But before the commission could reach that conclusion, the Miles allegation generated plenty of baneful consequences. Stung and incensed, Eagan requested an opportunity to testify in rebuttal before the commissioners and took the occasion to attack Miles as a liar “with as black a heart as the man who blew up the Maine possessed.” He added for emphasis, “I wish to force the lie back into his throat, covered with the contents of a camp latrine.” The Washington Times reported that, although Eagan’s words were “the words of violence and heat—the phrases of mad passion—they were read with calmness and without any display of feeling.”
But they generated plenty of feeling in the army hierarchy, which recommended a court-martial to try Eagan for his intemperate attack on a superior officer. Typically McKinley deliberated on the matter carefully before formulating his response. On January 17 he consulted with Alger and Corbin in a meeting “long in duration,” then informed his Cabinet that the court-martial would proceed. Eagan was charged with conduct “unbecoming of an officer and a gentleman and . . . prejudicial to good order and military discipline.”
Eagan’s sensational outburst and his subsequent trial kept the “embalmed beef” scandal percolating in the national consciousness for weeks and served further to undermine Alger’s standing with his countrymen. Then McKinley, determined to stay ahead of the story, created yet another investigative panel, a military court of inquiry, to investigate Miles’s grimy allegations. That kept the story alive for another two months.
Testifying before the “beef court,” Miles quickly retreated from his most incendiary allegations of corruption and fraud and walked back many of his harshest remarks to reporters. In late April the court rejected any suggestion that the army’s canned or refrigerated beef contained harmful preservative chemicals. It was nutritious food, said the court—adding, though, that it should not have been used in the tropics on such a large scale without sufficient experimentation beforehand. That, said the court, was a “colossal error.” But it discerned no ulterior motive in Eagan’s effort to feed the troops. As for Miles, it said he had “no sufficient justification” for his allegations and demonstrated particularly bad judgment in not reporting his suspicions immediately upon developing them, as soldiers continued to eat the allegedly tainted meat for weeks in the meantime.
In late January Eagan was found guilty of charges that carried a penalty of dismissal from the army. McKinley commuted that sentence to suspension from duty for six years, the remainder of the time prior to Eagan’s scheduled retirement. Under the president’s commutation, he would be reinstated in time to retire with regular rank and pay.
That finally ended the sensational beef controversy for the country—but not for Alger, whose political standing continued to plummet. “The honor of the army has been soiled,” declared the New York Times. Later, when Alger appeared with the president at a Boston event, his name elicited hisses from the audience. The president’s cousin, William Osborne, writing from London, said nearly everyone he talked to deprecated Alger. He urged the president to “clear the atmosphere of this army criticism immediately.”
In late March Alger traveled to Cuba for a three-week fact-finding tour to escape the firestorm and bolster his national image. It didn’t work, in part because upon his return he announced plans to run for senator from Michigan in the fall. That would place McKinley in a delicate position should an intraparty battle emerge for the post, as seemed likely. It also aligned Alger with Michigan’s governor Hazen Pingree, a fiery populist and harsh McKinley critic. This proved troublesome when Alger told reporters that “Gov. Pingree is for President McKinley first, last, and all the time.” Asked about it, Pingree responded with characteristic sarcasm and scorn:
The question whether I am for McKinley lies with the President, not with me. If Gen. Alger knows that President McKinley is opposed to territorial expansion, and is not an advocate of the murders and the destruction being visited upon the innocent Filipinos, he has a right to say that I am for McKinley. If Gen. Alger is informed that McKinley is opposed to trusts and . . . in favor of legislation to restrict and suppress them, then I am closer to the opinions of McKinley than has generally been believed. If Gen. Alger is assured that President McKinley is not in touch and sympathy with the disreputable political methods of Mark Hanna and his friends, and deprecates such leadership, then I am for McKinley.
The next Day Alger told reporters that, sure, he may have disagreed with some administration policies, but Treasury Secretary Gage did the same in putting forth a currency plan that was rejected by the president. This was a gross violation of Cabinet protocol, which held that members should never reveal the positions of their colleagues in private Cabinet discussions.
