colonial areas by Germany, whose impetuous emperor, Wilhelm II, was encouraging Afrikaner resistance to Britain in the powder keg of South Africa. (Wilhelm had rashly dismissed Bismarck after 28 years as imperial chancellor and minister president of Prussia, in 1890.)

  Cleveland presented the correspondence to the Congress and announced that he would appoint a commission to determine the just demarcation between Venezuela and Britain, and added that the United States would resist by force any British attempt to take more than what his commission recommended. Salisbury belatedly realized that it was time to throw this crisis into reverse, since the Americans were being so testy and bellicose about it, and he devolved it to the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, who declared that war between the two countries “would be an absurdity as well as a crime,” adding that “The two nations are more closely allied in sentiment and interest than any other nations on the face of the earth.” It had been British policy since the near-collision during the U.S. Civil War to maintain excellent relations with Washington; they were now natural allies and it was notoriously obvious that the United States was growing more powerful in absolute and relative terms every year.

  It was astounding how this trivial episode stirred war fever in the United States. The 37-year-old president of the board of police commissioners of New York, Theodore Roosevelt, revealed his cowboy belligerence, writing: “Let the fight come if it must. I don’t care whether our seacoast cities are bombarded or not. We would take Canada. If there is a muss, I shall try to have a hand in it myself! ... It seems to me that if England were wise, she would fight now. We couldn’t get at Canada until May, and meanwhile, she could play havoc with our coast cities and shipping. Personally, I rather hope that the fight will come soon. The clamor of the peace faction has convinced me that this country needs a war.”94 This was nonsense from every angle; the British could probably defend Canada quite well unless the United States reconstituted at least half of the strength of the old Grand Army of the Republic, and could reduce to rubble every American city on every ocean coast, from Seattle to San Diego, Galveston to Pensacola, and Jacksonville to Boston, for as long as pleased them. Further, from the British standpoint, it would be insane, as Chamberlain wrote, to get into war with the United States over such a trivial issue. Theodore Roosevelt would soon become one of the great executants of American strategic policy, and would be very successful. At this point, he was just a blustering, ill-tempered schoolyard pugilist.

  Since the Civil War there had been almost no strategic thinking. But Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan became the father of the great American entry into the world with his epochal study The Influence of Sea Power on History 1660–1783, published in 1890. Within a few years, both Roosevelts, and a great many others, including the chief strategists of Britain and Germany (these three continuing to be the world’s three greatest naval and maritime powers, and the three greatest powers generally), would be Mahan’s disciples. Mahan provided a strategy for the United States just as its immense economic and population expansion caused it to burst out of its adolescent gamecock confinement to the Americas and the eastern Pacific, as the Arthur-Cleveland-Harrison naval build-up (partly as an aid to the steel industry and to shipbuilding generally) made the U.S. an important naval power, and as expansionist opportunity presented itself. The United States had been growing exponentially by every measurement for 30 years. It was almost time for it to prorupt into the world.

  The Venezuela Boundary Commission met in January 1896; Britain cooperated with it and the contending countries agreed in a treaty of January 1897 to submit their disagreement to a board of arbitration. In October 1899, the board reported out along the lines the British had claimed in 1840, but not agreeing the extension the British had claimed in 1887. Both sides accepted the award without rancor. Both Britain and the United States had by then been engaged in real combat in much more important matters. Olney did upgrade U.S. ministers to ambassadors, and legations to embassies, a symbolic act but in the diplomatic realm where symbols have some importance.

  The Republicans met at Pittsburgh in May 1896 and chose Governor William McKinley of Ohio for president and Garret A. Hobart, Republican national committeeman from New Jersey, for vice president. McKinley’s rise was engineered by his chief benefactor, financier and industrialist Marcus Alonzo Hanna, Republican Party chairman and campaign manager. The platform supported a high tariff, annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, and adherence to the gold standard, though it was suggested that the lot of the silver interests could be furthered through agreements with other countries. The pro-silver Republicans seceded and held their own convention, at which they endorsed the Democratic nominees. The Democrats met at Chicago in July and it was clear from the start that the bimetallists were in control of the convention. The party’s platform proposed the free coinage of silver at the ratio of 16-to-one of gold over silver; demanded lower tariffs; condemned monopolies and injunctions against labor organization; and flirted with a tax on high incomes. It was a rather radical set of positions.

