Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America from Colonial Dependence to World Leadership

by Conrad Black

  The Democrats met in Chicago a month after the Republicans and nominated New York governor and former Buffalo mayor Stephen Grover Cleveland for president, and former governor and senator Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana for vice president. The ensuing campaign was one of the most unsavory and irresponsible in American history. The Democrats claimed that correspondence they flourished about proved Blaine’s corrupt arrangements with railway lobbyists while Speaker of the House. The Republicans accused Cleveland of having, while a bachelor, fathered an illegitimate child, which he acknowledged. Reform Republicans led by Edwin L. Godkin of the New York Post, Carl Schurz, leader of the German Americans of Missouri and a former U.S. senator, and Charles Francis Adams Jr. defected from Blaine to Cleveland. Tammany leader and New York boss John Kelly deserted Cleveland, but Samuel D. Burchard, a leading New York Protestant clergyman, called upon Blaine and denounced the Democrats as the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” This stampeded New York’s Irish and Italian communities back toward Cleveland, who carried his home state of New York by 1,149 votes out of 1,125,000 cast in the state, and won the election, 4.91 million votes to 4.85 million for Blaine, and 219 electoral votes to 182. New York swung the election, even more dramatically than Van Buren’s spoiler vote against General Lewis Cass had done in 1848.93

  Vice President Hendricks died in November 1885, and two months later presidential succession was changed to go, in the event of the vacancy of the presidency and vice presidency, to cabinet members in the order of the creation of the departments, starting with the secretary of state. For that post Cleveland had selected longtime Delaware senator and former antiwar Democrat Thomas F. Bayard. He had had little foreign policy background, but again, there was little foreign policy to be formulated. Taxes levied to pay for the Civil War continued in place and generated large budget surpluses. Cleveland proposed tariff reductions but was rebuffed by Congress. Cleveland did accelerate the naval construction program and within 15 years the United States had the third navy in the world, after Britain and Germany. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 addressed problems of exploitation by railways of monopolies and regulated price schedules, with reasonable latitude to railway companies. Cleveland vetoed army pensions that were just pay-offs to the veterans’ lobby, subsidized state agricultural scientific research, and repealed the Tenure of Office Act, which had been the basis of the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Cleveland initially approved the return of captured Confederate battle flags to the Confederacy, but then rescinded approval, an issue the Republicans, ever ready to seize on any pretext for reviving the now tired glories of the Civil War, amplified in a completely irresponsible manner. By treaty with Hawaii, the U.S. gained the right to a fortified naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1887, and frictions with Britain and Germany over Samoa continued, with Britain aligning itself alternately with the other two, and all three retaining a naval presence there. Disputes with Canada over fishing in the Bering Sea and elsewhere led to some friction, and the Bayard-Chamberlain Treaty of 1888, though rejected by the Republican-led Senate, gave the Americans some rights in Canadian ports that had been ceded by the British, who retained control over most Canadian foreign relations.

  In June 1888, Cleveland was renominated at St. Louis, and chose the 74-year-old former Ohio senator Allen Thurman as his running mate. Two weeks later, the Republicans, meeting in Chicago, chose former Indiana senator Benjamin Harrison, grandson of the ninth president, as their presidential candidate, and the wealthy former congressman and minister to France Levi P. Morton for vice president. (Morton had declined the vice presidency in 1880, thus passing on the succession to Garfield, but Garfield’s assassin, Guiteau, was allegedly miffed that Morton had been named minister to France in preference to him.) The sole substantive issue in the election was the tariff, which Cleveland wished to reduce. The Republicans were massively financed and did their best with promises of increased veterans’ (of the Union Army) pensions, and the nonsense about the Confederate flags. The British minister, Sir Lionel Sackville-West, unwisely answered a letter falsely claiming to be from a naturalized Englishman seeking advice on how to vote, with the insinuation that Cleveland would be better for British interests. The Republicans pulled this canard out of the hat on October 24 and the minister was expelled from the country the same day, but the Republicans made a good deal of hay out of it. For the third time in four elections, the Democrats won the popular vote, 5.54 million for Cleveland to 5.44 million for Harrison, and also for the third time in four elections the Republicans won anyway, 233 electoral votes to 168, as Harrison surprisingly won Cleveland’s home state of New York by 14,373 votes out of 1.32 million cast, taking its 36 electoral votes. Once again, as in 1848, 1880, and 1884, New York state swung the election.