Such behavior was untenable, as many newspaper commentators understood. “Why,” asked the New York Times, “does the President keep Alger in the place in which he has displayed an incompetence so abysmal, a spirit so small?” From across the Atlantic, the Times of London intoned, “Mr. Alger is a burden which no President, no party, would carry voluntarily. . . . He imperils Mr. McKinley’s renomination and re-election.” Many papers expressed puzzlement at McKinley’s lassitude in the face of such an internal crisis. The New York Times speculated, charitably, that the “kindliness of [McKinley’s] heart probably has resolved to stand by Alger all the more tenaciously because of the open manifestation of aversion for him.”
But the president’s heart was becoming less kindly by the day. Each evening Cortelyou showed him that day’s press coverage, with the “demand for a change” becoming practically unanimous. Cortelyou noted in his diary that the president continued to treat Alger “with every courtesy—too much, many think—and the evidently strained relations are made as bearable as the situation can warrant.” But behind the scenes the president was dealing with the situation in his own way. He had “several rather trying interviews” with Alger in early July and finally got him to resign, effective the following January 2—nearly six months away. The president withheld this information, however, in hopes he could get Alger out sooner. On July 18, responding to Cortelyou’s disparagement of Alger, the president looked at his secretary a few moments, then said quietly, “Something will come to a head tomorrow.”
The next morning McKinley invited his secretary on a walk through the White House grounds. “Well,” said the president, “he has over and left it with me. . . . It is to take effect at my pleasure.” He claimed the culminating interview with Alger had been “brief and devoid of any embarrassing features.”
The deed was done. The president that afternoon drafted a brief message to accompany Alger’s resignation notice, then sought comments from Hay, Long, and Cortelyou. When they all approved, the president placed it in the drawer of his Cabinet Room table and told Cortelyou, “I’ll leave that there to-night and you will know where it is if anything happens to me to-night.”
To replace Alger McKinley quickly set his sights on Elihu Root, the high-powered New York attorney known for his quick mind, moderate reformism, probity, and professional loyalty. He was a slender, stern-looking man with a shock of thick hair covering his forehead and thin lips that could erase his austere countenance instantly by forming into what Hay called a “frank and murderous smile.” Root had no background in military matters, and nobody was clamoring for the New Yorker’s elevation, not even Tom Platt, because nobody saw the value he could bring to such a position. But McKinley, who had consulted with Root shortly after his inauguration and had offered him the Spanish mission in 1897, knew what he wanted. His novel and creative thinking was manifest in a telephone exchange between Root and a presidential messenger, Congressman Lemuel Quigg.
“The President directs me to say to you that he wishes you to take the position of Secretary of War,” said Quigg.
“Thank the President for me,” replied Root, “but say that it is quite absurd, I know nothing about war, I know nothing about the army.”
Quigg asked Root to hold the phone whi
le he consulted with McKinley. Returning, he said, “President McKinley directs me to say that he is not looking for any one who knows anything about the army; he has got to have a lawyer to direct the government of these Spanish islands, and you are the lawyer he wants.”
Beguiled by the logic and the challenge of leadership, Root accepted, and the president expressed to Cortelyou his “great satisfaction.” In constructing his initial Cabinet in early 1897, the president’s performance had been not much above mediocre. Now he had a Cabinet as strong as any in recent memory.
— 23 —
Aguinaldo
INTERTWINED MILITARY AND POLITICAL DANGERS
On April 19, 1899, rumors began circulating in New York City that House Speaker Thomas B. Reed, that irrepressible bulk of political will and guile, had taken a $50,000-a-year position with a prestigious Manhattan law firm and soon would resign his House seat. Asked about it by reporters, Reed dismissed the question with his characteristic gruffness. “I would rather not talk on that subject,” he growled. “In fact, I have not given the matter any consideration as yet.” Then he headed off on a three-month European vacation.
