President McKinley

by Robert W. Merry

  The situation was exacerbated by Alger’s clumsy response to these multiple lapses. Never acknowledging the magnitude of the problems nor issuing any public apology to the nation or his troops, he offered instead bland excuses. “The Secretary of War cannot be supposed to be everywhere and give his personal attention to every detail,” he exclaimed to reporters at one point—“petulantly,” as the Times reported. The president sympathized with Alger’s complaint that he couldn’t oversee everything in an army that had ballooned from about 25,000 troops to more than 260,000 in some three months. To Cortelyou he dismissed some of the criticism as “unreasonable and unwarranted” and argued that “the Secy could not be responsible for many of the conditions at Santiago and other places.” But he knew this festering problem soon would attach to him if he didn’t move on it. As the New York Evening Post put it, “Alger is responsible for Algerism, but McKinley is responsible for Alger.”

  To deflect the barrage of criticism and ensure his own control over events, the president initiated two actions. One was a visit to Camp Wikoff. The other was a decision to establish an investigative commission charged with establishing the facts of the matter. McKinley arrived at Wikoff on September 3, along with Alger, Vice President Hobart, and other dignitaries, and spent five hours in the camp. He interviewed officers, talked with soldiers, inspected tent quarters, and generally showed his regard for troop welfare. He spent an hour and a half in the hospital wards, interviewing medical officials and offering soothing words to wounded and ill soldiers.

  “I’m sorry to see you so sick,” he told one stricken sergeant. “I hope you are getting better.” At frequent intervals he would exclaim, “How sorry I am to see these brave fellows in such a condition.” But he also expressed his view that camp management had reached a creditable degree of efficiency, asserting, “I think I never saw a handsomer camp.” Widespread press reports of the president’s visit were highly favorable, isolating him from most of the national ire directed at Alger and the army.

  Meanwhile McKinley used Agriculture Secretary James Wilson as an intermediary to inform Alger of his intention to appoint an investigative commission. Wilson also said the president wanted Alger himself to ask for the commission, to demonstrate his good faith in the controversy. Alger initially resisted the idea. “He told me he is having army officers do that work,” Wilson reported to the president. But Wilson persisted, and Alger ultimately gave way when Wilson “pointed out the weight that would attach to a report from men not in army life placing responsibility where it properly belongs.”

  Alger made the request in a September 8 letter to the president, and McKinley’s subsequent announcement generated widespread support throughout the country. To head the commission, the president named Grenville M. Dodge of Iowa, a Union general in the Civil War and pioneer of the Union Pacific Railroad. Assembling commission members at the White House on September 26, the president told them, “If there have been wrongs committed, the wrongdoers must not escape conviction and punishment.” By giving the commission several months to report its findings, the president managed to quell the national outrage, at least for a time, so he could concentrate on other matters—notably, the negotiations with Spain, a replacement for Day at the State Department, mounting difficulties in the Philippines, and the coming November elections.

  With the shooting war with Spain over, Day’s commitment to his State duties also expired. But McKinley had one last assignment for his longtime Canton friend: to chair the five-man commission that would negotiate final terms with Spain. Day accepted, with the proviso that, once the negotiations were completed, he would escape the Washington hubbub and return to his quiet life in Ohio.

  The president knew precisely the man he wanted for Day’s replacement: John Hay. In mid-August he offered the ambassador the job via telegram. The ambassador replied with his usual false modesty: “The place is beyond my ambition. I cannot but feel it is beyond my strength and ability.” But a week later he reported that Queen Victoria herself had wired Arthur Balfour, who was running the British Foreign Office, asking him to convey her congratulations to Hay. “This is—I am told—a very unusual kindness and compliment,” wrote Hay, adding, “It makes me very humble to be the recipient of so much undeserved praise and confidence.”

