President McKinley

by Robert W. Merry

  Okuma was right. Unless Japan wanted war with the United States, it would have to accept the inevitable. On three occasions during the tensions Japan asked for support from Great Britain, which disavowed any vital interest in the matter. Japan then sent three further protests to the U.S. government, with an escalation in forcefulness of expression, protesting against any harm annexation could bring to Hawaii’s Japanese residents. Responding to each, Sherman dismissed Japanese concerns so airily that The Nation was moved to write, “The sum and substance of the whole correspondence is that we snap our fingers at Japan.” The magazine added there was “no such thing as a right to annex a country, and that Japan, if its interests are affected, has just as much right to prevent our annexing as we have to annex.”

  True, but the exercise of that anti-annexation right would bring war, and Japan wasn’t prepared for war. By sending his annexation treaty to the Senate, knowing full well that the matter couldn’t be settled in the chamber for months and probably not at all in 1897, McKinley signaled that the United States was prepared for war. For good measure, the administration leaked to the press the substance of Admiral Beardslee’s orders in the event of Japanese provocations. The Washington Post headline told the story: “TO HOIST OUR FLAG; How Japan’s Interference in Hawaii Will Be Checked; Instruction Sent to Beardslee; The Islands to Be Seized at Once if Any Aggressive Action Is Attempted.”

  On July 15, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee reported the annexation treaty to the Senate floor without amendment. The vote was 6 to 2. Already measures had been introduced in both houses for annexation through legislation rather than through treaty, as a hedge against the possibility that the treaty could run into trouble in the Senate. It was understood that the annexation treaty would slide over to the next session of Congress, set to begin in December. In the meantime, in late July Japan accepted an offer from Hawaii to enter into arbitration to settle all disputes between the two countries regarding indemnity claims and Japanese rights on the islands. American officials had urged the Hawaiian government to settle those outstanding matters as Congress grappled with annexation. By fall Japan’s aggressiveness began to wane, and by year’s end it had relaxed its strident immigration policies and withdrawn its protests on assurances that the United States would ensure that legitimate indemnity claims would be honored.

  It would take many months before annexation would be complete, but U.S. actions on the matter throughout 1897 represented a significant departure in foreign policy. Though the acquisition process was often messy and, to some, morally questionable, the country had stripped away any regard for international niceties in its pursuit of its first overseas colony. It is noteworthy that, during this delicate time (prior to his first Annual Message in December), McKinley never hailed the Hawaiian acquisition in public statements or speeches. There is no record that even within the councils of government he extolled the strategic significance of annexation in the kinds of stirring words that fell from the lips and the pens of Roosevelt, Mahan, and Lodge. But as his comment to Quigg attests, he saw the Hawaiian opportunity in precisely the same terms. And he leveraged his own wiles and the full powers of his office to bring it about, risking diplomatic censure and even war. The same expansionist zeal that had driven the explosive development of Ohio early in the nineteenth century and the inexorable conquest of the North American continent over subsequent decades now animated this son of Ohio at the dawn of the new century. For McKinley, this spirit clearly was more a matter of instinct than philosophy, but that didn’t lessen its significance as a force of history.

  Probably no nation understood the underlying significance of McKinley’s actions more crisply than Great Britain, the world’s most powerful and extensive empire. The Times of London suggested this would not be an isolated policy initiative. “Will America pursue the colonizing course upon which she has now entered?” asked the paper. “President McKinley tries hard to represent the case as wholly exceptional, but the forces tending in an opposite direction are very strong.” Added Britain’s ambassador to Washington, Sir Julian Pauncefote, in a dispatch to London, “The most important act of the present administration, involving a change of policy as regards the acquisition of territory outside the Union, has just been consummated by President McKinley.”

