Schurman concluded that the anti-American fervor came almost exclusively from the highly warlike Tagalogs, ready to kill not just Americans but other Filipinos to secure independence. Defeat the Tagalogs on Luzon and clean out their small but intimidating forces in the other islands, he said, and the rest of the archipelago would accept U.S. governance.
The question was whether Otis could do the job. The general was severely criticized in July when newspaper correspondents in Manila alleged that he had misled his superiors about the Philippine situation and used censorship to thwart reporters from filing honest stories. The correspondents accused Otis of presenting “an ultra-optimistic view that is not shared by the general officers in the field” and of ignoring the “dissention and demoralization resulting from the American campaign and the brigand character of their army.” Contrary to Otis’s cheery dispatches, asserted the reporters, the insurrection wouldn’t likely be defeated “without a greatly increased force.”
This jolted the American consciousness. McKinley’s Cabinet quickly took up the issue but decided not to instruct Otis on such an internal matter, particularly since the general held two long sessions with reporters and promised “greater liberality” in letting dispatches leave Manila. But the damage was done. The New York Times warned, “The Administration will be seriously hampered politically by having to assume responsibility for a General whose reports will be derided as unbelievable.” Numerous members of Congress urged the president to relieve the general, and the Washington Post reported, “The President’s position against a change is less determined now than formerly.”
Then newspaper accounts revealed that before his departure Secretary Alger had recommended that Otis’s responsibility be limited to civil authority, with General Lawton taking the military command. The implication was that Otis’s preoccupation with minutiae, particularly regarding civil matters, hampered the war effort. McKinley rejected the idea, but the New York Times captured Secretary Root’s assessment when it reported that, while Otis would not be “shorn of any command,” he was admonished to organize his priorities more effectively, break free of his “sedentary life,” and recognize that “the prime object to be achieved is to crush the armed Filipinos, and afterward to attend to the minute things in civil administration that critics say might be left to subordinates.”
The war debate turned nasty when McKinley supporters blamed anti-imperialists for energizing Aguinaldo’s cause even in the face of repeated defeats. General Joseph Wheeler, now serving in Manila and sending the president back-channel assessments, said it was “fearful to think of American soldiers being killed by ignorant half savages who are encouraged to do so by expressions of American citizens.” Thomas Platt, in a provocative statement, accused antiwar Americans of taking “immoderate satisfaction” at America’s military difficulties and deceiving Aguinaldo’s forces into thinking McKinley’s political opponents would win the next election and grant Philippine independence. In this view, Aguinaldo’s aim wasn’t necessarily to win battles but merely to hold on long enough to undermine American war support.
But holding on wasn’t easy given American firepower and battlefield tactics. In mid-August, MacArthur’s troops dislodged an insurgent force of 2,500 troops on the outskirts of a town called Angeles, driving them north and leaving some 200 killed and wounded (compared to just two Americans killed). But the victory didn’t encourage the president, who saw now that the war would require more aggressiveness and more troops. In mid-September he recalled Denby and Worcester from Manila since America’s future in the islands hinged on military strength and not civilian activity. As Judge Day put it in a letter to McKinley from his Canton retirement, “There can be only one sentiment now among patriotic Americans as to our duty to put down the Aguinaldo rebellion with all the force necessary to complete the work effectually and as soon as practicable.” It wasn’t lost on Day, or the president, that the Philippine conflict remained McKinley’s greatest impediment to a second term.
Another impediment had emerged when the anti-McKinley Cleveland Plain Dealer announced breathlessly, “Boom for Dewey in 1900; A Prophecy That the Admiral Is the Coming Man; A Presidential Boom Already Launched for Him in Washington.” The paper speculated that, upon his return from Asia, Admiral Dewey would be feted throughout America with military honors and parades and artillery salutes, and the frenzied enthusiasm would propel him right past McKinley and into the White House.
In the spring Dewey disavowed any interest in high office, telling a magazine reporter, “I am a sailor. A sailor has no politics.” Asked if he had ever voted, he replied, “Yes, years ago.”
