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

by Conrad Black

  The Spanish replied with their then usual, heavy-handed and medieval inflexibility, by assigning suppression of the rebellion to General Valeriano “Butcher” Weyler (as the American media quickly labeled him, in collusion with the Cuban rebels, and not without some reason). Weyler produced a counter-scorched-earth policy and, without the slightest pretense to due process, committed large numbers of people, including women and children, to concentration camps, where malnutrition, disease, and rough treatment by custodial officers was commonplace and infamous. The U.S. Senate and House, in February and March 1896, conferred a status of legitimate belligerent on the Cuban revolutionaries and offered American good offices in establishing Cuban independence. The Spanish naturally considered that after nearly 400 years, they had some standing in Cuba and that if Cuba was ever to achieve its independence, Spain could confer that status on the island without any help from the Americans.

  The American public attitude to Cuba was influenced by and tied up in one of the great circulation wars in the history of the daily press, between Joseph E. Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Both newspapers achieved unheard-of circulations of around—and in Hearst’s case—above a million a day, partly on the basis of flamboyantly written, artistically sketched, and sometimes luridly exaggerated or invented descriptions of Spanish outrages and atrocities. Hearst rescued a supposedly savagely raped convent girl who, once in the good life of New York, lost no time getting up to speed with the racy life of her liberator. Hearst had supported Bryan in 1896 and had no influence with McKinley, but he stirred opinion. And McKinley did have a war-hawk faction in his party, led by the young Theodore Roosevelt, now assistant secretary of the navy, and Henry Cabot Lodge, scion of a great Boston Brahmin family and senator from Massachusetts. In their energy and inventive stridency, they somewhat resembled the young Henry Clay, on England, 90 years before.

  A relatively liberal government was installed in Madrid in October 1897, which recalled Weyler, granted partial autonomy to the Cubans, released imprisoned Americans, and cleaned up the concentration camps. As usual in such vortexes, the insurrectionists professed to be offended by tokenistic tricks, and the loyalists condemned the authorities for cowardly appeasement and rioted, demanding retention of Weyler. On February 9, 1898, Hearst published a letter that Cuban revolutionaries had stolen from the mails in Havana, addressed privately by the Spanish minister in Washington, Enrique Dupuy de Lome, to a Cuban friend, in which he wrote that McKinley was “weak and a bidder for the admiration of the crowd, besides being a would-be politician who tries to leave a door open behind himself while keeping on good terms with the jingoes of his party.” Dupuy de Lome cabled his resignation to Madrid as soon as the letter was published. What he wrote was not altogether inaccurate, but he failed to note that walloping Spain was not only an easy option for the United States but that, somewhat incited by Spain’s primitive conduct, it would be politically advantageous to McKinley and serve the interests of an America about to flex its great muscles in the world.

  This was where things stood when, six days after the Dupuy de Lome episode, the U.S. battleship Maine, sent to Havana supposedly to protect American lives and interests in Cuba, abruptly blew up in Havana harbor at 9:40 on the fine clear evening of February 15, 1898, killing 260 officers and men. Hearst and most of the rest of the media went into orbit, while the administration urged calm and the avoidance of leaping to conclusions, and appointed an admiralty board of inquiry, which five weeks later attributed the explosion on the Maine to an underwater mine of uncertain provenance. Hearst propagated the jingo cry “Remember the Maine!” and Congress voted a special defense appropriation of $50 million. McKinley showed admirable restraint and resisted public and congressional pressure to go to war at once. The American minister in Madrid assured the Spanish on March 27 that the United States had no designs on Cuba and sought a cease-fire within Cuba and the disassembly of the concentration camps. The Spanish agreed to these terms on April 5 and 9, but on April 11 McKinley asked for “forcible intervention” to establish peace in Cuba. This was a rather mealy mouthed back-step into war, presumably revealing an unconvinced president swayed by public opinion and by reflections on the easy partisan and geopolitical gains from hammering the flaccid and inert corpus of the Spanish Empire, which had been in gradual decline for 300 years since the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.

  On April 20, 1898, the Congress voted to recognize the independence of Cuba, demand the withdrawal of Spanish forces from Cuba, empower the president to use the army and the navy in pursuit of these aims, and to renounce any ambitions to govern Cuba, whose future would be determined by the population of Cuba. It was the ultimate political free lunch: the United States would help banish primitive imperialism and sought nothing for itself. It would take advantage of the weakness of Spain to masquerade as continental liberator, champion of freedom, and disinterested protector of human rights and national autonomy. The rest of what was more or less a charade, though any replacement of Spanish by American influence in the remaining fragments of the Spanish Empire would be a full step forward, unfolded quickly. McKinley signed the congressional war resolution on April 20, and gave the Spanish an ultimatum to withdraw at once from Cuba and grant its independence, or the U.S. would resort to force. Spain broke off relations with the U.S. the next day, and the United States imposed a naval blockade on Cuba the day after that.