  Cleveland had been another good president and he was not through yet. Nor was the Plumed Knight, James Gillespie Blaine, back again as secretary of state as the United States continued its serene ramble toward world power on the wings of rails and steel (assisted by naval construction), adding 7 percent annual economic growth and half a million new immigrants a year. Its population, at 62 million, had almost doubled in the 24 years since the end of the Civil War; in the lifetime of the narrowly defeated vice presidential candidate, Allen Thurman, it had multiplied eight-fold. It was all happening exactly as Franklin had foretold to his British friends a century before. The vertical rise of America was seen by all astute observers, including Europe’s two greatest statesmen, Germany’s Chancellor Bismarck and Britain’s Prime Minister Salisbury, as the preeminent geopolitical phenomenon of the world. In London and Berlin and elsewhere, the comparative strength of the country moved appreciably according to the expertise of government policy. The ascent of America, like the system itself, was from the bottom up, like a volcano; the identity of the leaders, since the end of the great crisis of the Union, was almost incidental, and no one knew what mighty power remained unseen, constantly accumulating, below and within this amazing country.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A New Great Power in the World, 1889–1914

  1. BENJAMIN HARRISON

  The presidency of Benjamin Harrison was one of the least eventful in the country’s history. The administration attempted to deliver for its constituencies and against its opponents. It produced another Force Bill, which would enable federal invalidation of measures designed by white southern Democrats to prevent the emancipated slaves and other African Americans from voting. The bill cleared the House but the southern Democrats already had enough votes in the Senate to prevent its passage there.

  What Abraham Lincoln called “the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil” was to be replaced by a century of segregation, an interim regime of separation and inequality, subordinacy but not slavery, in the South and much of the North. As the reassertion of white control in the South occurred (and not by antebellum patricians like Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee, rather the gritty southern petty bourgeoisie and soon-to-be-infamous “white trash” of southern life, the elements most fearful of black emancipation and equality), large numbers of southern African Americans began to move to the great cities of the North and Midwest. They weren’t well-received or instantly successful there either, but segregation was less severe and there was no hint of a deprived proprietary interest in the attitude of whites, but increasingly one of suspicion and disrespect. The route up from slavery, despite the bloodbaths already endured, would be slow and steep, long into the future.

  The administration had greater success with its payoff of the “old soldier” vote. The Dependent Pension Act of June 1890 assured the pension to anyone who served 90 days in the Union armed forces who was disabled, mentally or physically, in combat or after, regardless of the reason, as well as to minor children, dependent parents, and working widows. In this presidential term, the annual cost of pensions rose over 60 percent, from $81 million to $135 million, and the number of pension recipients increased by 1895, contra-intuitively, given that the Civil War had then bee
n over for 30 years, from 676,000 to 970,000. The veterans’ associations of the Grand Army of the Republic were, in fact, a well-paid front organization for the Republican Party. It was the tangible response to Lincoln’s call “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and his orphan,” and it began the service pension, whose legitimacy in the United States would not be questioned again.

  The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of July 1890 was a gesture to placate concerns about outright monopolies being created in various industries and charging what the traffic would bear to an exploited American public, while often applying wanton economic muscle to the management side of labor relations. The act declared to be illegal “Every combination . . . trust . . . or conspiracy in restraint of trade or commerce among the several states” or internationally. The federal government was authorized to move legally to dissolve trusts (monopolies), which now controlled the oil, whiskey, sugar, and lead industries, among others. This act mirrored similar initiatives in many of the states and responded to well-founded public concern about the dangers of exploitation of customers and employees. But there was no definition in the act of any of its key terms, and until the practice was established of pursuing authentic concerns, it bore the character more of tokenism than of reform. From 1890 to 1901 only 18 suits were launched under the act, and four of those were against labor unions. Showing their customary ingenuity, American industrialists and corporate lawyers quickened their pursuit of monopoly control of whole industries with holding companies, pooling agreements, informal price-fixing or geographic demarcations, or, as in the glass and aluminum industries, concentration of patent rights.