  — 14 —

  Cuba

  “THE STILLNESS OF DEATH AND THE SILENCE OF DESOLATION”

  In April 1897, during a presidential trip to New York, McKinley met with the legendary Carl Schurz in the president’s Manhattan hotel suite. Schurz had stirred the American imagination with his extraordinary life: youthful partisan in the 1848 Prussian Revolution; wounded in that rebellion and banished from his native land; Civil War service in his adopted country as U.S. minister to Spain and Union field general; postwar Wisconsin senator and Hays administration cabinet official; and now one of the country’s most implacable foes of American imperialism. John Hay considered him a kind of “wonderful land pirate, bold, quick, brilliant, and reckless.”

  In his earnest way, Schurz expressed concerns to McKinley over rumors that the president might nominate a strong annexationist as minister to Hawaii. The president dismissed the concern. “Ah, you may be sure,” said McKinley, as the two men shook hands, “there will be no jingo nonsense under my Administration. You need not borrow any trouble on that account.”

  Not surprisingly, Schurz recoiled when McKinley later gave the Hawaii portfolio to the feisty imperialist Harold Sewall. And he was astonished on June 17 when the president sent his Hawaiian annexation treaty to the Senate for ratification. The next time the two men met, Schurz pressed McKinley on the matter, getting increasingly emphatic as he sensed that the president didn’t seem to recall the previous conversation.

  “Yes, yes, I remember now,” the president finally said. “You are opposed to that annexation, aren’t you?” He sought to assuage the Prussian with assurances that the treaty wouldn’t get Senate consideration during the current session and would be fully debated before any votes were taken. Schurz wasn’t assuaged. He thought the president lacked either a sense of direction or a commitment to forthrightness. More likely, the two men held different views on what the foreswearing of any “jingo nonsense” meant. For Schurz it meant opposition to any kind of expansionism, even peaceful annexation; for McKinley it meant pursuing his emerging expansionist agenda in a measured and responsible way, without rabid rhetoric or reckless adventurism. But the president also wanted to buy time as he sought to move events systematically toward his goals with as little friction as possible. Anticipating Schurz’s opposition, he sought to delay that eventuality until he could fortify himself on the issue. Of course, when it became clear that incrementalism couldn’t counter Japan’s diplomatic belligerence, McKinley quickly produced an annexation treaty to get the Japanese to back off. He could be bold when necessary.

  But his instinct for incremental decision making took on immense urgency in another foreign policy challenge that threatened to burst into a full-blown crisis. That was the war in Cuba between the island’s Spanish overlords and its insurgent forces.

  Almost from inauguration day, McKinley found himself in a political box on the issue. He wished to avoid war with Spain while pursuing a delicate diplomacy aimed at getting the fading Spanish Empire out of the Caribbean. If feasible at all, this would require time and flexibility. But Congress, increasingly anti-Spain and pro-insurgency, threatened actions that could deprive the president of both time and flexibility, and popular sentiment was moving in tandem with Congress. Meanwhile the business community, a key McKinley constituency, opposed any actions that might upend the country’s incipient economic recovery.

  At the foundation of the president’s thinking was a subtle shift in outlook between himself and his predecessor. Cleveland, sympathetic to Spain and averse to those “rascally Cubans,” favored Spain’s continued possession of Cuba, albeit under a system that granted to the island a significant degree of autonomy. This was not s
urprising given Cleveland’s general anti-expansionist sentiments. If America harbored no serious ambition to expand its regional influence, then the best prospect for regional stability rested with the status quo. After all, an insurgent victory could generate a power vacuum that might lure to the region other European nations more threatening to U.S. interests than the hollow Spanish Empire.

  McKinley, on the other hand, sympathized with the rebels more than with their Spanish rulers. In part this reflected the humanitarianism that undergirded his family’s abolitionist convictions before the Civil War. Beyond that, the new president questioned whether autonomy could succeed, although he didn’t rule it out and would support it if the warring factions could agree on an autonomous structure. But he didn’t think that could happen, given Spain’s apparent inability to crush the rebellion within any realistic time frame. Hence the insurgents would shun autonomy in favor of full independence as the war sapped Spain’s financial health and political stability. In the meantime the conflict threatened growing chaos near American shores, with U.S. citizens increasingly abused and U.S. interests challenged. That was becoming untenable for America.