  On April 24, Spain completed its hot-headed, bull-headed blunder, as if in a time machine, into war with a country three full centuries ahead of it in all respects, 10 times as powerful, and 98 percent closer to the theater of activity, and declared war on the United States. The United States declared war the next day, retroactive four days to when it had commenced acts of war. Spain, the dimming, fading, superannuated fighting bull, had been prepared by the local Cuban picadors, goaded by the onlookers, fortified by dreams of bygone grandeur and requirements of honor, provoked by the cocky and histrionic matador, blinded and enraged by the red cape, and charged, delivering its head and neck and lungs to the mighty sword-thrust of its insouciant enemy. The Spanish-American War was such an uneven match, it went almost entirely according to (American) plan.

  Commodore George Dewey commanded the U.S. Asiatic Squadron, consisting of four cruisers, which effectively rented facilities from the British at Hong Kong. When Dewey learned of the American declaration of war, he sailed his already fully stocked ships for Manila, and entered Manila Bay in the predawn of May 1, 1898. He opened fire on the 10 Spanish ships he took unawares there, at 5:40 a.m. (“You may fire when ready, Gridley.”), and by early afternoon had sunk, destroyed, or captured all the Spanish ships and killed 381 Spanish sailors, suffering no significant damage and only eight wounded men himself. Dewey (promoted by the Congress to the sonorous title Admiral of the Navy) blockaded Manila and awaited the arrival of land forces to seize the Philippines, which, like Cuba, were already seething with insurrection. By the end of July, almost 11,000 American marines and soldiers had arrived and had contacted and arranged coordination with the rebels, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, whom Dewey returned to the Philippines from the exile where the Spanish had banished him. Manila was occupied by Americans and insurrectionists on August 13, and the Spanish surrendered the following day. If they had not so hot-headedly declared war on the United States, they would have lost Cuba but not the Philippines.

  By this time, the main Spanish navy, having sailed from Spain to Cuba, was destroyed off Santiago by a superior American force led by five modern battleships, on July 1, 1898. The Spanish lost 474 sailors killed and 1,750 captured, to 1 killed and 1 wounded American. In the land action in Cuba, 17,000 men of the regular army and volunteers, most famously Theodore Roosevelt and Leonard Wood’s Rough Riders, a cavalry regiment, were disembarked near Santiago on June 26, and succeeded in taking El Caney and San Juan Hill on July 1. These engagements did involve serious fighting and the United States suffered over 1,500 casualties. Roosev
elt led his men on foot up San Juan Hill against heavy fire and took the heights above Santiago. Theodore Roosevelt became an instant and permanent American hero. (He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor nearly a century later, by President William J. Clinton, and about 50 years after his son, Theodore Junior, was awarded the same honor by their cousin, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for his conspicuous courage in the 1944 Normandy landings. The only other family with father and son winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the MacArthurs, also gained them in the Philippines, General Arthur MacArthur evicting the Spanish in 1898 and General Douglas MacArthur in resisting the Japanese in 1941–1942.)

  This effectively doomed the Spanish presence in Cuba, and on July 26 the Spanish inquired of the talented French ambassador in Washington, Jules Cambon (later ambassador to Berlin and, with his brother Paul, one of the architects of the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France), to find out American terms for peace. A protocol was signed on August 12 involving the relinquishment of Cuba by Spain and the cession of Puerto Rico (which the United States had occupied without opposition on July 25); the Philippines would be discussed later.

  The Treaty of Paris of December 10 confirmed the cession of the Philippines to the United States, for $20 million, and Spanish assumption of Cuban debts of nearly $400 million. The secretary of state was now the talented and urbane John Hay, once private secretary to Abraham Lincoln. William Day, a jurist at heart, had accepted appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hay did have an extensive background in foreign policy, having been in the Paris, Madrid, and Vienna legations, as well as Rutherford Hayes’s assistant secretary of state and McKinley’s ambassador to Great Britain; he was very conscious of rising American strength in the world, and had many influential friends in the principal countries of Europe, as did the war secretary, Elihu Root. These men, along with Senator Lodge and, as he was elected in November 1898, New York governor Theodore Roosevelt, represented a new mentality nearing the summit of American affairs. They knew the trans-Atlantic world and would not be content with America simply ruling the Americas. It was as great a power as Britain and Germany and would act accordingly. They had all read Captain (later Admiral) Mahan’s works, and Roosevelt had worked with Mahan in the Navy Department, and a new era of American assertiveness, of which the drubbing just administered to Spain was a harbinger, was about to open. The United States also took Guam, and for good measure had occupied Wake Island on July 4 and formally annexed Hawaii on July 7.

  There was a considerable debate over the Treaty of Paris, with the Republicans waving the flag around and claiming that if the United States did not take over the Philippines, undesirable foreigners would. Most Democrats and the Populists were uneasy about the takeover of non-contiguous territory peopled by non-whites. William Jennings Bryan came to the aid of the administration, urging ratification and saying that the disposition of the Philippines could be determined in the following presidential election. With Bryan’s help, the Senate ratified 57–27, just two votes more than the two-thirds needed. This, coupled with the ratification of the takeover of Hawaii, by a simple majority in a joint resolution, did indicate that the expansionists and colonialists were beginning to assert themselves over the isolationists and militant opponents of racial dabbling. The United States had mobilized 274,000 men to serve in the war, of whom relatively few got anywhere near belligerent activity. There were 379 battle deaths and 1,604 wounded, but 5,083 deaths from exotic diseases. The war cost $250 million, not much to pick up the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, as well as Wake and Guam. But this was the last of America’s carnival wars. Hereafter, it would have more serious opponents. (The Spanish fought bravely but their techniques and equipment were obsolete.)

