President McKinley

by Robert W. Merry

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  MEANWHILE DEVELOPMENTS WERE brewing around Santiago de Cuba that threatened to destroy McKinley’s bargaining position vis-à-vis Spain. Shafter’s army was wilting under the strain of tropical disease, particularly malaria, and soon it would be ravaged by yellow fever. Washington had instructed the general to get his troops to higher and safer ground immediately after the fall of Santiago, but Shafter had dawdled in complying, and now his army was so enervated that any effort to march his men overland would prove disastrous. The only solution, in the view of Shafter’s officers, was to transport the army by ship to some location on the American East Coast. Shafter and his officers decided to convey this sentiment to Washington via the press. Accordingly on August 4 newspapers across America bannered an Associated Press story that sent shock waves through the nation and rocked official Washington:

  Santiago de Cuba, August 3, 5:30 p.m. (delayed in transmission).—Summoned by Major General Shafter, a meeting was held here this morning at headquarters, and, in the presence of every commanding and medical officer of the 5th Army Corps. General Shafter read a cable message from Secretary Alger, ordering him . . . to move the army into the interior, to San Luis, where it is healthier.

  As a result of the conference, General Shafter will insist upon the immediate withdrawal of the army north within two weeks.

  As an explanation of the situation, the following letter from Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, commanding the 1st Volunteer Cavalry, to General Shafter, was handed by the latter to the correspondent here of the Associated Press for publication:

  “Sir—In a meeting of the general and medical officers called by you at the palace this morning we were all, as you know, unanimous in the view of what should be done with the army. To keep us here, in the opinion of every officer commanding a division or a brigade, will simply involve the destruction of thousands.”

  Roosevelt’s letter, reflecting his famous vivid expressiveness, explained that yellow fever had not yet appeared in his regiment, but malaria was rampant, and “the whole command is so weakened and shattered as to be ripe for dying like sheep when a real yellow fever epidemic . . . strikes us as it is bound to if we stay here.” The AP story also reprinted a “round robin” letter, signed by Shafter’s top officers, expressing the same sentiments and a similar warning from the army’s medical corps.

  These letters, delivered via the public press, constituted military insubordination on a grand scale. Further, by signaling the depleted state of the U.S. Army at Santiago, the correspondence could have encouraged Spain to stiffen its bargaining position—or even send its remaining forces on the island, still substantial, to Santiago to seek a reversal of the American victory.

  Looking back, the administration always had intended to force the Santiago surrender as soon as possible and then get U.S. troops quickly to high ground to avoid the yellow fever pestilence. That’s why McKinley had become increasingly frustrated with Shafter’s glacial pace of action—first, in departing Tampa, then in forcing a Spanish surrender after he had taken the San Juan Heights. And now, in the wake of the surrender, Shafter continued his lassitude, devoting more attention to the disposition of his Spanish prisoners than he did to his own troops. His cables to Washington had been full of assurances. Few cases of yellow fever had emerged; the cases that had emerged were mild; and the situation seemed “somewhat improving.”

  What he didn’t say, if indeed he even knew, was that his troops had been increasingly devastated by malaria, far less deadly than yellow fever but capable of weakening the troops and rendering them dangerously vulnerable when yellow fever arrived with the rainy season. In ignoring Washington’s order to get his men to safer territory, Shafter had debilitated his army. It didn’t help that the general’s dysfunctional quartermaster corps had not adequately fed or clothed the troops, nor had the medical corps adequately tended to them.

  By late July Shafter began to recognize his army faced a humiliating doom. On August 2 he cabled Washington that he was ready to transport the troops home. This was stunning news to McKinley, who had been given no knowledge of the condition of Shafter’s troops. The transports weren’t readily available, nor were the coastal rest sites completed. The president called in Surgeon General George Sternberg, who assured him that the plan to march the troops to higher ground remained sound. The result was a stern order to Shafter to follow the initial plan.

