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

by Conrad Black

  From May to July 1899, a conference took place at The Hague under the auspices of the czar of Russia, Nicholas II, exploring arms limitations and seeking a regulation of methods of warfare. It proved impossible to restrict the use of poison gas and of balloons in war, and to impose weapons levels, but the Permanent Court of International Arbitration was established. The United States accepted a formula of dispute resolution through mediation and arbitration, but would not hear of compulsory arbitration or application of any such process to activities within the Americas, which it effectively reserved the right to sort out as it pleased. There were further small steps to absorb the new empire. Samoa was finally divided between Germany and the United States, with Britain being compensated elsewhere, and Pago Pago became an American naval base. And the Foraker Act in April 1900 established civil rule in Puerto Rico as an American territory like Alaska and Hawaii.

  Foreign affairs had dominated McKinley’s term, and almost the only legislative initiative of note was the Gold Standard Act of 1900, which reinforced the golden barricades against the bimetallists at the approach of the election. These had been years of high economic growth and broad and general prosperity. The Republicans met at Philadelphia in June and renominated President McKinley without opposition. Vice President Hobart had died in 1899, and to the consternation of the eastern machine politicians, especially from New York, Governor Theodore Roosevelt was nominated for vice president. The governing party’s platform supported the gold standard, a protective tariff, and, suffused with the fruit of their “splendid little war” and its acquests, an isthmian canal in Central America, with the slightest concern only for the fact that it would have to be cut through the territory of another country.

  The Democrats met at Kansas City in July and renominated William Jennings Bryan and former vice president Adlai E. Stevenson on a straight bimetallist platform. Silver had become a metaphor for western interests, the little man across the country, and resistance to Wall Street and the exploitive overlordship of eastern finance, although any practical connections between these causes and the bogeyman were tenuous. The Social Democrats, succeeding previous parties of the left, had met at Indianapolis in March and nominated, for the first of several star turns in the role, former railway worker and labor agitator Eugene V. Debs for president and Job Harriman of California for vice president. There were the usual Prohibition and other splinter-group candidates.

  Bryan campaigned against imperialism and for the silver reform; McKinley was slightly more energetic than he had been four years before, and emphasized “the full dinner pail” as well as the easy part of imperialism: hammering a derelict colonial power and looking a good deal more liberal and full of a civilizing mission than the European colonial powers. Bryan was the exponent of the grumbles of the fringes of American society; McKinley was the candidate of American satisfaction: peace, effortless military victory, prosperity, accretions of territory, all manner of good fortune rolling in for America. McKinley led all the way and on election day the president became only the sixth man to win two consecutive, contested presidential terms, 7.22 million to Bryan’s 6.36 million, 209,000 for the Prohibitionist, and 95,000 for the socialist Debs; 51.5 percent to 45.5 percent, to 3 percent to all the others, and 292 electoral votes to 155 for Bryan. The Democrats were still in the cul-de-sac of frightening too many satisfied people to vote against them without attracting enough unsatisfied people into voting for them.

  In March 1901, the Platt Amendment was adopted, which supplemented what Cuban legislators had adopted as a regime for an independent Cuba in a constitutional convention that the United States had requested. The amendment, which was adopted as part of Cuba’s constitution, and as a matter of treaty, provided that Cuba would never impair its independence by treaty opposite any foreign power; that Cuba would not borrow beyond its apparent means to service debt; and that the U.S. was authorized to intervene to ensure the survival of Cuban independence and the rule of law. The Cubans dutifully agreed to cede naval installations to the United States. The Platt Amendment was added to the treaty to ensure the permanence of the residual American rights, although the amendment itself was abrogated in 1934.

  On September 6, 1901, President McKinley was shot by an anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. For a time he appeared likely to recover, but primitive hygienic standards aggravated the problem and McKinley died on September 14, of complications from his treatment. The vice president, vacationing in the Northeast, was advised by a mounted park ranger that the president’s condition was deteriorating, and entrained at once for Buffalo. Roosevelt was in transit when McKinley died, and he was inaugurated shortly after he arrived in Buffalo. At 42, he was the youngest person ever to hold the office of president of the United States, and remains so.

  McKinley was a popular and sensible if somewhat unimaginative president. He was an unenthused imperialist, but did not balk at expansion as Cleveland had; was close to monied industrial interests but not a tool of them. He was another of the group of presidents between Grant and Roosevelt who wanted to let America be America as it grew exponentially, nudging it here and there to reduce patronage in the civil service, build more warships, and avoid economic nostrums like bimetallism, more concerned about union agitation than economic combinations, but not oblivious of the concerns raised by either. Theodore Roosevelt, after passivity in the presidential office through the 36 years since the death of Lincoln, was altogether different, and abruptly raised the curtain on a new age of America’s consciousness of itself and of its presence in the world.

