by H. W. Brands
“God’s in his heaven; all’s right with the world,” Hanna wired McKinley as the returns came in.
“Oh, God, keep him humble,” McKinley’s mother prayed.29
Chapter 20
IMPERIAL DREAMS
When Frederick Jackson Turner and the U.S. census director couldn’t find a frontier in the West, they cited the growth and spread of the American population as the cause. Another reason, no less significant, was the abrupt halt of American territorial expansion. The American population didn’t grow much faster in the 1870s and 1880s than it had during most of the previous century, but for the first time the region available for settlement had stopped growing. The American domain effectively doubled in 1783, when Britain handed over the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley; it doubled again in 1803 when Jefferson acquired the western half of the valley from France in the Louisiana Purchase; it added another 50 percent in the 1840s upon the annexation of Texas, the conquest of California, New Mexico, and Utah, and the negotiated transfer of greater Oregon. William Seward bought Alaska from Russia in 1867.
And there the expansion stopped, to the surprise of much of the world, including many Americans. There were sufficient reasons for the halting, though they weren’t apparent all at once. In fact three decades would pass before the full meaning of American expansion would become clear, amid a bitter debate over whether it ought to resume and what it had to do with the continuing capitalist revolution.
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OMENS OF THAT debate informed the purchase of Alaska. Nearly all Americans found that frigid region less attractive than William Seward did. It was large but obviously unsuited to extensive settlement; the handful of non-indigenes—Russian fur traders, chiefly—clung to the shore at Sitka and a few other villages, dependent on provisions shipped in from outside. The precariousness of their existence was what compelled czars Nicholas I and then Alexander II to broach unloading Alaska to the Americans. Furs had drawn the Russians to Alaska, but the furs were playing out and the Russian treasury couldn’t stand the continued drain. The czars might have offered Alaska to Britain, but Britain was an enemy, or had been in the recent Crimean War. To strengthen an enemy would be foolish. Better to bequeath Alaska to the Americans, who were so convulsed by their internal problems as to threaten neither Russia nor anyone else.
William Seward understood Russia’s reasons for dumping Alaska; he had his own reasons for accepting it, starting with the bounty Alaska offered to American capitalists. Alaska’s furs might be thinning, but its fish—salmon that weighed a hundred pounds apiece, herring that schooled by the millions—would last forever. Timber—giant cedars and spruces, larger than anything Americans had seen outside the redwood belt of California—crowded to the ocean’s edge. Coal creased the mountains; iron deposits made compasses forget which way was north. Gold doubtless awaited only the discovering. Alaska’s harbors afforded shelter for ships plying the North Pacific, especially to Japan—lately opened to American trade—and China.
As obvious as Alaska’s charms were to Seward, the secretary of state understood that others in Washington were less discerning. “This negotiation must be conducted in the greatest secrecy,” he told the Russian minister, Edouard de Stoeckl, once the discussions grew serious in early 1867. “Let us see first if we can agree. It will be time then to consult Congress.” Seward offered $5 million for Alaska. Coincidentally or otherwise, Stoeckl’s instructions were to consider nothing less than $5 million. But he declined to commit, and a few days later Seward raised the offer to $7 million. Stoeckl accepted in principle, yet while Seward’s lawyers were formalizing the offer, one suggested stipulating that the transfer be unencumbered by any existing licenses or franchises. To compensate the Russian government for extinguishing such claims, an additional $200,000 was added to the purchase price. Stoeckl relayed the offer to St. Petersburg and received a favorable reply on Friday evening, March 29. He visited Seward’s home that night to tell him. The secretary was playing whist with family and friends; Stoeckl supposed that closing the deal could await the next day or the following Monday. Seward would hear nothing of the sort. Dropping his cards, he asked Stoeckl to meet him at the State Department in an hour. The American secretary and the Russian minister, flanked by their lawyers, initialed, engrossed, signed, and sealed the treaty for presentation to their respective governments.1
Seward hoped by his swiftness to present the Senate with a fait accompli, a bargain so tempting none but the willfully perverse could reject it. The pennies-per-acre price conjured parallels to the Louisiana Purchase, another impulsive acquisition, which had worked out splendidly. Yet opposition immediately arose. The New York Herald called Alaska an “ice house” and a “worthless desert”; the New York World declared the deal “one of the very neatest operations of Russian diplomacy.”