  There was a severe decline in agricultural prices, due partially to protectionist activity by principal trading countries, including the McKinley Tariff of 1890 (guided through Congress by William McKinley of Ohio), which raised tariffs to 49.5 percent, and western agrarian and silver-mining interests only approved that tariff in exchange for concessions to the silver-mining industry. Under the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of July 1890, the federal treasury was obligated to buy 4.5 million ounces of silver per month at current prices, and pay for them with notes convertible into gold or silver at the Treasury’s option. This was a form of inflation to combat recessive economic conditions and to spread money around an aggrieved (and normally Republican) area in the West and Southwest. These conditions gave rise to great discontent in the agrarian areas of the West and South, and a good deal of political fermentation, including efforts to unite militant farm and labor organizations in what became known, and persisted intermittently for more than 50 years, as the Populist, or Progressive, movement.

  The foreign policy concerns of the Harrison administration were also less than earth-shaking. Cleveland had dispatched commissioners to a conference in Berlin about Samoa. Like most aspects of U.S. foreign policy in this time, it was a somewhat absurd episode. Cleveland told the Congress (January 15, 1889) that the matter was “delicate and critical,” but two months later a feared naval confrontation between the U.S., Germany, and Great Britain was avoided when the combatant ships were overwhelmed by a hurricane in Apia harbor, destroying the German and American ships (three each) and sparing only the British vessel. (Had there been an exchange of fire in harbor, the collateral damage would have been considerable, but it is not clear at whom, if anyone, the British warship would have been firing.) In June 1889, it was agreed in Berlin that Samoa would be “independent and autonomous,” but with a three-power protectorate and an agreed “adviser” to the king of Samoa.

  Blaine’s first International American Conference met in Washington starting in October, 1889. All the Latin American countries except the Dominican Republic were present. (Canada was not.) Blaine’s proposals for a customs union and a dispute-resolution mechanism were not accepted, but the International Bureau of American Republics, which became the Pan-American Union, was established as a permanent office for exchange of information.

  There were opera bouffe incidents with Italy and Chile. Following a trial of Mafia suspects in New Orleans in October 1890, which led to acquittals, a mob broke into the city jail in March and lynched 11 detainees, including three Italians. Blaine deplored the actions but rejected Italy’s demand for indemnity and prosecution of the mob, as it was a State of Louisiana matter. Both sides withdrew their ambassadors and made unfriendly noises, but the incident was resolved by a payment of $25,000 in April 1892. The rebels in the Chilean civil war of 1891 sent a vessel to San Diego to collect arms and munitions. The ship was intercepted and escorted back to San Diego, but then released, as there was no violation of the Neutrality Act (which did not apply to civil wars). The rebels won the war and American sailors on shore leave were attacked by a mob at Valparaiso in October 1891, and two American sailors were killed. A public exchange of acerbities and demands ensued, and Blaine threatened a total breach of diplomatic relations and Harrison in his message to Congress in January 1892 virtually threatened war. The Chileans thought better of this and apologized, and paid an indemnity of $75,000 to close the incident.

  Alone among the world’s Great Powers, the United States had no serious business to conduct diplomatically. It stood noisily on its dignity when offended in the Americas or the Pacific, and could always extract an unembarrassing resolution of small matters, but rarely intersected in any significant way with another important country. In 1892, a dispute developed between the United States and Great Britain over seal hunting in the Bering Strait, separating Alaska from Russia. The problems had started when Americans accused Canada of poaching in 1886. After a sharp exchange of notes with Great Britain, a power that could not be as lightly treated as Chile or even Italy, the matter was referred to an international tribunal of French, Swedes, and Italians, who decided, establishing a long tradition of European resentment of American assertions of sovereignty, that the Canadians and British were right, and the United States eventually (in 1898) paid an indemnity of $473,000. These were terribly trivial matters compared with Bismarkian maneuverings, the revanchist agitations of France, Britain’s tenacious hold on the delicate balance of power, and Japan’s muscle-flexing in the Far East. James G. Blaine had retired as secretary of state for reasons of poor health in 1892, and was succeeded by John W. Foster, a respected career diplomat, whose son-in-law and grandson, Robert Lansing and John Foster Dulles, would also be secretaries of state.