  Further, McKinley believed America could fill any Caribbean power vacuum, preserving the Monroe Doctrine and meshing the country’s expanded regional influence with his other global ambitions: a canal through the isthmus of Central America, the acquisition of Hawaii, a growing merchant marine, expanding naval fleets with coaling stations around the world, and reciprocal trade agreements generating markets for American products. Spanish Cuba didn’t figure into this vision.

  Neither did war with Spain. In his cautious way, McKinley focused initially on side issues that nettled U.S.-Spanish relations. One was the fate of U.S. citizens languishing in Cuban jails. Alabama’s Democratic senator John Morgan insisted Cuban prisons were “crowded” with Americans forced into intolerable conditions, “without a place to lie down or a bench to sit upon, and with all of the inconveniences that it is possible to conceive of.” But Maine’s Republican senator Eugene Hale declared that only twelve U.S. citizens were incarcerated in Cuba, three or four of whom were expected to be released soon. No one knew what the precise number was or the circumstances of their arrests.

  Most troublesome was the case of Ricardo Ruiz, a Cuban dentist who had become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1880 but had lived in Cuba continuously since then. Arrested and charged with blowing up a train in the rebel cause, he had been placed in solitary confinement, where he died from brain injuries that Spanish authorities insisted were self-inflicted. His death generated sensational coverage in U.S. newspapers, much of it pointing accusatory fingers at Spanish officials. On March 9, Ruiz’s widow arrived in Washington with her five children to seek help in securing financial redress from the Cuban government. Since Cleveland had agreed to a joint Spanish-American commission to investigate the death, McKinley used it as the impetus to send a commissioner to Cuba who also could investigate the broader Cuban situation. This served two hallmark McKinley purposes: methodical information gathering and resistance to pressure for quick action.

  Another vexing issue was the filibustering operations by Cuban partisans—notably, the so-called New York Junta—seeking to ship money, manpower, and weapons to Cuban insurgents from American soil. Both Cleveland and McKinley had embraced the principle, constantly pressed by Madrid, that the United States had a responsibility to interdict such missions, and most were thwarted. But for Spain, caught in a bloody war it couldn’t seem to win, America’s antifilibustering efforts never seemed sufficient. In early April, Secretary of State Sherman issued a statement saying that U.S. citizens “pursuing lawful occupations in a lawful way” could expect full U.S. protection. But those who, “under cover of American nationality, engage in hostilities against Spain must accept the consequences of their own acts.” At the same time, the administration urged Spain to protect American property and investments from destruction and confiscation brought on by the war.

  In late April, McKinley appointed William J. Calhoun of Illinois as commissioner to Cuba to investigate the Ruiz death and “make a very comprehensive inquiry into the condition of affairs on the island,” as the Washington Post reported. Calhoun, a square-faced trial lawyer with a tidy white mustache, had known McKinley since their days together at Ohio’s Poland Seminary. He left Washington on May 8 for a month-long stay in Cuba, and McKinley hoped his inquiry would freeze U.S. political activity on the issue. But New Hampshire’s Republican senator Jacob Gallinger introduced a resolution calling on the president to protest the anticipated execution of General Juan Ríus Rivera, a captured rebel leader whose fate was foreshadowed with characteristic anti-Spanish umbrage by Hearst’s pro-insurgent New York Journal. “It is time,” the senator exclaimed, “that this war is ended, it is time that the great nation of Spain should be given to understand that this is the close of the nineteenth century, and that war should be fought upon a higher plane than that of butchery, of crime, and of rapine.”

  Leading the opposition was the round-faced, white-haired George F. Hoar, Republican of Massachusetts, whose courtly demeanor and outward conviviality gave way to pugnacity and spitefulness whenever he became aroused in political discourse, which was often. Hoar relished his role as one of the Senate’s most impassioned anti-imperialists.

