But it wasn’t clear the Senate would go along. Although Republicans held forty-six seats in the coming session to the Democrats’ thirty-four, independent pro-silver elements commanded ten seats. Thus silver Republicans could bolt their party and hold up any tariff bill to get concessions on the currency issue. Godkin’s Nation speculated that the only way McKinley could get the needed tariff votes was by “doing something for silver.” Godkin viewed that as more harmful to the economy than insufficient tariffs, and the danger was punctuated when the silver forces disdained the November election results. “The victory for gold,” declared A. J. Warner of the American Bimetallic Union, “is a victory of trusts and syndicated wealth, brought about by corruption and coercion, and not a victory of the people, or for the people, and it cannot last.”
But an economic rebound could blunt the silver push, and business developments suggested it might be happening. In November railroads reported significant cargo increases for grain and cotton and also a rise in passenger traffic. A boom was developing in the Indiana energy belt, and idle plants were resuming operations in a number of states. Analysts attributed this in part to a new economic certainty born of McKinley’s settled views on protectionism and sound currency. Further, U.S. banks were acquiring large amounts of gold, much of it hoarded during the campaign season as Americans sought protection from the anticipated currency devaluation if William Jennings Bryan were elected. In addition, global gold production was increasing, particularly in the U.S. territory of Alaska but also in Australia, Russia, Mexico, and China.
These pools of capital fueled corporate investment that promised to boost the economy. “No one now doubts that the brighter day is dawning,” asserted R. G. Dun & Co., a market analyst, in November. Two months later it reported that pig iron output grew 12 percent in December and nearly 42 percent since October 1. Coke production increased nearly 89 percent in just three months, while wool sales were moving upward. “Money markets,” said Dun, “feel a steady increase in demand for commercial and manufacturing loans.”
Business confidence also swelled on news of McKinley’s commitment, declared in his inaugural speech, to pursue an international monetary conference designed to get the major industrial nations, now adhering to a strict gold standard, to embrace a responsible bimetallic regimen that would allow for the monetization of silver, along with gold, while ensuring that doing so wouldn’t constitute a currency devaluation. Even before his inauguration, McKinley had endorsed the efforts of a special commission under Colorado’s Republican senator Edward Wolcott, a strong silver man, to assess prospects for such a conference in various European capitals. Though no doubt sincere, McKinley’s approach constituted a shrewd political maneuver. It allowed him to keep the bimetallism issue at bay while the commission’s efforts were pending and posed in the meantime little likelihood that European governments would force the issue by embracing the concept.
On his major domestic initiatives—high tariffs but with a nod to reciprocity, sound money with an embrace of bimetallism under international agreement, a clamp on federal spending while recognizing it was a billion-dollar country—McKinley felt comfortably aligned with voter sentiment. On foreign policy, however, voter sentiment wasn’t easily discerned because those issues hadn’t been aired with any depth during the campaign. And yet the country stood at the threshold of some momentous developments that would shape its global identity in the twentieth century.
First among these was Cuba, the long sliver of an island that stood sentinel over the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, two bodies of water that America considered within its sphere of influence. But Spain held on to this Antilles jewel with a tenacity born of its lingering disappointment at having lost its vast global empire—including Mexico and extensive colonies throughout Central and South America—in the nineteenth century. Now all it had left to show for its former glory were Cuba and Puerto Rico in the Americas, and the Philippines and a few small islands in Asia.
And Cuba was threatened by an insurgency that began in February 1895 with the aim of ripping this “ever faithful isle,” as it was called in Madrid, from Spanish dominion and giving it sovereign independence. Spain almost lost the island during an earlier rebellion, from 1868 to 1878, that claimed almost 260,000 lives on both sides. But eventually a new government in Madrid, product of a Spanish revolution that replaced the old absolute monarchy with a constitutional structure, negotiated a settlement with the Cuban insurgency that granted amnesty to its leaders and offered concessions on some grievances. Now the same leaders were back in the fight with a fearsome resolve.