  Shafter was in a pickle. He couldn’t follow orders because his negligence had preempted the feasibility of doing so. He couldn’t own up to the situation because it would expose his ineptitude and irresponsible lack of candor in communicating with his superiors. He took the cowardly path of turning the dilemma over to his officers, who promulgated the round robin and Roosevelt letters.

  For McKinley, learning of the situation for the first time through the newspapers, the news seemed calamitous. Seeing his entire peace strategy now at risk, he became “very much agitated and indignant,” Alger wrote later. Already he had demonstrated his displeasure at news reports of the hideous fate of sick and wounded soldiers being moved from Cuba to New York aboard two transport ships, the Seneca and the Concho, without sufficient food and little medical attention. A New York Times editorial asked if the army’s medical department actually intended “to kill off our sick and wounded soldiers by shipping them from point to point on unfit transports, without physicians, without medical supplies, and with nothing but beans, bacon, and hard tack for food.” An indignant McKinley pummeled Alger with “many searching questions” and promptly ordered an investigation into the matter.

  Secretary Alger sought to explain the scandal publicly by noting difficulties faced by his army in Cuba: high surfs made landing of supplies difficult; so many people wanted out that the ships inevitably became overcrowded; the captains never informed higher authorities that they lacked sufficient water. The New York Times punctured Alger’s high-surf excuse by stating that the two transports left Santiago after it had surrendered, easing the way for the loading and unloading of ships within the harbor. The Times added that “no mere wholesale denial or disclaimer of responsibility either by Gen. Shafter or the Secretary of War will satisfy the public indignation.” Cortelyou considered Alger’s statement “lame” and decried his opportunistic maneuverings. He constantly tried to take the sting out of the president’s communications to Shafter and other errant officers, wrote the secretary, and he was quick to issue self-serving statements to the press. After McKinley’s Seneca-Concho investigation order, Alger rushed to waiting reporters outside the White House and conveyed “the impression . . . that he had ordered the investigation.” Cortelyou feared the War Department would become “one of the few blots on the brilliant record made in the conduct of the war.”

  Though McKinley didn’t seem inclined to blame Alger for the army’s dysfunction, he had lost his patience with Shafter. In a letter to the general he said the round robin letter “makes the situation one of great difficulty. No soldier reading that report if ordered to Santiago but will feel that he is marching to certain death.” The big question, though, was what Madrid would do with the information.

  The answer came on August 9 when Cambon and Thiebault called at the White House to deliver the Spanish response to the president’s August 5 position. It became clear that Spain had no desire to continue the war—but still wished to negotiate McKinley’s demands. The language of Spain’s response was vague as to the disposition of the Philippines, and it asserted evacuation of Cuba and Puerto Rico couldn’t take place until approved by the Spanish legislature.

  The president stood firm. “I demanded of Spain the cession and consequently the immediate evacuation of the islands of Cuba and Porto Rico,” he declared to Cambon. “Instead of a categorical acceptance, as was expected, the Spanish Government addresses me a note in which it invokes the necessity of obtaining the approbation of the Cortes. I can not lend myself to entering into these considerations of domestic government.”

  Cambon
suggested translations may have contributed to some misunderstanding, and it was natural for Madrid to want to express regret at the loss of its colonies. He was confident, he said, that Spain intended a “full and unqualified acceptance” of the president’s terms.

  If that were true, replied McKinley, his government would draft a “protocol” clarifying the U.S. position, setting forth a time for the negotiations to begin, and establishing a timetable for the evacuation of Cuba and Puerto Rico. If Madrid signed the document, that would answer the question.

  That night State officials drafted the protocol and submitted it to McKinley for his approval, which he gave after some minor tinkering with the language. The next day the document was presented to Cambon, who sent it to Madrid with an admonition that McKinley remained unmovable and “Spain will have nothing more to expect from a conqueror resolved to procure all the profit possible from the advantages it has obtained.” On August 12 the French minister reported back that he had been authorized by Madrid to sign the protocol on behalf of the Spanish government. At four o’clock that afternoon, Cambon and Thiebault reappeared at the White House for a signing ceremony in the Cabinet Room. Present were the French diplomats, the president, Secretary Day, and various invited officials from the State Department, the White House, and the military.