The treaty nonetheless cleared the Senate, largely on the strength of a marathon speech by Charles Sumner, chairman of the foreign relations committee, dilating upon the history, resources, and prospects of Alaska and summoning the spirit, lately silent, of Manifest Destiny. “The republic is something more than a local policy,” Sumner said. “It is a general principle, not to be forgotten at any time, especially when the opportunity is presented of bringing an immense region within its influence.”2
The House, which had to appropriate the money to underwrite the deal, put up greater resistance. “Seven million dollars in gold!” Hiram Price of Iowa expostulated. “How many hearts would this lift from the verge of despondency? How many orphans’ tears would it wipe away?”3
Yet Seward got the votes he needed. Some, in the spirit of Gilded Age politics, were purchased. “Do you wish to know how that treaty was consummated?” Seward asked editor and diplomat John Bigelow afterward. Bigelow said he did. “Then I must put you under oath,” Seward continued. “Before that money could be voted”—by the House—“twenty thousand had to be given to R. J. Walker”—formerly senator from Mississippi and secretary of the Treasury, lately legal adviser to Stoeckl and the Russian government—“ten thousand to his partner F. K. Stanton, ten thousand to ten members of Congress, and twenty thousand to Forney”—John W. Forney, friend of Walker and newspaper publisher of many pro-purchase articles. “Ten thousand more were to be given to poor Thad Stevens, but no one would undertake to give that to him, so I undertook it myself. The poor fellow died, and I have it now.”
Bigelow recorded this conversation in a diary that wasn’t made public for many years. Long before then the House approved the Alaska appropriation—by a margin of 113 to 43, which suggests either that Seward bought votes he didn’t need or that he didn’t tell Bigelow of all the votes he bought. The money evidently came from the $7.2 million purchase price, meaning that those congressmen who received payment were in the enviable position of voting their own bribes.4
WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER wasn’t related to Charles Sumner, and he didn’t share the latter’s penchant for politics, instead devoting himself to science, history, and philosophy. He early imbibed the thinking of Charles Darwin, and that of Herbert Spencer when a bit older, and he followed Spencer in believing that Darwin’s theories explained the rise of civilization. Some people were better at the contest of life than others, Spencer and Sumner said; the good ones climbed out of the jungle of savagery and passed their talents to their offspring, who climbed still higher. The sorting took place both among nations, with the industrial powers of Europe and North America having made the greatest progress so far, and within nations, as certain individuals and families accomplished and attained more than the rest.
Such, to William Sumner, seemed as obvious as the inflamed nose on J. P. Morgan’s face, and as undeniable as death. Nor were these views especially controversial in America among the kinds of people who encountered Sumner’s essays in the leading journals of the 1880s and 1890s. Religious conservatives—who tended not to read the Forum, the North American Review, Harper’s, and similar fare—disputed anything to do with Darwin, but am
ong the intelligentsia the description provided by Sumner and the other Social Darwinists didn’t elicit inordinate objection.
Sumner’s prescriptions were another matter. Sumner argued that attempts to overrule evolution—as by alleviating the plight of the poor—were both immoral and imprudent. “Those whom humanitarians and philanthropists call the weak are the ones through whom the productive and conservative forces of society are wasted,” he declared. “They constantly neutralize and destroy the finest efforts of the wise and industrious, and are a dead-weight on the society in all its struggles to realize any better things.” The do-gooders had made a cottage industry of weeping for the weak.