  It was in fact much deserved. In his brief London tenure, Hay had cemented a friendship between two nations that only three years earlier had faced off ominously over the Venezuelan border dispute. Now Balfour was declaring that “between English-speaking peoples war is impossible.” Joseph Chamberlain, British colonial secretary, went further in concept and eloquence. “There is a powerful and generous nation,” he said, “speaking our language, bred of our race, and having interests identical with ours. . . . At the present time these two great nations understand each other better than they ever have done, since over a century ago they were separated by the blunder of a British government.” Hay worked assiduously to foster that sentiment among Britons and articulated its significance in his own eloquent prose. He spoke of “a peace between us and a friendly regard—a peace growing more firm and solid as the years go by, and a friendship which, I am sure, the vast majority of both peoples hope and trust may last forever.” The new amity between the two nations, forged during McKinley’s presidency through Hay’s elegant diplomacy, would prove to be a development of global significance.

  To replace Hay at London McKinley chose the seventy-two-year-old Senator Hoar of Massachusetts. One rationale for the offer, according to speculation, was to get his strong anti-expansionist voice out of the Senate. But Hoar declined, citing health and age considerations. When the president indicated he might consider Whitelaw Reid, New York boss Tom Platt quickly weighed in with a twenty-two-page letter begging McKinley to choose someone other than the priggish antimachine newspaperman. He eventually selected Joseph Choate, a leading New York City trial lawyer with strong Republican ties and a wide following among Eastern establishment figures.

  As a consolation to Reid, McKinley asked him to join the U.S. peace commission. Reid avidly accepted. Then the president corralled three sitting senators—Republicans Cushman Davis of Minnesota and William Frye of Maine and Democrat George Gray of Delaware. Of the five, Day steered a middle course, philosophically committed to expansion but wary of going too far. Gray had opposed Hawaiian annexation and seemed uncomfortable with any overseas acquisitions. Davis and Frye were strong advocates of taking all of the Philippines, while Reid seemed inclined in that direction. In placing three senators on the commission McKinley ignored concerns of some that it violated the separation-of-powers principle. “Permit me to respectfully remind you,” wrote New Hampshire Senator Chandler in a heartfelt protest to the president, “that you cannot constitutionally appoint Senators as Peace Commissioners.” It was “an important principle of republican liberty” that the three branches of government “should be kept unmingled.” But McKinley brushed aside such objections without much regard to what he considered mere constitutional niceties. As usual, he put his focus on directing events in his stealthy way and getting the outcome he wanted. In doing so, he signaled to discerning observers that he intended to exercise the full powers of the presidency even in the face of congressional complaints.

  As the president looked ahead to the coming elections, he had reason to think his party might buck the traditional tendency of voters to slam the majority party in midterm balloting. The economy was in greater shape than it had been in years. Prices were solid, the iron trades healthy, business failures down, cereal exports up. Perhaps most important, for the first time in the nation’s history total exports were double the value of imports, and even manufacturing exports exceeded manufacturing imports. Soaring gold production boosted investment capital for both farmers and manufacturers. All this translated into jobs and solid wages. What’s more, the patriotic fervor unleashed by the war and its triumphant outcome seemed to buoy voter sentiment toward the majority party.

  But McKinley
wasn’t inclined to leave anything to chance. When he accepted a speaking invitation at an Omaha peace celebration in October, Republicans showered him with pleas to add other appearances where closely contested campaigns were unfolding. He accepted many of them—“not making political speeches,” he said, “but discussing current events connected with the administration.” But of course any presidential appearance during the heat of an election autumn constituted a political event. One McKinley biographer portrayed this as “a significant departure from accepted political practice that became a precedent for the traveling White House of twentieth-century campaigns.” Once again the president didn’t feel constrained by precedent or what he considered outmoded political etiquette. He was in politics to win.

  When the votes were counted, Democrats gained twenty-nine seats, eight of those coming from splinter parties. Republican losses, held to twenty-one, constituted a respectable showing for a party in power between presidential elections. Besides, Republicans picked up seven Senate seats while Democrats lost eight. The results, though mixed, reflected high voter esteem for McKinley and his party halfway through the president’s term.