  “Mr. Ambassador,” said Day to Cambon, “the papers are ready.” The president stood at the far end of the Cabinet table as Cambon and Day seated themselves across from each other at the other end. In turn the two men affixed their signatures to the four copies of the protocol. When that was completed, three other officials were admitted into the room—Secretary Alger, General Corbin, and naval official Charles Allen—as McKinley extended to Cambon his hand and a warm expression of appreciation for the good offices of the ambassador and his nation in facilitating the end of hostilities. He invited the French diplomat to remain while he signed a presidential proclamation suspending U.S. military action. Moments later, Day turned to the large globe in the corner and said to Cortelyou, “Let’s see what we get by this.”

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  WHAT THE UNITED States got was added to another strategic prize acquired on July 7, at the height of the Santiago siege. On that date the Hawaiian Islands came under the U.S. flag through a joint congressional resolution introduced initially in the House on May 4 by Nevada’s Democratic representative Francis G. Newlands. There was no doubt that Newlands’s resolution would pass the House handily if brought to a vote, but standing athwart the resolution’s legislative path was that physical and political Goliath, Speaker Reed, who for months had vacillated between demonstrations of acrimony toward annexation and promises of cooperation. Now he seemed inclined toward acrimony. “Speaker Reed,” reported the Washington Post, “has always been and is now opposed to annexation, and if no action is taken in the House it will be due to his powerful and antagonistic influence.”

  McKinley had no intention of making it easy for the speaker to buck his annexation plan. On May 11 he summoned to the White House all members of the House and Senate foreign policy panels to urge prompt action. In conjunction with the visit, Cortelyou delivered to the Washington press corps a full briefing on just how much the president wanted Hawaii. The next day the House Foreign Affairs Committee cleared the annexation measure 10–4, along with other enabling resolutions, and sent them into the clutches of Reed, who held sole discretion on whether they would get to a floor vote. When Foreign Affairs Chairman Robert Hitt urged Reed to speed them along, the speaker responded with a dismissive coyness.

  Finally, on May 23, following an informal canvass showing overwhelming House support for annexation, Reed announced he would let the resolutions proceed to the floor calendar, where they would compete with other crucial legislation for floor consideration before the looming congressional adjournment. But as the days unfolded it became clear that Reed still hadn’t abandoned hope of killing the resolutions—if he could shroud his involvement behind legislative legerdemain. For two weeks annexation proponents waited for their measures to reach the floor, and constantly the resolutions fell behind other bills. Finally it became clear that Joe Cannon, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and a fervent annexation foe, was working stealthily with Reed to crowd the calendar with appropriations conference reports and squeeze out annexation. Reported the Post, “Just where the friends of annexation are going to have an opportunity to bring up their resolutions this week is not apparent now.”

  It was all too much for Ohio’s representative Charles Grosvenor, the McKinley loyalist and a man of both force and wiles. On June 8 he rose on the House floor to force the issue into the open through parliamentary maneuvers aimed at requiring the Rules Committee to put annexation onto the floor schedule. He accused the leadership of perpetuating “a continuing order to obstruct the passage of the Hawaiian resolutions.” Iowa’s representative John Lacey, “retorted with much vigor” declaring: “The gentleman should be ashamed to make such an accusation.” But in exposing to public knowledge the House leaders’ sly obstructions, Grosvenor flustered Reed and his allies. Two days later word filtered through Congress that the president shortly would submit to lawmakers a special message calling for immediate annexation as a military necessity, prompted by the wartime need to ship men and materiel to the Philippines and also to discourage adversarial nations—notably Japan and Germany—from seeking military advantage in the islands while America was pinned down in its war with Spain.