  5. PRESIDENT THEODORE ROOSEVELT

  Roosevelt’s diplomacy, through the capable and like-minded Hay, turned first to Panama. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 had assured equality between Britain and the United States in any isthmian canal linking the Atlantic and the Pacific, and forbade the fortification of such a canal, and promised the abstention of both powers from violations of local sovereignty in Central America. McKinley’s Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of February 1900 and Roosevelt’s second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty of November 1901 revoked the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, envisioned an American canal that would be open equally to all nations; a canal that would be neutral territory in all respects, though under U.S. auspices; and a canal that the United States would be conceded the right to fortify. The Hay-Herran Convention was negotiated in January 1903 with Colombia, of which Panama was then a province, and provided that for $10 million and an annual rental of $250,000 the U.S. would receive a renewable 99-year lease on a canal zone six miles wide across the narrowest part of the isthmus of Panama. The U.S. had also arranged to buy the assets of the Panama Canal Company.95 It was on the basis of that company having lowered its price from $109 million that the Congress opted for the Panama rather than the Nicaragua route. But the Senate of Colombia, unlike the U.S. Senate, did not ratify the Hay-Herran Convention, because it reasoned that if it waited another 18 months, the charter of the Panama Canal Company would expire and Colombia, and not the company, would receive the $40 million the United States was prepared to pay for the company’s right of way and charter.

  Unfortunately, Theodore Roosevelt chose to regard this not as an astute business decision but rather as a personal and national affront, and ordered a naval squadron to the Panamanian coast to assure the “free and uninterrupted transit” between the oceans guaranteed by the Treaty of New Granada of 1846, while encouraging a coup d’état by locals whipped up by shareholders of the Panama Canal Company, led by the French adventurer Philippe Bunau-Varilla. In fact, the revolution consisted effectively of the small railway owned by the company refusing to conduct Colombian forces into Panama while wealthy locals proclaimed Panama’s independence, on November 3. Roosevelt, with his fleet intimidating Colombian central authorities from advancing on foot in the absence of rail transport, recognized the new country. Then the resourceful Bunau-Varilla, a founding shareholder of the company who had sold McKinley and Hanna on the virtues of the Panama route,
presented his letters of credence to Roosevelt as minister of the Republic of Panama to the United States on November 13, and granted the Canal Zone in perpetuity to the United States through the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty also of November 13 (a busy, well-planned day for him).

  It was a crisply executed opera bouffe banana-republic farce. Work on a canal was begun almost at once, though interrupted in 1905 to effect improvements in resistance to malaria and yellow fever, which had killed many canal workers. A lock canal of 40.3 miles was built between 1906 and 1914 at a cost of $365 million, under the supervision of Colonel George Washington Goethals of the Army Corps of Engineers. The political facilitation was shabby, but it was a great engineering achievement and a triumph of Roosevelt’s in reinforcing the overwhelming preeminence of the United States as the hemispheric power and becoming, with Great Britain, one of only two great naval powers in both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

  In July 1902, Congress passed Roosevelt’s Philippine Government Act, which put the government of the Philippines in the hands of the Taft Commission, headed by U.S. Court of Appeals judge William Howard Taft of Cincinnati. After 1907, when the Philippine legislature was elected, Taft and his commission served as the upper house of the legislature. Taft was an enlightened governor and the regime was undoubtedly an unrecognizable improvement on the Spanish colonial government, in modernizing efficiency and in respect for the individual and national rights of the population.

  And in 1904, after the British and the Germans had suffered default on a loan to Venezuela and asked Roosevelt if he objected to their bombardment of Venezuelan coastal cities as an encouragement to the Venezuelans to pay their debts, with no ulterior motives or colonial ambitions, Roosevelt agreed, and also agreed to transmit a proposal for arbitration to The Hague Tribunal, which was accepted. Similar problems arose with the Dominican Republic, and what became known as the Roosevelt Corollary resulted, in which it was accepted that “Chronic wrongdoing or impotence may ... require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere ... may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” The United States, despite the lack of support by the Senate, administered Dominican customs collection and debt repayments from 1904 to 1907. By this time and by these methods, Roosevelt pushed American dominance of the Americas (except for Canada) about as far as even the most imperious interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine would allow.

  Considerable interest had arisen over the precise line of the boundary between the Alaska Panhandle and the Canadian province of British Columbia after the Klondike gold rush of 1896. Canada invoked the Anglo-Russian Treaty of 1825, which set the border at the outer edges of the peaks of the Rockies, while the United States invoked a line between the heads of bays and inlets along the coast. That would assure U.S. retention of the harbors. In January 1903, the U.S. and Great Britain signed an agreement confiding the determination to a joint commission consisting of three Americans, two Canadians, and the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Alverstone. Alverstone cast his vote with the Americans, and the matter, which had never been more than an irritant, was settled in America’s favor, to the annoyance of the Canadians, who felt they had been put over the side by the mother country, but accepted that the higher interests of empire could not accommodate trivial disputes with the United States.

