At this point, with the vote scheduled for February 6, with the outcome uncertain, with each side anxiously canvassing and counting every possible aye and nay, the Filipinos rose in their own war of independence. Their forces attacked the American lines outside Manila on the night of February 4. In Washington, although the news intensified the frenzied speculation, no one could be certain what effect it would have. A last-minute petition signed by ex-President Cleveland, President Eliot of Harvard and twenty-two other men of national prominence was addressed to the Senate, protesting against the treaty unless it included a provision against annexing the Philippines and Porto Rico. “In accordance with the principles upon which our Republic was founded we are in duty bound to recognize the rights of the inhabitants … to independence and self-government,” it said, and pointed out that if, as McKinley had once declared, the forcible annexation of Cuba would be “criminal aggression by our code of morals,” annexation of the Philippines would be no less so. Its text was unanswerable but it offered no judgeships, political futures or other coin that Lodge and Bryan were dealing in.
When the Senate voted on February 6, the treaty won by 57–27, with a one-vote margin. It was “the closest, hardest fight I have ever known,” said Lodge. In the aftermath one thing on which all agreed was that Bryan had swung the deciding votes. By the time the vote was counted 59 Americans were dead and 278 wounded and some 500 Filipinos were casualties in the Philippines. The cost of picking Malays was just beginning to be paid.
“The way the country puked up its ancient principles at the first touch of temptation was sickening,” wrote William James in a private letter. Publicly, to the Boston Evening Transcript, he wrote, “We are now openly engaged in crushing out the sacredest thing in this great human world—the attempt of a people long enslaved” to attain freedom and work out its own destiny. The saddest thing for men such as James was the parting with the American dream. America, Norton wrote, “has lost her unique position as a leader in the progress of civilization, and has taken up her place simply as one of the grasping and selfish nations of the present day.”
To many others the knowledge of American guns firing on Filipinos was painful. The anger of the Anti-Imperialists deepened and their membership increased to half a million, with branches of the League in Boston and Springfield, in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon. “We are false to all we have believed in,” wrote Moorfield Storey. “This great free land which for more than a century has offered a refuge to the oppressed of every land, has now turned to oppression.” Still unwilling to give up, he hoped for leadership from Reed, whom Roosevelt had called “the most influential man in Congress.” Writing to Senator Hoar, Storey begged him to “persuade Mr. Reed to come out as he should. He is very sluggish and lacks aggression in great matters. If he would come out I think he might really be the next President.”
It was too late. Reed’s sluggishness was that of a man for whom the fight has turned sour. Others whose main interest lay in non-political fields could feel as deeply without being shattered. Reed’s whole life was in Congress, in politics, in the exercise of representative government, with the qualification that for him it had to be exercised toward an end that he believed in. His party and his country were now bent on a course for which he felt deep distrust and disgust. To mention expansion to him, said a journalist, was like “touching a match” and brought forth “sulphurous language.” The tide had turned against him; he could not turn it back and would not go with it.
Like his country, he had come to a time of choice. He could go on to another term as Speaker, but already he could see signs of growing feeling in the House that he was too hostile to the Administration to continue as its principal lieutenant. Joe Cannon and others of his old associates were antagonized by his attitude and his remarks about the President but none dared attempt a contest to unseat him. The President lacked the nerve to come out openly in support of anyone else. Reed knew he could hold his command but it would be a term at bay against a pack snarling at his feet. He became “moody and ugly” in these days and curt to old colleagues whom he saw deserting him.
To retain office as Speaker would be to carry through a policy in the Philippines abominable to him. It would be to continue as spokesman of the party of Lincoln, which had been his home for so long and which had now chosen, in another way than Lincoln meant, to “meanly lose the last best hope of earth.” To his longtime friend and secretary, Asher Hinds, he said, “I have tried, perhaps not always successfully, to make the acts of my public life accord with my conscience and I cannot now do this thing.” For him the purpose and savor of life in the political arena had departed. He had discovered mankind’s tragedy: that it can draw the blueprints of goodness but it cannot live up to them.