But the frenzied enthusiasm predicted by the Plain Dealer did in fact sweep the country with the admiral’s triumphant return, cruising up the Hudson River and into New York Harbor atop the bridge of his famous flagship, the Olympia. On September 29 Dewey’s war vessel led the U.S. Atlantic fleet up the Hudson in a parade of giant battleships stretching, at one point, from 110th Street to 60th Street. The air was pierced by sirens and whistles, and one reporter speculated that “the ships expended more ammunition in salutes that day than had been fired at the Spanish in Manila Bay.” Dewey was overwhelmed. “Even the accounts in the newspapers, the invitations from cities and corporations and civic and patriotic organizations,” he wrote later, “did not fully prepare me for the splendor of the attentions awaiting me.” A Fifth Avenue parade the next day boasted some 35,000 participants, and a later fireworks display somehow formed a likeness of the admiral with a pattern of colored rockets in the sky. Similar ceremonies, parades, and enthusiasm greeted the admiral a few days later in Washington, where the president organized an elaborate White House “stag” dinner for the admiral, along with the capital’s top movers and shakers. Later, at an open-air ceremony that drew 50,000 citizens, Navy Secretary Long presented Dewey with a jeweled Tiffany sword from a grateful nation.
It was an open question whether this fervor would generate political energy, but some prominent Americans hoped it would. Publisher Henry Watterson of the Louisville Courier-Journal and the New York World’s influential Joseph Pulitzer both sought to generate a draft movement, and a rich financier and former navy secretary named William C. Whitney touted Dewey as a nonpolitician who could unite the country by transcending partisanship. “It is only at long intervals and special occasions,” he told Pulitzer’s World, “that Providence presents a man in whom the whole people have this unquestioning and perfect trust.”
Others considered the idea ridiculous. Mark Hanna called the draft-Dewey boomlet “indecent” because the admiral “has frequently said that nothing . . . would induce him to run for President.” The Washington Post predicted flatly, “The Dewey spasm in politics will not last.” But the Post also suggested Dewey could rise if McKinley’s political standing should somehow plummet through unforeseen developments—growing Philippine difficulties, for example, or untoward political events in Ohio. Should a Democrat win the gubernatorial battle in Ohio, said the paper, “the anti-McKinley Republicans, who are not numerous, would at once question the advisability of nominating a candidate who could not carry his own State.”
The old wounds of the Ohio Republican Party remained raw, and it didn’t take much of a bump to cause pain and induce bleeding. Even with all the power wielded now by the McKinley-Hanna faction, the Foraker group refused to yield. The battle was on once again, focused initially on the Cleveland mayoralty race and then, more intensely, on the state gubernatorial contest.
In Cleveland, attention focused on Mayor Robert McKisson, that stalwart of the Foraker-Bushnell-Kurtz faction, who wanted to be reelected. The year before, of course, McKisson had sought to destroy Hanna’s senatorial career—with the help of Ohio Senate Democrats and after Hanna had won the state GOP endorsement. Thus McKinley-Hanna loyalists considered him a party traitor and set out to defeat his reelection bid. The lingering residues of that senatorial election obliterated party lines in the Cleveland race. Many Republica
ns voted for Democrat John Farley, while thousands of Democrats favored McKisson. Farley won—a small price to pay, in Hanna’s view, for the luxury of kicking McKisson out of office. Better to have an opposition Democrat as mayor, thought Hanna, than a despised Republican enemy.
But Hanna and McKinley now feared a Republican enemy could grab the GOP gubernatorial nomination. With the state convention scheduled for early June, a number of Foraker-Bushnell-Kurtz men seemed bent on running, including Kurtz himself, as well as McKisson and Charles Daugherty, a journeyman politician with strong ties to Foraker and Bushnell. The nightmare scenario was a Kurtz nomination, given his vicious past attacks on Hanna and McKinley. “If Mr. Kurtz should be nominated,” argued the Washington Post, “the anti-administration men will have Mr. Hanna on the hip,” forcing him to support his most bitter intraparty adversary or risk a Democratic victory on the eve of the presidential campaign.