  By this time, the United States had become such an immense power in the world, and was led by such a dynamic and aggressive president, and Britain was in such an intense contest of naval construction with Germany, that the British national and imperial interest required almost open-ended deference to the United States. France and Russia were in alliance against Germany and Austria-Hungary (Hungary having acquired parity with Austria, largely through the cunning political infighting, accompanied by extraordinary skills in the Habsburg salons and boudoirs, of the dashing and formidable Hungarian premier and foreign minister, Count Andrássy, with the help of Bismarck). Italy was loosely attached to the Berlin-Vienna alliance, and the Entente Cordiale between France and Britain was growing steadily more intimate, ancient foes now reconciled in the shadow of German military and naval might, with Alsace-Lorraine part of the German Empire and the German navy laying keels of ever larger battleships almost as swiftly as the British. The impetuous young Emperor Wilhelm II, after dismissing Bismarck as chancellor, had allowed the alliance with Russia and the isolation of France to lapse, as he became embroiled in the Habsburg-Romanov contest for the South Slavs and gratuitously challenged Britain’s supremacy on the seas, the one concern that could always be relied upon to drive Britain into the camp of a rival’s enemies.

  Roosevelt himself was the first American president since John Quincy Adams (though Buchanan almost qualified) who had traveled extensively in Europe and had a sense of America’s relations to Europe. In his early twenties he had written the definitive history of the naval campaigns of the War of 1812, and he and Admiral Mahan were among the six authors of the official history of the Royal Navy, because of their undoubted scholarship in the field. Mahan had been an indifferent sea commander, but when tapped for the Naval War College at Newport in 1866, intensified his studies and began his exposition of the strategic importance of sea power by illustrating the Roman advantage over the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars: Rome could transport its forces by sea while Carthage had to cross North Africa to the west from what is Tunisia and then cross to Spain and approach Italy through Spain and France. His Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660–1783 (see pp. 273–274), published in 1890, strategically explained the rise of Britain.

  These men provided a serious and academically learned basis for American strategic policy and supported an international presence for America far exceeding the confines of the New World. Mahan presciently pointed out that the Philippines could not be defended against a militarist Japan, and an informal understanding was made between Roosevelt and the Japanese that the American occupation of the Philippines and the aggressive Japanese occupation of Korea and Formosa would be reciprocally tolerated (the Taft-Katsura Agreement of 1905). Roosevelt strenuously accelerated U.S. naval construction, which only enhanced the United States’s position as holder of the key to the world balance of power, a position Britain had largely vacated by entering into alliance with France and Russia against Germany and its allies. Less than a century after Britain had successfully assisted, exhorted, and bankrolled the Prussians, Russians, Austrians, Spanish, and Swedes against Napoleonic France, ending French hegemony in Europe, Britain’s weight, committed entirely to the assistance of France and Russia, might not be sufficient to counter and deter the great power of Germanic Europe, Bismarck having undone the work of Richelieu, Germany’s great fragmentor, and reconstructed a Teutonic power in Central Europe of immense strength and uncertain benignity.

  The rise of Germany to parity with Britain and the comparative decline of France, punctuated by decisive defeats by Pitt in Canada, Wellington on the French frontier, and Bismarck at the gates of Paris, left the nascent and mighty industrial and demographic and still almost revolutionary republican force of America as the arbiter of the fates of nations and alliances in the Old World, on the opposite sides of both major oceans. To proclaim America’s new vocation, Theodore Roosevelt sent the main American battle fleet, painted white and popularly known as The Great White Fleet, on a goodwill mission around the world in the last year of his presidency. It was admirably within the U.S. tradition of astute public relations, being much noticed in the world, and it fired the imagination of many Americans who had not been in the habit of thinking much beyond their own sea-girt borders.

  Cuba in the Spanish-American War. Courtesy of the Department of History, United States Military Academy

  Roosevelt, unlike his predecessors since Lincoln (with the partial exception of Grant, whose strategic perceptions were famously acute and well-known but hadn’t been much applied outside the United States),
saw, relished, and exploited these changes. He had been a puny youth who had overcompensated by making himself, from sheer willpower, a barrel-chested rancher, frontiersman, and roustabout in the badlands, as well as a big-game hunter, and was an academic whose treatment of historic and strategic subjects achieved renown well beyond the British acceptance of the fairness and perception of his account of the naval operations in the War of 1812. His compulsive bellicosity has been mentioned in the Venezuelan–British Guyana border dispute. As New York City police commissioner, he was given to arbitrary round-ups of people out for a stroll late at night, on the grounds of aggressive suspicion. He was always quick to anger and more prone even than Jackson to escalate personal quarrels to feuds and fights to the death, and national disagreements to war.

  He was a flamboyant campaign orator, referring to Bryan as a “human trombone.” And he had almost superhuman energy, with mixed results. On one occasion, while he was giving a speech, he was the subject of an assassination attempt, but the bullet was largely absorbed by a book in his breast pocket and did penetrate his chest. There was a commotion as the gunman was subdued, and Roosevelt finished the speech. And once he became so enthused chopping trees that he chopped down those to which the telegraph lines to his house were attached, rendering him incommunicado as he awaited an important message. He had, in the French expression, the fault of his qualities. But with his bullying and simplistic aggressivity, there coexisted a high and well-informed intellect and a very strong sense of the national destiny, benign global mission, and the unsulliable honor of America. He was a brave and intelligent man, and also a very belligerent and impulsive one. The office, as well as the times and the voters, appeared to have sought the statesman.