  — 21 —

  Empire

  “THE SINGLE CONSIDERATION OF DUTY AND HUMANITY”

  In late September 1898 President McKinley received an information bonanza with the arrival in Washington of General Francis V. Greene, who had traveled from the Philippines to deliver a message from Admiral Dewey. A round-faced man with a salt-and-pepper mustache and a demeanor of crisp seriousness, the forty-nine-year-old Greene had become a successful New York businessman following a sixteen-year army career that included stints as a West Point professor and a military attaché in Russia. Reentering the army after the Maine explosion, he had landed in the Philippines with some 3,550 troops following Dewey’s naval victory.

  McKinley avidly solicited Greene’s firsthand observations because for weeks the president had been struggling with the Philippine conundrum, the last remaining momentous issue emanating from the victory over Spain. The fate of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam had been essentially settled, thanks to the president’s dogged insistence that disposition of those matters must precede peace talks. Of course, the Paris negotiations inevitably would generate nettlesome points of contention as Spain sought to squeeze whatever advantage it could from its reduced global position. But the president had secured the desired outcome in the Caribbean and the Ladrones.

  The Philippine archipelago was something else entirely. McKinley didn’t know what he wanted there. More important, he didn’t know enough about the islands to know what he should want. He consulted the chief of the navy’s Bureau of Equipment, Commander R. B. Bradford, who had visited the islands years earlier. Bradford warned that it would be difficult to hold Manila as a naval base without commanding the entire island of Luzon, and holding Luzon would be difficult if other powers took possession of nearby islands, which seemed inevitable if the United States left them out there for the picking. That seemed to argue for taking the entire archipelago, but McKinley needed to assess what military and civic challenges that would entail and what kinds of commercial opportunities would ensue. Besides, he couldn’t ignore the political dangers at home at a time of growing anti-imperialist fervor.

  Dewey’s message via Greene didn’t help much in answering McKinley’s questions. The president had asked the admiral which island should be acquired if he confined his demand to a single landform. Dewey selected Luzon, since it contained Subic Bay, highly favorable for a naval base and coaling station and also a point of strategic command over Manila. By the time Dewey got his reply to McKinley, however, the answer had become obvious. The admiral also offered “a few random bits of data on climate, resources and trade” that didn’t add up to much. Nor did McKinley find particular value in Dewey’s bland observation that Luzon’s inhabitants were far more capable of self-government than the Cubans. It was beginning to appear that, for all his tactical brilliance in battle, the admiral possessed a leaden, incurious mind.

  But Greene’s mind was facile and restless, and he had devoted his six weeks in Asia to an exhaustive study of the archipelago, including its people, climate, mineral wealth, agriculture, commerce, economics, politics, and the implications of recent developments since the native insurgency had begun in 1896 under a fiery and articulate young leader named Emilio Aguinaldo. The president consulted with Greene numerous times over several days and received from the general a comprehensive written report that pulled together much of the information McKinley needed for sound decision making.

  Greene estimated the Philippine population at between 7 million and 9 million, with a significant proportion of those—about 3.4 million—living on Luzon. There were some thirty separate races, each speaking a different dialect, though fully five-sixths of the Christian population (about 6 million people) belonged to two tribes, the Tagalog and the Visayans. These dominant tribes seemed to be “industrious and hardworking,” although there had been “occasional evidences of deceit and untruthfulness in their dealings” with U.S. officials. Most Filipinos worked in agriculture and demonstrated little inclination or ability in manufacturing, the arts, or mining. In the few major cities (Manila, Cebu, Iloilo), there were “many thousands” of educated, propertied natives, including merchants, lawyers, doctors, and priests.

  For centuries the Spanish ran the Philippines largely as a trading center, connecting the New World with far Asia. This meant their central aim was to dominate Manila and lesser port cities on the islands of Luzon, Panay, and Negros, while the Catholic order became the primary Spanish influence in the countryside. Spanish officials largely ignored the islands’ vast agricultural and mining resources until the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution spawned efforts to develop Philippine raw materials for export and create Philippine markets for finished goods. This unsettled the archipelago’s civic equilibrium as Spain first opened up society with administrative reforms, then pulled back severely with the arrival of the infamous General Valeriano Weyler, the same iron-fisted leader who later generated so much brutality and civic unrest in Cuba.