  The 1892 election season was riven by the Populist campaign, led by James B. Weaver, who had almost held the balance between Garfield and Hancock in 1880 and was nominated for president in St. Louis in February 1892. Farm prices were still depressed and there had been widespread labor disturbances in 1892, especially the Homestead Strike in July, in which seven people were killed at a Carnegie Steel plant in Pennsylvania, and Carnegie’s manager, Henry Clay Frick, was attacked and wounded in a plot led by socialists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. The platform was a recession-born mish-mash of Know-Nothingism and Progressivism. It included calls for expansion of the money supply by $50 per capita (which would have been spectacularly inflationary), unlimited issuance of silver coinage, sharp curtailment of the private banks, nationalization of the rail and telegraph and interstate shipping systems, a graduated income tax, direct election of U.S. senators (instead of by the state legislatures as the Constitution had provided), a referendary form of government, shorter working hours for all categories of labor, and restricted immigration. It was, as such movements often are, a mixed bag of enlightened and reactionary and quirky policies.

  The Republicans met at Minneapolis in June, and renominated President Harrison and chose Whitelaw Reid of New York (editor of the New York Tribune and a friend and protégé of Horace Greeley) for vice president. (Harrison blamed Levi Morton’s mismanagement of the Senate for failure to pass the Force Bill reenfranchising African Americans in the South and sought a change of vice presidents. Morton returned to private life and, apart from one term as governor of New York, soldiered on in ever-increasing prospe
rity to his death in 1920 on his 96th birthday.) The Democrats met at Chicago two weeks later and renominated Grover Cleveland, the party’s candidate for the third consecutive time, with Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois for vice president. (Stevenson, as Cleveland’s first-term assistant postmaster general, had made himself a beloved figure to Democrats by firing 40,000 Republican postal workers and replacing them with southern Democrats. His name would be made more famous by his grandson, who ran two stylish (but unsuccessful) campaigns for president in the 1950s, partly singling out for attack the foreign policy of Secretary of State John W. Foster’s grandson, John Foster Dulles.) The main issue was again the tariff, with Cleveland vaguely proposing reductions.

  On election day, Cleveland won 5.54 million votes to 5.19 million for Harrison and 1.03 million for Weaver, 46 percent to 44 percent to 9 percent. (The Prohibitionists gained 271,000 votes, as alarm at alcoholism was becoming quite vocal.) McKinley’s tariff and economic conditions generally in agrarian areas cost Harrison the election, as most of the Weaver voters were natural Republicans. Grover Cleveland was about to become the only person in American history to have non-consecutive terms as president. The outgoing secretary of state, John W. Foster, had had a foreign policy background and prior to that, the last secretary who could make this claim was Buchanan, who had been secretary of state under Polk. Since then, the holders of the office had been beneficiaries of political pay-offs by the president to powerful faction heads (Clayton, Webster, Everett, Marcy, Cass, Seward, Washburn, Blaine, Frelinghuysen, Bayard), or had been prominent lawyers (Black, Fish, Everts). Cleveland followed now in both traditions, first with Walter Q. Gresham, who had been Arthur’s postmaster general and secretary of the Treasury, before becoming an appellate judge and defecting to Cleveland and the Democrats. When Gresham died in 1895, Cleveland would select Richard Olney, a former attorney general, best known for taking injunctive action against the Pullman strikers in 1894. In these times, even the Democrats were closer to the capitalists than to the workers, and unions were looked upon as un-American radicalism. Benjamin Harrison had been a mediocre, but not a bad, president. He is one of the more forgettable figures to hold that office, but executed it with more distinction than Pierce or Buchanan, and than several of his eventual successors.