  The principal Democratic bimetallist orator, William Jennings Bryan, 36-year-old former congressman from Nebraska, editor of the Omaha World-Herald, “boy wonder of the Platte” and soon to be “the Great Commoner,” swept the convention with one of the great partisan harangues of American history, ending “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” Bryan took as his running mate Arthur Sewall, Democratic national committeeman and wealthy banker and railroad director, of Maine. (The vice presidential fight, between Sewall and Hobart, was between national committeemen and was publicly seen as a battle between two luxuriantly mustachioed running mates of clean-shaven presidential nominees.) Bryan was nominated also by the People’s Party (Populists) and the pro-silver Republicans. The pro-gold Democrats quit, as the pro-silver Republicans had, and they, like the Prohibitionists, had their own nominees. Bryan set a new style of campaigning by barnstorming the country and giving more than 600 speeches. He was already a famous and popular bimetallist orator before the convention and built on his forensic reputation. McKinley replied with aphorisms to the press and passersby from the verandah of his home in Canton, Ohio, while Hanna financed the election and most of the major newspapers excoriated Bryan as a radical, a revolutionary, and an anarchist.

  America was not ready for such a revolution; the Democrats had entered a cul-de-sac, and McKinley won 7.04 million votes and 271 electoral votes, to Bryan’s 6.47 million votes and 176 electoral votes. The other candidates combined polled barely 300,000 votes. It was roughly 52 percent to 46 percent to 2 percent, and was the first substantial popular-vote victory the Republicans had enjoyed since Grant routed Greeley (who dropped dead a few weeks later) in 1872, while there was still a restricted electorate in the Union Army—occupied South. The Republican cycle of 14 election victories out of 18 between 1860 and 1928 would now enjoy its greatest phase, with 7 victories in 9 elections, none of them close, and the 2 defeats attributable to a rending split between the two leading Republican faction heads in 1912.

  Stephen Grover Cleveland went into honored retirement, and died in 1908, aged 71. He was a courageous and principled president who stood for honesty in government and adherence to international law, but was somewhat out of step with the chauvinism and muscularity of America on the steep rise. Y
et, even he strode to the bully pulpit and rattled his saber at the British over the silly issue of Venezuela’s border (which was none of America’s business anyway), having cranked himself to a state of near-belligerency over the fatuous issue of Samoa. As mayor of Buffalo, governor of New York, and president of the United States, Cleveland was unchanged: modest, guileless, good-humored, intelligent, unimaginative, and distinguished in conduct and motive; a good president for uncomplicated times, as had been Hayes, Arthur, and probably, had he lived, Garfield. The times were about to become more complicated as the mighty nascent power of America eased itself into the wider world, like a large man stepping gingerly into a bath.

  3. WILLIAM MCKINLEY AND THE SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR

  McKinley named the aging lion (73) of the Senate, and brother of the great general, John Sherman of the president-elect’s home state of Ohio, as secretary of state (opening up a Senate seat for his champion, Mark Hanna, to which the Ohio legislators elected him). McKinley appointed as deputy secretary of state his longtime Canton friend and intimate adviser William R. Day, a prominent local lawyer, who would succeed Sherman. McKinley thus followed the recent tradition of a party bigwig with no foreign policy background, followed by a lawyer with an equal absence of such background. McKinley’s term was overshadowed by Cuban matters from the start. An insurrection against Spanish rule erupted in February 1895 and was followed with much interest in the United States. For a time in the 1850s, as was recorded in Chapter 6, the Democrats advocated the absorption of Cuba by the United States under no color of right except the desire to expand slavery as a sop to the South without riling the North by carving a slave state out of American territory. Americans had taken a dim view of Spanish colonial rule in the Americas since before the successful uprisings of Bolivar, San Martin (Argentina), and other Latin American revolutionaries in the first quarter of the century. This continued to be the case, and the moribund colonial administration of Spain was a dead hand in the Americas that offended the United States in a way that the presence of the British and French and Dutch, advanced and democratic countries and relatively enlightened colonial administrators, did not. The Cuban revolutionaries adopted the technique of burning down sugar fields and refineries, including some owned by Americans, in order to attract American intervention.