In February, 1899, after the vote on the treaty, he made his choice. Although he said nothing publicly at this time, rumors that he intended to withdraw from politics began to appear in the press. When reporters came to ask him about his hostility to the Philippines policy and the Nicaragua Canal bill, he brushed aside their questions with an expression of “fatigue and disgust.” In April, after the close of the Fifty-fifth Congress, he authorized an announcement. The unbelievable proved true. Speaker Reed would retire from Congress and after a vacation in Europe would take up the private practice of law in New York as senior partner in the firm of Simpson, Thacher and Barnum.
“Congress without Tom Reed! Who can imagine it!” exclaimed an editorial in the New York Tribune. Everywhere was felt a half-frightened sense as of some great landmark being removed, leaving a gaping hole at the feet of observers. The Times, never one of his admirers, was moved to a full-column editorial on the “national loss.” It felt “there must be something wrong in the political condition” that made such a man leave public life for the private practice of law. Its Washington correspondent called the event a “calamity” for Congress in the degree to which it would reduce the level of ability after the Speaker departed. Godkin in the Evening Post mourned the passing from political life of that rare phenomenon, “a mature, rational man.”
Reed himself offered no public explanation of his going except to say, in a farewell letter to his constituents in Maine, “Office as a ribbon to stick in your coat is worth no-one’s consideration.” Cornered in the Manhattan Hotel in New York by reporters who urged that the public would want to hear from him, he replied, “The public! I have no interest in the public,” and turned on his heel and walked away.
Military operations in the Philippines swelled in size and savagery. Against the stubborn guerrilla warfare of the Filipinos, the U.S. Army poured in regiments, brigades, divisions, until as many as 75,000—more than four times as many as saw action in Cuba—were engaged in the islands at one time. Filipinos burned, ambushed, raided, mutilated; on occasion they buried prisoners alive. Americans retaliated with atrocities of their own, burning down a whole village and killing every inhabitant if an American soldier was found with his throat cut, applying the “water cure” and other tortures to obtain information. They were three thousand miles from home, exasperated by heat, malaria, tropical rains, mud and mosquitoes. They sang, “Damn, damn, damn the Filipino, civilize him with a Krag …” and officers on occasion issued orders to take no more prisoners. They won all the skirmishes against an enemy who constantly renewed himself. A raiding party which missed Aguinaldo but captured his young son made headlines. Reed, coming into his office that morning, said in mock surprise to his law partner, “What, are you working today? I should think you would be celebrating. I see by the papers that the American Army has captured the infant son of Aguinaldo and at last accounts was in hot pursuit of the mother.”
Aguinaldo fought for time in the hope that anti-imperialist sentiment in America would force withdrawal of the forces already sickening of their task. The longer the war continued, the louder and angrier grew the Anti-Imperialist protests. Their progr
am adopted at Chicago in October, 1899, demanded “an immediate cessation of the war against liberty.” They collected and reported all the worst cases of American conduct in the Philippines and all the most egregious speeches of imperialist greed and set them against the most unctuous expressions of the white man’s mission. They distributed pamphlets paid for by Andrew Carnegie, and when the League’s executive head, Edward Atkinson, applied to the War Department for permission to send the pamphlets to the Philippines and was refused, he sent them anyway.
Anxious to end the war and placate the “new-caught sullen peoples” and govern creditably, the Administration sent various committees to investigate the atrocities, to find out what the Filipinos really wanted—short of self-government, which they said they wanted—and to report on what form of civil government to give them. In April, 1900, the shy, kindly, three-hundred-pound Judge William Howard Taft was sent out to set up a civil government, armed with a charter drawn up by the new Secretary of War, Elihu Root, which granted the Filipinos a liberal degree of internal autonomy. Since neither they nor the Americans were ready to give up fighting, the attempt was premature, but Taft stayed on, determined to govern in the interest of “the little brown brother” as soon as he was given a chance. When friends at home, concerned for his welfare, sent anxious queries about his health, he cabled Elihu Root that he had been out horseback riding and was feeling fine. “How is the horse feeling?” Root cabled back.