They see wealth and poverty side by side. They note great inequality of social position and social chances. They eagerly set about the attempt to account for what they see, and to devise schemes for remedying what they do not like. In their eagerness to recommend the less fortunate classes to pity and consideration, they forget all about the rights of other classes, they gloss over the faults of the classes in question, and they exaggerate their misfortunes and their virtues. They invent new theories of property, distorting rights and perpetuating injustice, as anyone is sure to do who sets about the readjustment of social relations with the interests of one group distinctly before his mind, and the interests of all other groups thrown into the background. When I have read certain of these discussions, I have thought that it must be quite disreputable to be respectable, quite dishonest to own property, quite unjust to go one’s own way and earn one’s own living, and that the only really admirable person was the good-for-nothing.
The reformers, Sumner said, were constantly hatching plans to employ the power of government on behalf of their favored victims. “Their schemes, therefore, may always be reduced to this type—that A and B decide what C shall do for D.” A and B were the reformers; they derived power and self-satisfaction from this arrangement. D, the object of their concern, received material benefits. C, whom Sumner called the “Forgotten Man,” unwillingly supported the others. “We should get a new maxim of judicious living,” Sumner said sarcastically: “Poverty is the best policy. If you get wealth, you will have to support other people; if you do not get wealth, it will be the duty of other people to support you.”5
The immorality of freeloading aside, Sumner held that tampering with the social mechanism reduced total welfare. “If any one will look over his dinner table the next time he sits down to dinner, he can see the proofs that thousands of producers, transporters, merchants, bankers, policemen, and mechanics, through the whole organization of society and all over the globe, have been at work for the last year or more to put that dinner within his reach.” All this happened not by accident but by an interlocking set of agreements and expectations evolved over time. Reformers thought they could improve the operation of the social mechanism by bending this lever or adjusting that flywheel; instead they threw the whole thing out of order.6
Rejecting reform, Sumner put his faith in laissez faire. “Let us translate it into blunt English,” he said of the French phrase. “It will read: Mind your own business. It is nothing but the doctrine of liberty. Let every man be happy in his own way.” Sumner didn’t promise paradise. “We never supposed that laissez faire would give us perfect happiness. We have left perfect happiness entirely out of our account.” He would settle for imperfection not made worse by reformers. “If the social doctors will mind their own business, we shall have no troubles but what belong to Nature. Those we will endure or combat as we can. What we desire is that the friends of humanity should cease to add to them.”7
Sumner’s philosophy supported domestic capitalism in obvious ways and was often cited to that effect; but it had implications for foreign policy as well. The struggle among humans took sharpest form in war, with the fit inheriting the earth and the meek finding early graves. This had been so from time out of mind, and the onset of industrialization hadn’t changed anything essential. “War has always existed and always will,” Sumner wrote. “It is in the conditions of human existence.” Tribes and nations competed for the resources of the earth, starting with land but extending, in the modern age, to vital minerals, markets for exports, and opportunities for investment. The deft and strong advanced, the rest retreated, and each tear devoted to the losers was water wasted. “The inevitable doom of those who cannot or will not come into the new world system is that they must perish. Philanthropy may delay their fate, and it certainly can prevent any wanton and cruel hastening of it; but it cannot avert it, because it is brought on by forces which carry us all along like dust upon a whirlwind.”