The speaker’s reply wasn’t entirely truthful, and the reporters knew it. He did in fact intend to abandon his speakership and join the firm of Simpson, Thatcher & Barnum. The next day many newspapers treated the rumors as fact. “Speaker Reed’s withdrawal from public life,” announced the Washington Post, “will be, beyond doubt, the most important and far-reaching incident which has occurred in political circles for a long time.” The paper called Reed “a clear and forcible speaker, a sharp and ready debater, a parliamentarian unexcelled, and a man whose tremendous force of character dominated the House.”
The Post speculated that sixty-year-old “Czar Reed,” as he was known, felt frustrated as a presidential aspirant and thus would abandon politics for money. “He is a man who loves the good things of life and chafes if he has them not.”
This interpretation, correct as far as it went, missed a significant element. Reed’s beloved Republican Party had taken a turn he could neither abide nor forestall. He fumed at McKinley’s imperialism and fumed even more at the position it placed him in—charged with maintaining party unity in behalf of the president’s agenda and yet aghast at his foreign policy. The annexation of Hawaii was bad enough, and he had done what he could to undermine that errant action without precipitating a public rupture with the president. But now, truly enraged at McKinley’s Philippine policy, he took to directing his acerbic wit indirectly at his nemesis. In mock opposition to a large appropriation for a Philadelphia museum, he said, referring to a Philippine tribe, “This seems like a great waste of money. We could buy 150,000 naked Sulus with that.”
Though he liked the idea of increasing his wealth, Reed wrote to a friend, that wasn’t his primary motivation. “Had I stayed,” he explained, “I must have been as Speaker always in a false position,” either promoting policies that repelled him or directing his power as speaker against those who had given him the power. Either course was untenable for a man of Reed’s principle.
Just a decade before, when Reed had bested McKinley in the run for speaker, he had dismissed his rival as “a man of little scope”—“sly” perhaps but “above his level.” He certainly lacked Reed’s intellectual depth and devastating wit. The Major was a Mason who attended church regularly and listened respectfully to nearly all who approached him, even Democrats. To Reed, he seemed to operate in a bubble of blandness.
And yet now he was president of the United States, the country’s dominant political figure, moving it in directions that Reed couldn’t abide. The mystery of William McKinley was perhaps most mystifying of all to Thomas Reed. But if the speaker didn’t understand McKinley and his rise, McKinley understood Reed all too well as a powerful figure who, at any moment, might direct his powers to thwart the presidential agenda. McKinley never spoke ill of Reed, but his view of the man was reflected in the fact that he had set foot in the White House only once during McKinley’s two years there. Rumors actually filtered through Washington that the White House might recruit an opponent for the speakership at the next Congress. Thus it wasn’t surprising that Reed would decide to steal away from Washington.
But opposition to the president’s expansionism wouldn’t recede with Reed’s retreat. Industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who had helped get McKinley out of his financial jam during his gubernatorial days, now helped underwrite the anti-expansionist activities of Carl Schurz and Mark Twain. He closed a letter to the president by identifying himself as “Your friend personally; but the bitterest enemy you have officially, as far as I know.” Schurz attacked relentlessly in national magazines and at meetings and rallies around the country. The peace treaty with Spain, he declared, had “half a dozen bloody wars in its belly” and constituted “an open and brutal declaration of war against our allies, the Filipinos, who struggled for freedom and independence from foreign rule.”
These men were not alone. In transforming America from a contained land power into a global empire, McKinley had stirred a robust opposition movement that included former presidents Harrison and Cleveland, current prominent politicians William Jennings Bryan and George Hoar, reform-minded thinkers such as Edwin Godkin and Samuel Francis Adams, college presidents and academics, labor leaders, prominent clergymen, and famous writers Twain, William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters, and Ambrose Bierce. “It would be no mean task,” writes historian Robert L. Beisner, “to think of another issue that has united such a collection of Democrats and Republicans, progressives and conservatives, party stalwarts and independents, businessmen and labor-union chiefs.”
