This emphasis on professionalization would continue throughout the 1890s, and be accelerated by the difficulties of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine War. The flaws found therein would lead to perhaps the most critical set of military reforms in army history during the first decade of the twentieth century. Starting in 1905, Elihu Root, under the reforming guidance of President Theodore Roosevelt, undertook a grand reordering of the army, turning it from a frontier army to one that would be well prepared to expand and fight in mass, industrialized warfare. Ironically, the frontier army, which had spent a generation fighting in the American West, and found itself in a similar situation in the Philippines, would not long outlast the military forces it defeated there. The Philippines were, for the army, the end of the frontier.23
The navy went through a similar process after the Civil War. What had been among the most powerful navies in the world in 1865 began to disappear even before the conflict ended. The Confederate naval threat had essentially ended in 1864, and by late 1865 Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles had reduced the navy’s 671 wartime ships by half. The navy remained that size for several years as Welles—in a move of somewhat dubious legality—used funds he had hoarded during the war to sustain the navy afterward. In 1867 the U.S. Navy had more than twice the number of ships in commission as it had in 1860, before the Civil War started.
But there was little political interest in continuing to have a large navy. After 1871, when the Treaty of Washington had settled outstanding claims with Great Britain over their building and sale of commerce raiders to the Confederates, the U.S. Navy, Congress decided, needed to be “respectable, powerful, and efficient,” as New Hampshire Congressman Aaron Stevens put it. That did not mean the same thing as it would have meant to the Europeans. Stevens went on: “I do not speak of a British navy or of a French navy; I speak of an American Navy as it has been to our fathers, and such as it should be to us in time of peace.”24
The result was an American navy that gradually shrank through the 1870s and 1880s. The focus for this smaller navy was on the brown-water strategy of protecting America’s coastlines through fortifications and the use of heavily armed but small and short-ranged ships called monitors. Such a combination pleased a parsimonious Congress because it allowed them to disburse money to both the army (for the coastal fortifications) and the navy (for the monitors), thus staving off interservice squabbles. Even more important, the fortifications and ports for the ships brought money to the home states and districts of Congressmen from both coasts, a consideration that always carried great weight.
The only offensive capability the navy retained was a few commerce raiders, following in the footsteps of John Paul Jones and the Confederate Alabama. In case of war, they would set to sea and, avoiding other warships, prey upon the merchant ships of the enemy nation. The Monroe Doctrine—though no one said this too explicitly—would be enforced, as it always had been, by the British navy. The United States could be confident of continuing peace with Britain, for that country faced a difficult strategic conundrum in any potential conflict with the United States. Britain’s navy greatly overawed that of the United States and would undoubtedly carry the fight to American shores early on, as it had in the War of 1812. But Canada was always vulnerable to American land attack, and there was little that the British could do to protect her. The British army was too small and too committed elsewhere, especially in India, to mount a serious defense. Should war with the United States come, the British would lose Canada, of that they had no doubt. Thus, the British decided, war with the United States could not come. American recognition and use of that was perhaps the most underappreciated diplomatic fact of the nineteenth century.
This began to change in the mid-1880s. The enormous empires of the European powers, particularly of Britain and France, and their massive spending on navies, made the United States begin to suspect that its coastal fortifications were not quite the impenetrable walls it had thought. The result was that Congress hesitantly began to authorize several new classes of ships. In addition, the administration of Grover Cleveland began to lay the foundation for naval construction by organizing the creation of industries and firms that could build large iron ships.
These actions coincided with an intellectual revolution in naval ideas fomented by Adm. Stephen Luce and, more importantly, his protégé Alfred Thayer Mahan. The latter’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History, published in 1890, had a profound effect on global ideas about the uses and needs of naval power. Mahan saw the oceans as great highways of trade and commerce and argued that whoever controlled those oceans controlled the world. The British and French—perhaps unsurprisingly—leaped upon this idea as making concrete what they had been attempting to do all along.
But two others also leaped aboard Mahan’s bandwagon, and the results in both cases had enormous long-term consequences. The first was imperial Germany. Kaiser Wilhelm II found in Mahan the prophet he wished to hear, speaking words that would lead to German naval triumph. He had Mahan’s book translated into German immediately, and ordered copies for the libraries of every ship in the German navy. He also began the process of creating a great navy for Germany, one that he hoped would rival that of his grandmother, Queen Victoria of England. In so doing, he cast aside the aging Otto von Bismarck, the architect of German unification, and set Germany on a path that would lead to the catastrophic events of 1914.