They executed a “scorched earth” strategy of burning croplands and destroying food supplies in hopes that Spain would abandon the fight out of compassion for starving Cubans or perhaps America would intervene to assuage the human misery unfolding just ninety miles from its Florida tip. The rebels controlled the countryside throughout Cuba’s impoverished eastern half and pushed westward toward the capital of Havana, causing havoc in population areas dominated by Spanish-born Cubans known as peninsulares—mostly military officers, Catholic clerics, and governmental officials—who held sway over Cuba’s civic life and remained loyal to Madrid. Spain had nearly 200,000 troops on the island, but they were proving ineffective in thwarting the attack-and-run tactics of the insurgency’s 40,000 nimble and brutal guerrilla warriors.
Responding to repeated setbacks, Madrid sent in another 50,000 troops in February 1896 and named General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau as Cuba’s governor and military leader. Weyler fashioned a strategy designed to push the rebels out of the island’s more developed western and central regions and force them back into the eastern portions, where they could be systematically eliminated. He split Cuba into military zones, divided by north-south combat barriers of fences, trenches, and soldiers. Then he sought to seal off the zones to rebel activity one by one, pushing the rebels farther and farther east.
It didn’t work. Though rebel activity declined, it continued to disrupt the lives of the island’s main population areas and thwart Weyler’s plan to isolate the rebels. Weyler then made a fateful decision. He established a network of “concentration zones,” called reconcentrados—towns and localities completely under government control—and forced some 400,000 rural peasants into these militarized camps. The idea was to isolate potential rebel sympathizers and dry up the supplies, intelligence, and manpower that had been flowing to the insurgency. Unfortunately the Spanish military lacked the capacity to provide food and basic human necessities in these camps, and they soon became death traps. By the beginning of 1897 tens of thousands had died from disease and starvation.
The American people and their political leaders watched this unfolding conflict with growing unease trending toward outrage at the brutality of Weyler, who was becoming known as “the butcher.” Having such chaos gathering force nearby, and at a location of such crucial strategic significance, naturally raised concerns among American leaders. There also was a trade connection focused primarily on one commodity: sugar. The U.S. Sugar Trust, a consortium of eight major refiners with a big corner on Cuban sugar production, profited wildly when the McKinley tariff bill removed all import duties on sugar. Trade soared. U.S. imports from Cuba, mostly sugar, exceeded those from all other nations except Britain and Germany. Fully 87 percent of Cuba’s total exports went to the United States. When the Wilson-Gorman bill eliminated the duty-free policy, it devastated the Cuban economy—and contributed to the turmoil that spawned the insurgency. It was easy to see that Cuba’s fate and America’s interests were inextricably linked.
Further, the United States had become a staging area for the insurgency. Operating mostly out of Miami and New York City, rebel leaders, many of them naturalized U.S. citizens, raised money and churned out masses of propaganda designed to tilt the burgeoning North American nation toward recognition of the insurgents as legitimate belligerents. Rebel sympathizers in New York, known as the New York Junta, became particularly effective as p
ropagandists whipping up American sympathy for the Cuban rebels. The Junta, in collaboration with its Miami counterpart, also outfitted ships to transport supplies, money, and men to the revolution. Responding to Spanish protests, U.S. officials sought to intercept these “filibustering” vessels, but some got through nonetheless. Of seventy-one missions launched from American shores, only twenty-seven made it to Cuba, but that still rankled Madrid. What’s more, when Spanish officials captured these pro-rebel adventurers, they threw them into hellish prisons, where one of them died, and this generated further tensions between Spain and the United States.