  Aguinaldo announced a new insurrection when he learned that the United States would not be quitting his country so quickly. The Filipino rebels had a disjointed and under-equipped force of about 70,000, and the United States deployed 70,000 trained or semi-trained soldiers to suppress the uprising. They saw off organized resistance by 1899, and reduced Aguinaldo to skulking about in the hills and jungles, darting out to stage minor ambushes, until he was captured in March 1901. A commission McKinley had set up urged eventual independence of the Philippines, but not until the U.S. had adequately prepared the country for full nationhood. At least it was acknowledged that the sun would be setting on this empire. A second commission, presided over by federal appellate judge William Howard Taft, in April 1900, gradually installed an entire government, largely headed by natives, in the Philippines, and provided a very enlightened administration. In June 1901, military government was ended in the Philippines, except in a few areas where insurrection continued. The U.S., in its relatively brief and confined try at it, proved a progressive colonial power.

  Apart from Romania’s 1915 declaration of war on Germany, which was at least induced by British bribes that were paid, and did leave Romania much expanded, after crushing defeat and occupation for three years of self-sought martyrdom on the side of the victorious powers, modern history records few examples of such mad plunges into mortal national combat in conditions of impossible disadvantage as Spain’s against the United States. It would be another, though the last, of America’s easy little hemispheric flexings of muscle at the beach. Strategy or, more accurately, spontaneous impulse to organic growth, had equipped America to be a great world power, just 109 years after George Washington was inaugurated as its first president. Actually playing that role successfully would require relearning the international strategic finesse of the country’s greatest early diplomats, Franklin, Jay, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams.

  The half-century from the Civil War to World War I were for America almost a reversion to the spontaneous strategy of national development and self-absorption that first awakened the founders of the nation. The energy of the Revolution and the early years, which had yielded to the long and ultimately terrible crisis of slavery, and then the raw-boned surging adolescence of this period, were soon to give way to the need for the consistent judgment and self-interested discipline of a great and mature nation. These stages succeeded each other with a rapidity and on a scale that was outside European experience, even where, as with Richelieu, Peter the Great, and Bismarck, Great Powers were swiftly made from quickly expanded but long-established cultures and nationalities. As it always has claimed, America was exceptional.

  4. THE REELECTION AND ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT MCKINLEY

  Japan had been flexing its muscles in the far Pacific, and had started, as was natural given the vulnerability of China at this time, with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895. This threw wide open the gates of China and began a scramble of European powers building on their rapacious activities of some decades, to follow Japan in opening up spheres of influence in China. The United States initially declined to join in such indignities, but soon became concerned that the Europeans and Japanese would carve up all China and leave it out. Britain had offered the United States cooperation in Chinese matters in 1898 and 1899, but had been rebuffed. Hay had friends who had served in the British diplomatic service in China and he became somewhat well-informed about Chinese matters. In September 1899, he wrote the Russian, British, German, French, Italian, and Japanese governments asking for assurance that Chinese government tariffs and other arrangements would not be altered by whatever spheres of influence were being established, and that there would be no discrimination against any other foreigners in those spheres. This was a rather naïve questionnaire, to which he received rather evasive replies, but, in a time-honored gesture, Hay claimed to have achieved complete concurrence, and waving the official responses from the other six powers about, he declared the “final and definitive” acceptance of what was known as “the Open Door policy” in China.

  Predictably enough, in the spring of 1900 xenophobic nationalism swept intellectual and clerical circles in China, and the Boxer Rebellion, dedicated to the expulsion of the “foreign devils” (not to mention the “long
-nosed, fat-eyed barbarians”), erupted and quickly led to the seizure of the Chinese imperial capital at Peking. The foreign legations were besieged, and only relieved by an international force on August 14, 1900. The foreign powers exercised their usual heavy-handed will and extorted from China (September 1901) an indemnity of $333 million, of which the American share was to be $24.5 million. Hay issued another of his aerated circular letters to the powers enumerating everything that was supposed not to happen in China, and claiming to be upholding Chinese national dignity and the Open Door policy, which was not, in fact, compatible with any recognizable notion of Chinese sovereignty. Although there was a good deal of flimflam and wishful thinking in Hay’s position, the United States excused China from most of its indemnity to the U.S. and China dedicated much of its unpaid balance to paying for the education of promising Chinese university students in the United States. The battle for Chinese control of its own affairs would continue, often with great loss of blood and physical destruction, through most of the first half of the twentieth century. But 100 years after the Boxer Rebellion, China was back as one of the world’s greatest powers, in a remarkable and unique act of national regeneration.