Also surprisingly, the United States adopted a Mahanian agenda. That Mahan was American may have had something to do with it, but there were other factors as well. The increasing division of the world amongst the great powers, highlighted by the Berlin Conference of 1885, which partitioned Africa, certainly had its effect. But there was also a growing attitude shift on the part of many Americans, both ordinary and elite. The frontier in the West was closed, overrun by railway lines. Manifest destiny had been manifested, and the United States was now largely unrivaled on the North American continent. Its replacement was a continuing sense of American exceptionalism, and one of the representations of that exceptionalism was the impetus to build a navy worthy of the United States. Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Mahan in May 1890 that “I can say with perfect sincerity that I think [your book] very much the clearest and most instructive general work of the kind. … I wish … that the whole book could be placed where it could be read by the navy’s foes, especially in Congress.”25
This belief was, to a certain degree, independent of Mahan’s writing. Before the book was published, President Benjamin Harrison called, in his 1889 inaugural address, for the United States to build “a sufficient number of modern war ships.” Sufficient for what, or how many that was, he left to the imagination.26 But later that same year, Secretary of the Navy Benjamin Tracy asked Congress to authorize a fleet of battleships that could sail the globe and match one-on-one any other ship in the world. Tracy envisioned a fleet of twenty battleships, twelve for the Atlantic and eight for the Pacific. “Until the United States has a fleet of twenty battleships, the country cannot consider that it possesses a Navy; and a Navy it can never afford to be without.”27 Congress agreed, and the 1890 construction program authorized the building of the Indiana, Massachusetts, and Oregon. These battleships were equal to anything in the British navy, and they were the first step in a long process that would see the U.S. Navy supplant the British in the middle of the twentieth century.
In addition to the building program, the United States became increasingly concerned by a strategic problem. The Atlantic and Pacific coasts were separated from each other by thousands of miles of oceans. A battleship could not travel by railroad, and the route southward, around the tip of South America, was a difficult passage that, at best, required months of travel time. The possibility of shortening that journey by thousands of miles by creating a canal across the narrowest part of Central America became an increasingly popular idea among American politicians and strategists. But such a canal would require defense from both European and Asian threats. Tha
t defense would have to consist, Mahan insisted, of a larger navy, and of naval bases that could house that navy in a position to protect a canal. Mahan believed that Cuba and the Hawaiian Islands would be particularly useful in this regard.28
Two crises convinced the Harrison administration of the rightness of its approach. First, in 1889, a tense standoff developed between German, British, and American warships in the waters around the island of Samoa while their re-spective governments squabbled over ownership. The crisis brought into relief the critical nature of naval power. Second, in 1891, a confrontation with Chile took place over the jailing of thirty-six American sailors on shore leave in Valparaiso. The sailors, off the cruiser Baltimore, had gotten involved in a riot and been arrested. President Harrison demanded their freedom and recompense, but had to back down when it became clear that the Chilean navy could overmatch the American navy. There was even a minor panic on the West Coast that Chilean ships would attack the continental United States. In the end a compromise was worked out.
Though both of these situations were resolved without resorting to military action, both cases—and especially the confrontation with Chile—demonstrated to the administration the need for maintaining and increasing the naval capability of the United States. In his State of the Union address of December 1891, Benjamin Harrison outlined that vision, glowingly and in Mahanian terms:
There should be no hesitation in promptly completing a navy of the best modern type, large enough to enable this country to display its flag in all seas for the protection of its citizens and of its extending commerce. … It is essential to the dignity of this nation and to that peaceful influence which it should exercise on this hemisphere that its navy should be adequate, both upon the shores of the Atlantic and of the Pacific.29
By the end of Harrison’s term, the U.S. Navy had built sixteen steam-powered iron warships, and Harrison could proudly display them in a parade through New York Harbor in April 1893.
This new navy fit well with an increasingly external-minded and assertive America. That had not been true for several decades after the Civil War. The effort of that conflict had exhausted most military ambitions on the part of ordinary Americans. After 1865, the nation’s focus was largely on Reconstruction, both Southern and Northern, and on the continuing expansion of the country to the west. By the middle of the 1870s, the immediate task of rebuilding had been accomplished, and the reintegration of the former Confederate states had been achieved, if incompletely and with grave injustices to the African-American population. The United States could look forward to progress, modernity, prosperity.
Things were, of course, not that easy. The period from 1877 to 1893 saw the most intense period of an American economic revolution, and the economy was remade from a rural and agrarian one to an urban and industrialized one. The transition was chaotic and painful, marked by sudden slumps and bursts of inflation. Even as the size and power of the American economy grew, hundreds of thousands of workers lost jobs in industries that were no longer viable. Migration into cities broke down long-standing social and cultural arrangements and made many Americans strangers to one another. A flood of immigration from Europe and Asia brought millions of new residents into the country, often resented by those born in America, and frequently finding it difficult to adjust to the New World.
When Grover Cleveland took office again in 1893 (having been president from 1885 to 1889), the Democrat slowed down but did not stop the naval building program. Cleveland believed, and had believed in his first term, that the United States needed a strong navy for coastal defense. But he did not share the Mahanian belief that such a navy also required bases outside the continent, and he did not believe that the United States should join in the larger global race for empires. He demonstrated that conviction from the very beginning of his second term by withdrawing a treaty for the annexation of Hawaii that had been submitted to the Senate by Benjamin Harrison in one of his last acts. That decision was made easier by the deeply shady nature of the annexation: a revolution in January of 1883 had deposed the native queen of the islands and replaced her with a government led by white planters, who promptly petitioned to join the United States. Worse, the revolution had been aided by the American government’s representative in Hawaii, John L. Stevens, who had illegally used marines from the USS Boston to aid the revolutionaries. Cleveland said to Congress in December 1893 that
if a feeble but friendly state is in danger of being robbed of its independence and its sovereignty by a misuse of the name and power of the United States, the United States cannot fail to vindicate its honor and its sense of justice by an earnest effort to make all possible reparation.30
He found, however, that few in Congress agreed with him, and while he could withhold the treaty from Senate approval, he could not restore the native government.