President Cleveland harbored little sympathy for the Cuban rebels, whose brutal tactics he disdained. He labeled them “rascally Cubans” and set his policy toward the avoidance of involvement beyond protecting U.S. citizens and property. But popular support for the revolution mushroomed, and in early 1896 Congress passed a resolution, by lopsided margins in both houses, recognizing the rights of belligerency of both sides and declaring that the United States should acknowledge “the independence of Cuba.” The issue generated a surge of political emotion, but Cleveland ignored the resolution and the gathering political sentiment behind it. He issued a statement asserting, “The only action now proper is to continue to hold responsible for injuries to American citizens the only government which, so far as appears, has and maintains authority in Cuba.” The insurgency simply lacked the standing to merit recognition, he insisted.
After the McKinley election, pro-rebel legislators sought to pressure Cleveland with yet another resolution declaring America on the side of the Cuban rebellion, but it fizzled after Secretary of State Richard Olney warned that, even if the resolution were to pass over a White House veto, Cleveland would ignore it as an unconstitutional encroachment upon the president’s foreign policy prerogatives. At the same time, Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain put forth a plan for Cuban autonomy and economic concessions if the rebels would quit the fight. The rebels rejected it, but the action further dampened congressional sentiment for a pro-rebel resolution in the final weeks of the Cleveland administration.
As he prepared for inauguration day, McKinley didn’t relish the prospect of inheriting this incendiary situation. His focus had always been domestic matters, as attested by the fact that he seldom mentioned Cuba during his Front Porch campaign. Now he feared war would upend his domestic agenda. Besides, he had seen enough war in his youth to dispel any romantic notions about it. “I have been through one war,” he once said. “I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.”
Whether he could avert hostilities with Spain remained questionable. McKinley told Hay in the months before the inauguration that he hoped a negotiated end to the rebellion could emerge before he took office. He let congressional leaders know that he opposed any resolution on Cuba that would tie his hands and publicly lauded the Cleveland administration for avoiding actions that could “create an immediate ugly situation for the new administration.” During his pre-inauguration dinner with Cleveland at the White House, he told his host, “Mr. President, if I can only get out of office at the end of my term, with the knowledge that I have done what lay in my power to avert this terrible calamity, with the success that has crowned your patience . . . I shall be the happiest man in the world.”
* * *
IN THE MEANTIME other foreign developments suggested that the Cuban crisis eventually would be pulled into a broader context of American strategic imperatives and global ambitions. America’s burgeoning economic might was raising inevitable questions about the military power required to protect its commercial interests, and that in turn posed questions about what kind of navy the country would need. A new era was emerging that would test the limits of American expansionism.
One test could be seen in the North Pacific. The Sandwich Islands, now known as Hawaii, was an idyllic Polynesian kingdom that for decades had served as a magnet for Americans—first, traders seeking supplies and respite from weeks at sea; then missionaries worried over the fate of pagan souls; then whaling expeditions; and, finally, sugar interests. By the 1840s, at the height of the whaling era, five-sixths of all ships calling at Hawaii flew the Stars and Stripes, and the sons and daughters of missionaries were becoming increasingly embedded into Hawaii’s social elite, sometimes through marriage and childbearing. In 1842 the John Tyler administration declared, with an audacity reminiscent of the Monroe Doctrine, that while America had no designs on the islands it would not accept any other nation acquiring or dominating them.
The U.S.-Hawaiian relationship deepened during the Grant administration with a reciprocity agreement that eliminated duties on various trade items between the two countries. Although America wanted to establish a naval base on the strategically located Pearl River as part of the agreement, Hawaii’s King Kalakaua wouldn’t cede territorial sovereignty. But he promised he wouldn’t grant any “port, harbor, or territory” to any other power, thus ensuring that America would enjoy unmatched influence over the islands and be supreme in “the intimacy of our relations,” as Cleveland later expressed it. Though the free-trade reciprocity agreement affected many trade items—mostly agricultural staples from Hawaii and farm implements, animals, lumber, and tobacco from America—the big item was, once again, sugar.