Despite difficulties there was no re-thinking or hesitancy among the dominant Republicans about the new career upon which America was launched. The bill for constructing the Nicaragua Canal was in the Senate and so was Albert Beveridge, more closely allied with the Almighty than ever. “We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under God, of the civilization of the world,” he said on January 8, 1900. He informed Senators that God had been preparing “the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples” for this mission for a thousand years.
Some of Beveridge’s generation found the new image of America repugnant. Hearing the sound of “ignoble battle” coming “sullenly over the Pacific seas,” William Vaughn Moody wrote his “Ode in a Time of Hesitation,” which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in May, 1900. Are we still the “eagle nation” he asked, or:
Shall some less lordly bird be set apart?
Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat?
Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat?
This was the conscience of the few, felt too by Godkin, who, in his disillusion, said a strange and clairvoyant thing at this time. “The military spirit,” he wrote to Moorfield Storey in January, 1900, “has taken possession of the masses to whom power has passed.”
As the war passed its first anniversary with the American forces deeply extended, there was one event ahead that might yet bring it to an end: the coming Presidential election. In this the Anti-Imperialists and Aguinaldo placed their hopes. Its earliest oddity was a boom for Admiral Dewey, partly inspired by the desperation of some Democrats to find any candidate other than Bryan. Having concluded after some study of the subject that “the office of President is not such a very difficult one to fill,” the Admiral announced he was available but as his wording did not inspire confidence and he seemed vague as to party, his candidacy collapsed. Bryan loomed.
The Anti-Imperialists were caught in an agonizing dilemma. McKinley represented the party of imperialism; Bryan in Carl Schurz’s words was “the evil genius of the anti-imperialist cause,” loathed for his betrayal in the matter of the treaty and feared for his radicalism. Schurz met with Carnegie, Gamaliel Bradford and Senator Pettigrew at the Plaza Hotel in New York in January, 1900, in an effort to organize a third party so that the American people would not “be forced by the two rotten old party carcasses to choose between two evils.” Carnegie subscribed $25,000 on the spot, while the others made up a matching sum. Shortly afterward, members of the steel trust with whom Carnegie was then negotiating the sale of his company told him that if he opposed McKinley the deal would not go through. Preferring United States Steel to a third party, Carnegie withdrew his support, received his shares and retired from business. Schurz and the others, however, held a Liberty Congress at Indianapolis, at which they called on Reed to be their candidate, but neither Reed nor anyone else wanted the vain task of leading a mugwump party. At Kansas City in July the inevitable happened: Bryan was chosen.
Campaigning on imperialism as he had planned, Bryan ranged the country as strenuously as before. He was tarnished, but his magnetism, his passion and his sincerity-of-the-moment still reached through to the people and even across the Pacific. In Bryan, but for whom the Treaty of Paris would have been defeated, the Filipinos placed their faith. “The great Democratic party of the United States will win the next fall election,” Aguinaldo promised in a proclamation. “Imperialism will fail in its mad attempt to subjugate us by force of arms.” His soldiers shouted the war cry, “Aguinaldo-Bryan!”
In their Chicago platform, anticipating the election, the Anti-Imperialists had said, “We propose to contribute to the defeat of any person or party that stands for the subjugation of any people.” There was nothing to do, as a friend wrote to ex-President Cleveland, but “to hold your nose and vote” for Bryan. The modified rapture of such people for the Democratic candidate won them the name thereafter of the “hold-your-nose-and-vote” group. So distasteful to the Nation were both candidates that it refused to support either, preferring, as a dissatisfied reader complained, to “sit on a fence and scold at both.”