  In Greene’s view, if Philippine society could be stabilized and Western technology and knowhow brought to bear, the United States could exploit rich opportunities in the mining of gold, coal, oil, and sulfur, as well as in harvesting rice, corn, hemp, sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton, and cocoa. Upgrades in transportation could spur greater internal commerce and foster trade with many logical markets throughout Asia and the Americas. “With these islands in our possession and the construction of railroads in the interior of Luzon,” wrote Greene, “it is probable that an enormous extension could be given this commerce, nearly all of which would come to the United States.”

  But such a path was strewn with difficulties, reflected in the recent history of the islands, which Greene summarized (though McKinley already knew much of this background). Like Spanish rule in Cuba, the Philippine version had been autocratic and incompetent. “The natives have no place in the government,” wrote Greene, except for clerks in the public offices in Manila and petty positions in the villages. Also decisions at those levels could be nullified at whim by the imperious governor-general, whose arbitrary decision making “is shown in the hundreds of executions for alleged political offences” from 1895 through 1897, as well as thousands of deportations and imprisonments. Moreover Greene revealed widespread reports “that pecuniary dishonesty and corruption exist throughout the whole body of Spanish office holders.”

  All this led to Aguinaldo’s vigorous independence movement beginning in August 1896. Born poor and without prospects around 1869, this mixed-blood peasant defied the odds of life. Spanish authorities didn’t even allow men of his station to tuck their shirts into their trousers, a means of marking their lowly status. Mark Twain, emerging as a fiery leader of America’s anti-imperialist forces, was to write of Aguinaldo, “Grandson of a Chinaman, a race held in aversion out there—one handicap. Son of a peasant veg
etable-peddler—another. Not fluent in the tongue of the masters of the country . . . another. Allowed but a mean and meager schooling by the masters of the land—another. ‘Denied the remotest semblance of equality’ with the master race—another. Barefoot by compulsion, and not even allowed any authority over the southern extension of his own shirt—certainly another.”

  Slight of build (“short but well-knit,” as the New York Tribune described him), with a smooth face and languid eyes, Aguinaldo soon demonstrated a rare ability to inspire men with his organizational skill, fervent idealism, and lyrical expressiveness. His decisions and actions were “slow and deliberate,” said the Tribune, adding that this trait “may be a sign of depth and breadth of mental caliber.” He never seemed ruffled or agitated in either victory or adversity, which was all the more remarkable given that he was only twenty-seven when he emerged as the leader of the Philippine insurrection, commanding a force of 30,000. His resolve was reflected in how he dealt with a political rival, Andrés Bonifacio. Outmaneuvering Bonifacio, Aguinaldo got himself named president of the revolutionary government in early 1897. Then, not content with that victory, the new president ordered the arrest and trial of Bonifacio on trumped-up treason charges. He was executed on May 10, 1897.

  In reviewing Aguinaldo’s insurgency, Greene said the rebel force “can hardly be called an army,” but it nonetheless proved highly effective as a vexatious guerrilla operation against 25,000 of the best regulars Spain could send to the islands and numerous native militias under Spanish command. Aguinaldo captured nearly 3,000 militia troops during June and July 1896 while also constantly harassing Spanish forces in the trenches, “keeping them up at night and wearing them out with fatigue.” Surrounding Manila, Aguinaldo cut off supplies to the city and forced the citizens, including Spanish troops, to subsist on horse and buffalo meat. Capturing Manila’s water works, he cut off its water supply. Spanish forces lost some 150 officers and 2,500 men, killed and wounded, over a ten-month period, while Aguinaldo’s forces, despite heavier losses, pressed the fight relentlessly, capturing more and more territory surrounding Manila.