It wasn’t simply humanitarian impulses that propelled these opponents of empire. Racial attitudes played a part for some. Schurz, for example, feared a massive influx of “Spanish-Americans, with all the mixture of Indian and negro blood, and Malays and other unspeakable Asiatics, by the tens of millions!” But the main arguments were that America had no business subjugating other peoples, that the imperatives of imperialism would undermine democracy at home, and that the price in blood and treasure was higher than America should impose upon its citizens. As Senator Hoar expressed it, “There has never been a republic yet in history that acquired dominion over another nation that did not rule it selfishly and oppressively.” California’s Democratic Senator Stephen White declared that “the carrying out of the expansion question will prove disastrous to the republic.”
McKinley knew he must get ahead of these arguments with his own reassuring Philippine policy rationale. It wasn’t that the anti-imperialists were sweeping the country with their polemics. Most Americans embraced the idea of American greatness, and in those times that usually meant expansion, colonies, global trade, and a big navy with coaling stations around the world. McKinley was delivering on that. But the anti-imperialists could erode his political standing, particularly if U.S. forces in the Philippines got bogged down in a costly struggle, with growing casualty reports and no discernible victory in sight. Then his political fortunes would fall abruptly, and he knew it.
He chose as his vehicle of communication a February 16 address before a dinner of Boston’s Home Market Club. Ten days earlier, as he worked on the speech and read passages to young Charles Dawes, the president seemed to Dawes “much troubled.” Later, accompanying Mrs. McKinley and others to the theater, Dawes heard from General Corbin that the president had been shaken by Filipino casualty reports after the battle around Manila. Sinking into McKinley’s consciousness, wrote Dawes in his diary, was the “enormous responsibilities now resting upon him and his country.” The president’s Boston speech was designed to clarify his policy and capture the imperatives of colonial responsibility undertaken “in the name of human progress and civilization.”
The president and his party left Washington for Boston at 5:25 p.m. on February 15 and made it to Jersey City by 11:40 that night. The presidential car then was placed upon a float and transported to New Yor
k’s Harlem River station, where it was attached to a Boston-bound train. Among those in the presidential party were secretaries Alger, Long, and Bliss, Postmaster General Smith, Representative Grosvenor, Cortelyou, and two White House doorkeepers. The party reached Boston at 10:02 the next morning, and the president was greeted by cheering crowds at the station and along the streets to the Hotel Touraine, where a cavalry battery delivered a twenty-one-gun salute. The procession was marred a bit by jeers directed at Alger: “Yah, yah, yah, beef, beef, beef!” yelled some in the crowd. The president spent the afternoon “in quietude” until escorted to the Mechanics’ Hall at 4:15 for the Home Market Club reception and dinner. Nearly 2,000 were served at the dinner, making it “the largest banquet ever arranged in this country,” said the Washington Post. Another 3,800 spectators filled the hall balconies.
When the time came to deliver his remarks, the president stood upon a bunting-draped dais under a wall of more bunting, with huge pictures of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and William McKinley, each labeled “Liberator.” That coincided neatly with the president’s message.
He began with a brief rendition of the war and its aftermath, emphasizing the “universal and hearty commendation” that greeted the decisions and actions leading to victory. But wars generate their own logic, often unforeseen and uncontrollable, and America’s late war entrusted to the country the lands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. “It is a trust we have not sought,” said the president. “It is a trust from which we will not flinch.”
Acknowledging the opposition to the Philippine cession, the president outlined the options facing him and the country at the end of hostilities. He dismissed the idea of giving the islands back to Spain with the words, “No true American consents to that.” Requiring Spain to transfer them to some other power or powers would have been “a weak evasion of duty.” The idea that the archipelago could have been “tossed into the arena of contention or the strife of nations; or . . . [been] left to the anarchy and chaos of no protectorate at all,” said the president, was “too shameful to be considered.”
President McKinley Page 42