Exporting duty-free sugar into the United States, Hawaii substantially expanded its market share just as demand was exploding through the advent of the U.S. canning industry. Soon nearly all Hawaiian sugar went to the United States, and it amounted to an eighth of all sugar consumed by the country. American sugar magnates rushed to the islands to exploit the free-trade opportunity with the most modern methods and technology. When reciprocity began in 1876, sugar production in the islands jumped 50 percent. By 1881 production was nearly 47,000 tons; three years later, 71,000 tons; in 1890, 130,000 tons. “Plantations became so mechanized,” one historian noted, “that they were akin to factories.” Profit margins for some plantations reached 50 percent in good years.
Inevitably the money flowing into the islands via the sugar trade generated political power and transformed Hawaii’s civic culture. The establishment became fractured. Wealthy white businessmen, although a small proportion of the population, now demanded more influence and privilege within the governmental structure. Native populations encountered increasing difficulty in maintaining their small farms and social position. Old customs and folkways began to wither.
Then came large numbers of Japanese workers to toil on the sugar plantations—nearly 30,000 immigrants between 1885 and 1894, brought in for three-year stints under carefully crafted agreements worked out with the Japanese government. About half remained in Hawaii afterward, however, and this further undermined the islands’ old Polynesian culture. Hawaii’s population at the time of McKinley’s inauguration was about 109,000, with about a third native Polynesians.
Growing tensions within the polity culminated in a new Hawaiian constitution, forced upon King Kalakaua by the increasingly aggressive white establishment, largely merchants, lawyers, clerks, and artisans, who mustered a militia that the king found threatening. The so-called Bayonet Constitution tilted power and prerogative toward the whites and away from native Hawaiians. The king struggled under the new charter to maintain peace between these population groups until his death in January 1891.
His successor was his sister, Queen Liliuokalani, fifty-two at her coronation. A graceful woman of refined tastes and good education, Queen Lil, as she was called in America, also displayed a tendency toward naïveté in assessing people in her official circle. Far more than her brother, she revered Polynesian culture (though she married a Caucasian) and hated the Bayonet Constitution’s restraints on royal power. She chafed under it for two years before moving in January 1893 to replace it with a new charter by royal decree. Meanwhile economic turmoil ensued with passage in America of the McKinley tariff, with its duty-free policy toward all imported sugar and generous bounty for domestic sugar produc
ers. That ended the Hawaiian sugar boom—until the Wilson-Gorman bill restored the status quo ante, demonstrating once again the far-reaching impact of U.S. tariff policies.
The white establishment responded to the queen’s unconstitutional actions by mounting a rebellion and requesting troops from the USS Boston, which happened to be moored off Honolulu. The Boston’s commanding officer, Gilbert Wiltse, sent troops ashore, ostensibly to protect American lives and property, but royalists grew nervous when the troops bypassed American residential areas and stationed themselves near the Government Building. This intimidation compelled Queen Liliuokalani to abdicate her throne, thus ending the 1,600-year-old kingdom.
In the middle of all this was U.S. minister to Hawaii John Stevens, a strong advocate for U.S. annexation of Hawaii. Just about everything he did during the constitutional crisis was improper. He made it clear from the beginning that he would not support the queen, though he was accredited to her government, and wouldn’t even offer assurances of neutrality. That rendered the troop landing all the more intimidating. He quietly emboldened rebel elements with promises of support. When the rebels pronounced the creation of a provisional government, he quickly extended U.S. recognition, though the provisional entity lacked many elements of a functioning government. He later declared a U.S. protectorate over Hawaii and charged Boston forces with the job of defending it.
The new government slowly took root and promptly sent a delegation to Washington to pursue annexation. It arrived on February 3 and eleven days later signed an annexation treaty with Secretary of State John W. Foster. President Harrison promptly sent it to the Senate, where an informal poll of members revealed only lukewarm support. The prevailing attitude in Washington seemed to be that there was no need to hurry the matter.
President McKinley Page 20