The Republicans had no such difficulties. Although they preferred to be called expansionists rather than imperialists, they were proud of the condition whatever its name, and believed in its goals. Forthright as usual, Lodge said, “Manila with its magnificent bay is the prize and pearl of the East;… it will keep us open to the markets of China.… Shall we hesitate and make, in coward fashion, what Dante calls the ‘great refusal’?” Secretary Hay having pronounced the policy of the Open Door, China’s markets were much on men’s minds. During the summer of the campaign, the siege of the legations at Peking by the Boxers and the American share in the relief expedition pointed up the far-flung role the country was now playing. Its most convinced and vocal champion was McKinley’s new vice-presidential nominee, Theodore Roosevelt, who took the President’s place as chief campaigner. Unsure of victory, for the “full dinner pail” was more a slogan than a fact, he campaigned so vigorously and indefatigably that to the public and cartoonists the Rough Rider with the teeth, pince-nez and unquenchable zest appeared to be the real candidate. He derided the specter of militarism as a “shadowy ghost,” insisted that expansion “in no way affects our institutions or our traditional policies,” and said the question was not “whether we shall expand—for we have already expanded—but whether we shall contract.”
The country listened to thousands of speeches and read thousands of newspaper columns raking over every argument for and against imperialism and every aspect of the war in the Philippines. It learned, thanks to the efforts of the Anti-Imperialists, more about the conduct of its own troops than the public usually does in wartime. Dumdum bullets, so thoroughly disapproved (except by the British) at The Hague Peace Conference the year before, were found to have been issued to some American troops. In the end the American people, like the British in their Khaki election of the same year, approved the incumbents. What a people thinks at any given time can best be measured by what they do. McKinley and Roosevelt were elected by 53 per cent of the votes cast and with a greater margin over Bryan than had been received in 1896. Expansion and conquest were accepted and the break with the American past confirmed. Still at war in the Philippines, America moved into the Twentieth Century.
For Aguinaldo, after the election, there was nothing more to hope for. Retreating into the mountains, still fighting, he was captured by trickery in March, 1901, and in captivity in April signed an oath of allegiance to the United States together with a pro
clamation to his people calling for an end to resistance: “There has been enough blood, enough tears, enough desolation.”
Professor Norton voiced the elegy of the Anti-Imperialists. “I reach one conclusion,” he wrote to a friend in the month of Aguinaldo’s capture, “that I have been too much of an idealist about America, had set my hopes too high, had formed too fair an image of what she might become. Never had a nation such an opportunity; she was the hope of the world. Never again will any nation have her chance to raise the standard of civilization.”
Six months later came Czolgosz’s shot and McKinley’s place was taken by Roosevelt, “that damned cowboy,” as Mark Hanna said when he heard the news. The remark was not astute. It was an architect of the new age who now became its President at forty-three.
Reed wrote him a letter of good wishes but the exchange was formal and the gulf remained. Living in New York, Reed formed a congenial companionship with Mark Twain, whose wit and turn of mind and sardonic outlook matched his own. They were guests together on board the yacht of the multi-trust capitalist Henry H. Rogers for a long cruise of which the epic legend survives that Reed won twenty-three poker hands in succession. He visited Washington now and then, once arguing a case before the Supreme Court and entertaining the justices by his rather remarkable style of delivery. He did not revisit the floor of the House but would hold court and see old friends in the office of the Ways and Means Committee. On doctor’s orders he succeeded in losing forty pounds but his health was worrisome. In the summer of 1902 he was the central figure at Bowdoin’s centennial celebration, where he enjoyed “a rare good time” such as, he said, “we may have again but cannot sanely look for.” In December he was back in Washington and while in the Committee Room at the Capitol, was suddenly taken ill. He proved to be in the terminal stage of a chronic nephritis. Five days later, on December 6, 1902, he died, aged sixty-two. Joe Cannon, his successor as Speaker, said of him, “His was the strongest intellect crossed on the best courage of any man in public life that I have ever known.” With those two qualities and his “self-made laws,” Reed had stood his ground on the swampy soil of politics, uncompromising to the end, a lonely specimen of an uncommon kind, the Independent Man.
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