Yet Sumner refused to celebrate war, any more than he celebrated famine, pestilence, or other winnowers of the human race. “Shall any statesman … ever dare to say that it would be well, at a given moment, to have a war, lest the nation fall into the vices of industrialism and the evils of peace? The answer is plainly: No! … No war which can be avoided is just to the people who have to carry it on, to say nothing of the enemy.… A statesman who proposes war as an instrumentality admits his incompetency.”8
Even so, wars would come whether humans willed them or not. And like the other riders of the apocalypse they left improvement in their wake. “While men were fighting for glory and greed, for revenge and superstition, they were building human society. They were acquiring discipline and cohesion; they were learning cooperation, perseverance, fortitude and patience.… War forms larger social units and produces states.… The great conquests have destroyed what was effete and opened the way for what was viable.”9
NOT ALL THE Social Darwinists were as gloomy as Sumner. John Fiske, by comparison, was positively sunny. The struggle of nations, Fiske asserted in a widely reprinted essay bearing the historically resonant title “Manifest Destiny,” was the struggle against barbarism; as the barbarians succumbed, civilized society emerged. And with its emergence the temptation to war diminished. “Men become less inclined to destroy life or to inflict pain. Or, to use the popular terminology, which happens to coincide precisely with that of the doctrine of evolution, they become less brutal and more humane.”
Yet Fiske conceded that it might be centuries before humanity evolved to where war was obsolete. “For a very long time,” he said, “the possibility of peace can be guaranteed only through war.” And the surest guarantee was that the most pacific nations possess the most potent weapons.
Fiske nominated the United States for avenging angel of peace. The Civil War had shown Americans’ willingness to die—and kill—for principle. It also revealed the astonishing effects of industrialization on human conflict. “Never did any war so thoroughly illustrate how military power may be wielded by a people that has passed entirely from the military into the industrial stage of civilization.”
Most significantly, the war confirmed the redemptive power of American democracy. Fiske followed Lincoln in declaring the crux of the conflict to be not whether people could own others but whether they could govern themselves. As important as emancipation proved to be, the deeper issue was whether democracy “should be overthrown by the first deep-seated social difficulty it had to encounter, or should stand as an example of priceless value to other ages and to other lands.” Democracy had stood its test, and it now gleamed its light across the whole planet.
Yet Fiske wasn’t content for America merely to set an example. Americans must spread their values, institutions, and even their offspring as vigorously as their ancestors had done. The momentum of history was on their side; to turn from the task was to ignore the logic of evolution. “The work which the English race began when it colonized North America is destined to go on until every land on the earth’s surface that is not already the seat of an old civilization shall become English in its language, in its religion, in its political habits and traditions, and to a predominant extent in the blood of its people. The day is at hand when four-fifths of the human race will trace its pedigree to English forefathers, as four-fifths of the white people in
the United States trace their pedigree today.” The world was America’s for the taking. “There is really no reason, in the nature of things, why the whole of mankind should not constitute politically one federation.… The time will come when such a state of things will exist upon the earth, when it will be possible … to speak of the United States as stretching from pole to pole.”10
Josiah Strong thought like Fiske—so much so that he felt compelled to say he had been preaching assertive Anglo-Saxonism “three years before the appearance of Prof. John Fiske’s ‘Manifest Destiny.’ ” Strong was the general secretary of the American Evangelical Alliance, and he gave God due credit for America’s astonishing rise. Democracy was but half of America’s secret; the other was “pure spiritual Christianity,” by which Strong meant Northern European Protestantism, untainted by Romish superstition.
Strong’s God had no difficulty with Darwin. Under the aegis of heaven, the Anglo-Saxons had evolved into the dominant race on the planet, and nowhere more convincingly than in America. Strong quoted Darwin: “There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection; for the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country, and have there succeeded best.” Statistics showed clearly that the Anglo-Saxons were thriving. “In 1700 this race numbered less than 6,000,000 souls. In 1800 Anglo-Saxons (I use the term somewhat broadly to include all English-speaking peoples) had increased to about 20,500,000, and now, in 1890, they number more than 120,000,000.” America had witnessed the greatest explosion in Anglo-Saxon numbers: a 250-fold increase in two centuries, by Strong’s count. But the race spread even as it multiplied, colonizing the Indies, the Antipodes, and parts of Africa. “This mighty Anglo-Saxon race, though comprising only one-thirteenth part of mankind, now rules more than one-third of the earth’s surface, and more than one-fourth of its people.”