  That broke the logjam. The next day a vote was scheduled, and on June 16 the House passed the resolutions 210–92. Reed vacated the House chamber during the vote and had a colleague announce, to cheers from Democrats, that he would have voted no had he been there. Then the resolutions went to the Senate, where opponents declared their intention to kill them through endless debate right up to the time of adjournment. When a test vote engineered by Foreign Relations Committee chairman Cushman Davis demonstrated overwhelming annexation support, the opposition effort to thwart a vote fizzled.

  But annexation opponents had their days of debate. California’s Democratic senator Stephen White summed up anti-imperialist anxieties when he declared, “If we consummate this scheme we will be told we must have the Philippines, because Hawaii is not worth much unless we can have something else to use it for. And when we have annexed the Philippines we must have something else. So we will extend our action around the globe and enter upon an imperialistic policy.” Hoar of Massachusetts added that America could gain great world stature “if we come out of this war without entering upon the fatal folly of retaining far distant possessions.”

  When annexation proponents forced a roll call vote on the issue on July 6, it passed 42–21. Cortelyou, upon receiving the engrossed resolutions at the White House, took them immediately to the Cabinet Room, where McKinley had mustered a few signing witnesses, including Ida, assistant White House doorkeeper Alonzo Stewart, a couple military officials, and the president’s old friend from Canton, George Frease. At 7 p.m. the president turned the primary annexation resolution into law by affixing the words “Approved, July 7, 1898. William McKinley.” According to the Post, he remarked that with the annexation of Hawaii the nation had entered upon “a new era which would be productive of great benefit.”

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  FIVE WEEKS LATER, with the signing of the protocol with Spain and the accumulation of territories in the Caribbean and Asia, the president freely displayed his felicity at the turn of events under his leadership. Cortelyou noticed that he seemed particularly “genial and pleasant” as he conversed with Cambon after the signing. He had every reason to believe this represented the zenith of his career, just as it represented for America a new era of global consequence. But in politics, as in life, nothing stays the same for long, and McKinley soon found himself grappling with an issue that threatened to undermine his political standing and his party’s. The army’s war performance was coming under withering condemnation from Democrats, editorialists, civic notables,
and citizens across the nation.

  After the sobering revelations of the round robin and Roosevelt letters, all agreed that the army must evacuate its Cuban troops as quickly as possible and get them to a transfer camp—called Camp Wikoff, in honor of an officer killed at Santiago—hurriedly being prepared at Montauk, Long Island. Inevitably the army couldn’t get the camp into shape in time for the thousands of troops arriving from Santiago. The result was another scandal of army incompetence, with the first waves of troops finding insufficient tents, beds, clothing, food, doctors, and medicines. Compounding the embarrassment were widespread reports of ongoing supply problems and medical inadequacies at four other major domestic bases—in Georgia, Virginia, and Florida—that had served nearly 165,000 enlistees since the spring. By mid-August the army faced a medical crisis as typhoid fever ravaged the men of those camps. Ultimately nearly 2,500 officers and men died of typhus and other diseases, while combat deaths throughout the war numbered only 281.

  Alger’s army managed to flood the needed supplies into Camp Wikoff, and by early September the situation had stabilized. Alabama’s indefatigable General Wheeler, placed in charge of Wikoff, proved particularly resourceful in cutting bureaucratic red tape. But the damage had been done, and few Americans now believed the army could do anything right. A doctor from a New York State volunteer regiment, asked about the condition of his troops at Wikoff, replied, “Forty of our men are dead through the ravages of battle and disease; five have lost their reason, seventy are wounded, and 400 are physical wrecks. . . . There are not 150 men in our whole regiment who are fit for camp duty.” The New York Times reported that even former army apologists now attacked the military and its leaders: “The general opinion is that ‘red tape’ is killing men at Montauk, and that the man at the head of the War Department is so incompetent to do the cutting that the situation must continue . . . until the last possible victim is dead or a new head is found to grapple with the problem.” Suspicions of illegal profiteering and favoritism abounded.