Cleveland had another reason for being wary about military spending and a gaze focused abroad. Shortly after his second inauguration, the United States had plunged into one of the worst depressions in its history. In May 1893 the economy, overextended after its radical reshaping, without a financial system that could truly handle its new form, and feeling the effect of a decades-long agricultural slump, spun and sputtered to a halt. Hundreds of banks failed and hundreds of thousands of workers were thrown out of jobs.
The depression that ensued was marked by a large amount of labor unrest as companies drastically cut back their spending and workers and their nascent labor unions fought back. Violence was common on both sides. Perhaps the most famous outbreak was during the Pullman strike of 1894, in which workers on the Pullman railroad company protested a pay cut that, after they had paid the rent on company housing, left them with little or nothing for food and other necessities. The strike became a national cause when Eugene Debs, eager to enlarge the size and power of the unions, brought his American Railway Union and its 150,000 members out in sympathy. The resulting strike affected the railroads nationwide and threatened further to cripple the American economy if not halted. Cleveland, although somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the railroad workers, did not let that stop him from using army troops and court injunctions to protect the railroads. The strike ended with Debs in jail (studying Karl Marx) and the railroad owners triumphant.
The end of the strike was not the end of the depression. Though the worst of it was over by the summer of 1894, the effects continued through 1895–96 and heavily influenced the presidential election of 1896. That race pitted William Jennings Bryan, a Democratic candidate supported largely by agrarian interests in the West and the Solid South, against William McKinley, a Republican supported by the industrial interests of the Northeast, Midwest, and Pacific coast. Bryan’s great failing was his inability to appeal to the industrial workers of the big cities, a constituency that should have been a natural ally given his perceived radicalism. He lost the election to the quiet McKinley.
Two
MCKINLEY AND AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
Though William McKinley has been seen as something of a nonentity, a front for business interests controlled by his campaign manager Mark Hanna, the real picture is much more complex. McKinley knew his mind and ran his presidency as he wished, though he normally displayed a stoic face to the public. At first, McKinley’s foreign and military policies echoed those of Cleveland’s. In his inaugural address, he remarked that the United States “cherished the policy of non-interference with affairs of foreign governments,” and that such should continue, for “we want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression.”1
McKinley followed those words by appointing the elderly and resolutely calm John D. Long to the office of secretary of the navy, a signal that while the building of warships might continue, their aggressive use would not. How much of this expressed McKinley’s own moderate views and how much was simply a ritualistic bow to the long American tradition of noninterference in foreign affairs is not clear. What is clear is that from the very start, McKinley matched his s
oothing words with aggressive actions. One of the first of these was the appointment of Theodore Roosevelt as assistant secretary of the navy, under Long. Roosevelt was Mahanian to his core, and aggressive. “Too pugnacious?” McKinley wondered. Perhaps, but that pugnacity would usefully balance the staid Long.2
In addition, almost immediately after being inaugurated, McKinley reversed Cleveland’s policy on Hawaii. The government that had taken over the islands in 1893 had remained relatively stable over the ensuing years, and McKinley, in the summer of 1897, negotiated and signed a treaty of annexation with that government. Hawaii would join the United States and provide a valuable stepping-stone to the markets of Asia. The annexation would also act to curtail growing Japanese interest in the islands. But McKinley’s prospects of getting the treaty ratified by the Senate were bleak. Though the Republicans held a small majority, they did not have much chance of summoning the two-thirds necessary for ratification.
Before a confrontation in the Senate could occur, a crisis erupted that would dominate McKinley’s first term: the revolution in Cuba. The situation there resembled the situation in the Philippines in many ways. It was an outpost of a largely vanished Spanish empire, economically backward and dominated by a small Spanish elite. Just as in the Philippines, a revolution started. But the insurgency in Cuba was much more organized and more effective than the fragmentary one in the Philippines.
The Spanish found themselves losing. Unable to buy off the leaders of the revolt, they resorted to harsher and harsher measures to try to control the situation. The governor-general of Cuba, Valeriano Weyler, instituted measures known as the reconcentrado, which included concentrating the civilian population into areas where they could be controlled by the Spanish army. The army found it enormously difficult to keep these civilians fed, and the starvation of thousands of Cubans was widely reported in the United States. In addition, a number of American citizens on the island were mistreated or threatened by Spanish forces. In combination, these things, agitated by the American press, led to a growing animosity toward Spain amongst broad sections of the American public.
War of Frontier and Empire Page 3