Kurtz bowed out, and McKisson’s Cleveland defeat undercut his candidacy. That left Daugherty to challenge Hanna’s favored candidate, state party chairman George Nash, a ruddy-faced former railroad lawyer who had served as Ohio’s attorney general. Hanna couldn’t leave anything to chance. After four years of Asa Bushnell in the governor’s chair, he needed his own man there. Further, Hanna needed a GOP nominee behind whom he could galvanize his statewide organization and keep the office in Republican hands.
Known for both his deft maneuvering and his brute force in the political arena, Hanna opted now for deft maneuvering. He turned to George B. Cox, the boss of Cincinnati and longtime Foraker man. The stocky, blunt-spoken Cox ran his operation out of a dingy office over a saloon called Mecca—aptly named because anyone in town who wanted anything had to make a pilgrimage there. Cox seemed to be distancing himself a bit from Foraker, perhaps partly because the senator couldn’t deliver on federal patronage as he once had. Hanna, with his White House ties, dominated that arena. Besides, Cox didn’t much care for Daugherty.
Hanna told the Cincinnati boss in a letter that he would be glad to cooperate with Cox “for the best interest of the party.” Though he wasn’t pledged to any candidate, he added, “I am opposed to Mr. Daugherty from a party standpoint, and I understand that we agree in that position.” Hanna concluded, “I admire your good sense and good management and have faith that we can work together.”
When the votes were counted, Nash was the gubernatorial nominee and Cox’s man John Caldwell captured the nomination for lieutenant governor. “Yes,” wrote Hanna to McKinley, “the people can be trusted.” It was a nicely crafted win-win outcome for both Hanna and Cox—and for McKinley. “There was an evident earnestness on the part of every one,” Myron Herrick wrote to the president after the convention, “to show conclusively their loyalty to the Administration.” He added that, when he encountered Bushnell for the first time since the unpleasantness surrounding Hanna’s previous senatorial contest, the governor had extended his hand and “evinced a desire to let old matters drop.” He had “substantially the same experience” with Foraker.
But when it came time to push the Nash candidacy, the intraparty wound once again began to ooze. Bushnell, the outgoing governor, refused to lift a finger in behalf of Nash, and Ohio’s Western Reserve region, a Bushnell stronghold, seemed particularly apathetic about the GOP candidate. Worse, when Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith traveled to Bushnell’s hometown of Springfield to talk with him about the problem, the governor suddenly discovered a pressing need to be in Columbus. It seemed that whenever Nash appeared anywhere in the state, Bushnell had a commitment elsewhere. And the hostility didn’t flow merely one way. Hanna declined to invite Bushnell to the campaign’s big kickoff demonstration and hardly could bring himself to utter the governor’s name on the stump during his early campaign appearances.
This lingering party animus threatened to destroy Nash’s candidacy, already under pressure from two serious general election opponents. One was Democrat John McLean, whose Washington-based family had made a fortune in railroads and utilities and also owned the Cincinnati Enquirer, a newspaper that, under McLean’s leadership, became a journalistic powerhouse. The other was the nonpartisan Toledo businessman and mayor, Samuel B. Jones, known as “Golden Rule” Jones for his ascetic brand of politics and extreme populism. Jones was the wild card in the deck. While he clearly would pull votes from Democrat McLean in several Ohio counties, he could damage Nash around Toledo and Cincinnati, where anti-Hanna sentiment was strong. A former state labor commissioner aligned with Jones predicted the gadfly Toledo mayor would get 75 percent of his support from Republicans. If correct, this was ominous. It didn’t help that Bushnell publicly praised Jones as “a man who practices what he preaches” while uttering nary a word in behalf of Nash.