  “Now, what have we here?” he asked, then answered, “In the first place we have a statement of what we think Spain is going to do, and that is all. It is a prophecy, a guess, a prediction—”

  “It is a fact,” interjected William Allen, Populist from Nebraska. Hoar ignored him and continued: “A surmise, a conjecture; what we suppose she is going to do; not a fact, but a prophecy.”

  Mr. ALLEN: Does the Senator from Massachusetts profess himself to be so ignorant as not—

  Mr. HOAR: I do not yield to that kind of an interruption.

  Mr. ALLEN: As not to know that there is an intention on the part of the Spanish Government to summarily destroy this man’s life?

  Mr. HOAR: It is prophecy; and the Senator from Nebraska, when he has a little more experience, will, perhaps, discover what he does not seem to have learned, that prophecy is not an exact science, and that no event which has not happened can be accurately described as a fact.

  Ignoring Hoar’s lecturing tone, the Senate passed Gallinger’s resolution unanimously, with Hoar and Maine’s pro-Spain Eugene Hale abstaining. Then Alabama’s Senator Morgan introduced a resolution declaring that “a condition of public war exists between the government of Spain and the government proclaimed” and pledging America’s “strict neutrality between the contending parties.” This was a backdoor effort to get America into a war with Spain, in the view of the scholarly Alvey A. Adee, second assistant secretary of state. In a memorandum to Secretary Sherman, promptly forwarded to McKinley, Adee wrote, “A ‘recognition of belligerency’—as the issuance of a formal proclamation of neutrality is generally styled—is not a middle course,—it would rather be a stepping stone to intervention.” That’s because it would impose more severe obligations of neutrality than the country faced under its prevailing bystander stance, in which the Cuban insurgency was viewed as merely an internal Spanish matter. This new position, argued Adee, would give Spain rights of search and interdiction on the high seas in order to enforce America’s stated neutrality. That in turn “could scarcely fail to provoke a casus belli which would precipitate . . . [an] offensive and defensive alliance with the Cuban insurgents.”

  That’s precisely what McKinley wished to avoid. But the Senate on May 20 approved Morgan’s resolution, 41–14, with eighteen members of McKinley’s own party voting aye. In the debate before the vote, McKinley’s allies argued that the Senate should stand aside pending Calhoun’s report. But a particularly telling argument came from Maryland’s Democratic senator Arthur Gorman, who said he supported the measure only because the administration wasn’t adequately protecting American citizens and diplomatic officials in Cuba from the war’s lethal cha
os. When he referred to “their failure,” Senator Hale interjected, “Failure by whom?”

  “Failure by the executive branch of the government: by the President of the United States and the Secretary of State,” Gorman replied.

  McKinley immediately saw a dual threat. One was the resolution itself, which reflected a potentially troublesome current of popular sentiment. But he knew it would be thwarted in the House when it encountered the massive bulk and boulder-like tenacity of Speaker Reed, who despised foreign adventurism and dominated House procedures. The president knew Morgan’s resolution would die a quiet death in Reed’s chamber.

  But he perceived far more political danger in allegations that he wasn’t protecting Americans caught in the Cuban vortex. Even before the Morgan vote, McKinley instructed the State Department to solicit telegraphic reports from top consular officials throughout Cuba. These later formed the basis for a May 17 presidential message to Congress revealing that between 600 and 800 American citizens on the island “are in a state of destitution, suffering for want of food and medicines.” McKinley asked Congress to appropriate $50,000 to assist the beleaguered Americans, and the Senate voted the appropriation unanimously within eighteen minutes of receiving the president’s message. The House followed suit a few days later. “The policy of the Administration in reference to Cuba,” opined Whitelaw Reid’s New York Tribune, “is not likely to be criticized, as was that of its predecessor, on the score of vacillation or indifference to the rights of American citizens.”