Soon it was apparent that Nash wasn’t drawing large crowds, while Jones was stirring interest in GOP areas. Newspaper accounts suggested Jones was starting to pull Republican votes also in the industrial areas around Cleveland, a threatening development. “Apathy Menaces Nash,” was one Washington Post headline. The New York Times reported from Washington, “The impression is gaining ground here that if the Ohio election turns out in a way disadvantageous to the President there will be an effort to make admiral Dewey the Republican candidate for President.” The paper added that reports from Vermont, where Senator Proctor seemed to be grooming Dewey for a presidential run, “are making many of the President’s friends uncomfortable.”
Hanna lunged into this political thicket in characteristic fashion. He got McKinley to make helpful brief remarks—nonpolitical, of course—from the rear platform of his train as he passed through Ohio during his Midwestern speaking tour. Administration officials flocked to Ohio to stump for the president’s candidate. Hanna encouraged Nash to campaign on big national issues, particularly the Philippines, as a way of making the election a referendum on the president’s policies, which remained popular throughout much of the country. He importuned business interests in Hamilton County and Cleveland to rally behind Nash lest the antibusiness Jones prevail. Even Hay jumped in, issuing a statement disputing reports of an emerging formal alliance between the United States and Great Britain—thus reassuring Ohio’s many German American voters who were inclined to vote Republican unless the party seemed hostile to Germany.
As usual, Hanna pulled victory from the vapors of impending defeat. Nash outpolled McLean by nearly 50,000 votes, allowing the president to portray the outcome as an endorsement of his policies, rendered all the more credible by Republican victories also in Upper New York, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, South Dakota, and elsewhere. Platt crowed, “[The voters] indorse the war policy. They repudiate the criticisms made by the so-called anti-imperialists. [The results] indicate that President McKinley will be the choice of the people for a second term.” As far away as London, the Daily News predicted the president “will now have a free hand in the Philippines.”
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THE PRESIDENT MOVED aggressively to leverage this free hand into victory. He peppered Dewey with questions about the state of the archipelago and pored over back-channel letters streaming in from General Wheeler. When Dewey recommended augmenting the U.S. Philippine fleet with several warships, the president ordered them sent. He increased troop strength to 42,794 officers and men by November 5—with more ready to go if necessary. In an informal afterdinner cigar session with close associates at the White House, he emphasized his resolve to quell the rebellion and get to the job of democratizing the islands. One congressman later said the president was determined “to bend every resource to the stamping out of all opposition to our authority, the settlement of the war, and the establishment and maintenance of peace.”
McKinley didn’t wait for victory before moving on the civil front. In early November, America’s military authority established on the island of Negros the first autonomous government of Filipinos. The island’s U.S. military governor administered an oath of office to the judge of the island’s top court, who in turn swore in the gover
nor, three judges, twelve councilmen, the auditor, and the secretary of the interior, all Filipinos. Three days of feasting and an inaugural ball followed. “Negros leads in the van of civil government in the Philippines,” said a U.S. colonel. “Your honor lies in adding a new star to freedom’s flag.” McKinley hoped this action of good faith would persuade other Filipinos to pursue America’s model of autonomous government.
In mid-November, Otis unleashed a rapid movement of forces, including cavalry troops under General Samuel Young, toward Aguinaldo’s suspected low-country refuge. After nearly surrounding the startled rebel leader, Otis wired to Corbin, “Indications are that insurgents will not escape to mountain capital, at Bayombong, without great difficulty and loss, if at all.” But the elusive Aguinaldo managed to escape into the mountains, where his location became “a perfect enigma” to the Americans. For weeks the U.S. press peppered readers with rumors of his whereabouts, none ever confirmed. The dodgy insurgent issued a proclamation, though, declaring that his army would “not cease its efforts as long as there are any strangers in the land trying to enslave the Philippine people.” He praised America’s anti-imperialist opposition and invoked prayers “to God on high that the great Democratic party of the United States will win the next election, and that Imperialism will fail in its mad attempts to subjugate us.”
President McKinley Page 45