Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  Meantime Bryan carried his battle to the people. No front porch for him: ‘the Boy Orator from the Platte’14 travelled 18,000 miles, made 600 speeches and was heard by an estimated five million people. It was a method of campaigning that had a bigger future than McKinley’s. He did not always convince those he heard: his single-minded concentration on silver did nothing for him in the East, where, on election day, he failed to carry a single state. But it was Gospel to the West. The excitement was so tremendous that, years later, Vachel Lindsay was inspired to write one of the few great political poems in the English language by his memories of ‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan’:

  … It was eighteen ninety-six, and I was just sixteen

  And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,

  When there came from the sunset Nebraska’s shout of joy:

  In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat

  He scourged the elephant plutocrats

  With barbed wire from the Platte.

  The scales dipped from their mighty eyes.

  They saw that summer’s noon

  A tribe of wonders coming

  To a marching tune.

  Oh, the longhorns from Texas,

  The jay hawks from Kansas,

  The plop-eyed bugaroo and giant giassicus,

  The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,

  The horned-toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,

  From all the newborn states arow,

  Bidding the eagles of the west fly on,

  Bidding the eagles of the west fly on…15

  All to no avail. Bryan polled 6,502,925 popular votes and carried twenty-two states with 176 electoral votes, but McKinley beat him by 600,000 popular votes and carried twenty-three states with 271 electoral votes. The Republicans captured both houses of Congress, of which they were to keep control until 1910. The People’s party, having endorsed Bryan, now melted fairly rapidly into the Democratic party. (This meant, among other things, that the one-party South was stronger than ever, and the plight of the Southern blacks worse.) Cleveland went into dignified retirement as another conservative President settled into the White House.

  And then, for no reason that anyone could well understand, the economy revived. Business boomed, farmers found they could at last afford to re-paint their barns, the nightmare of the hard times melted away, Americans got back their self-confidence, and a period of great prosperity, with politics to match, began.

  19 The Progressive Adventure 1897–1914

  The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

  Theodore Roosevelt

  Prosperous or not, self-confident or not, the Unite States had reached a point, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, when radical improvements in its political, social and economic arrangements were so plainly necessary that they were actually attempted, and therefore may be called inevitable. Women and men, young and middle-aged, rich, poor and in-between, West, South and North, all acknowledged the necessity and had some hand in shaping the improvements. It was an epoch very much to the American taste, for it seemed a proof that faith in progress, and particularly in the potential for progress in America, was justified. The word ‘progressive’ had long been a favourite in common speech, as foreign observers such as Rudyard Kipling had already noticed;1 now it became attached to a political party, a movement, an era. It remains a curiously empty word, but historians will never be able to do without it. And after all due reservations have been made it would be churlish to deny that the United States did in many respects move forward during the period before the First World War – did begin to tackle a good many serious problems intelligently. It is a moderately encouraging story.

  Yet America crossed the watershed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – in a sense, between the past and our present – in battle, like Britain. There was a warning in this, but it was not noticed. The ‘progressive era’ began with gunfire in Manila Bay and ended with gunfire in the North Atlantic. Had the Americans understood the meaning of the first event they might have been less astounded by the second, or even have averted it altogether. As it was, they devoted themselves, all but a few of them (Andrew Carnegie was the most conspicuous exception, with his Endowment for International Peace), to their usual pursuits, and the darkest forces at work, which were pushing the whole world to disaster, went unnoticed, unanalysed, unchecked. Almost all Americans continued to think of themselves as probably better than other peoples, and certainly much safer. The progressive generation was quite unaware that, in the twentieth century, war would be the almost constant guide of the national destiny – strengthening, warping, encouraging, perverting all projects. Progressives would owe to warfare some of their most spectacular victories and some of their most shameful defeats. By failing to take it into sufficient account they would come several times to the very brink of destruction. It is a matter for painful speculation how much happier our age might have been had they been wiser.

  Historians still argue about the origins of the Spanish-American War of 1898. It was the first foreign war since the Mexican, which had ended fifty years previously. The two conflicts were in some respects strikingly alike – short, successful, aggressive, muddled affairs; both were crowned by territorial aggrandizement and left legacies of conflict. But it is the long gap between them which really needs consideration; and it needs to be asked whether the ending of that period of peace (if we disregard the Civil War and the Indian wars for a moment) was accidental or was significant of a profound change in America’s outlook and position.

  Geography, historical circumstance and political tradition intersect to condition all nations, and the United States in the nineteenth century was no exception. The world was so large, the oceans so wide and their own continent so vast and empty it was impossible for the Americans to be much concerned with foreign affairs. Furthermore, it was a settled assumption of British foreign policy, from the Treaty of Ghent onwards, that a war with the United States was always likely to be more trouble than it was worth; and while America was at peace with the British Empire (its greatest neighbour) it was buffered against interference from other quarters. The British and the Americans might have their tiffs, for there was always plenty to dispute about; but they were at one in the view classically expressed in the Monroe Doctrine, that the New World was to be preserved against the ambitions of the other great powers. The profits of trade and industrialization from Canada to the Falkland Islands were to be reserved to the English-speaking world; and although the competition between its two principal components, as they built up their ascendancy in the Caribbean and further south, was intense, it never led them to break with each other and so let in the rival pretensions of the Spanish, the French or the Germans. There was, in fact, a partnership between Britain and the United States; but it was so informal, and punctuated by so many rows, that most Americans never detected it. Their notion of Anglo-American relations remained that which had emerged from the Revolution, been strengthened by the War of 1812, and been strengthened again by the Civil War: John Bull was an obsolete bully, but Uncle Sam could handle him. Their notion of war was shaped rather by the experience of killing Indians than by Gettysburg or the Wilderness. Their notion of diplomacy was that it was the preserve of upper-class stuffed shirts who cost the country too much money (though the American foreign service was and is kept pitiably short of funds by Congress). Geographical isolation and strategic security turned the Americans in upon themselves. The conflicts that mattered were their domestic ones. Occasionally these might have diplomatic repercussions, as witness the deep embarrassment caused to the federal government by the anti-Chinese, and later the anti-Japanese, outbursts of feeling in California, which led to the passage of much racist legislation; but that was unusual. On the whole, foreign affairs were noticed only as topics for Fourth of July addresses, or campaign speeches, when it was thought desirable to let the eagle scream a little. Then American statesmen we
re happy to congratulate their constituents on the immeasurable superiority of their free, republican and democratic institutions; happy to denounce the aristocratic corruption of the Old World; happy to throw in allusions to those favourite shibboleths, Washington’s Farewell Address, the Monroe Doctrine and (after 1900) the Open Door. The chances were high that neither these orators nor their audiences had given anything that could be dignified with the name of thought to the implications of these time-worn slogans; but then neither they nor their audiences set much value on thought applied to foreign relations. What they wanted was rhetoric.

  Not that Americans were uninterested in the rest of the world. For one thing, it persisted in the habit of sending large numbers of its inhabitants to settle in the United States. For another, as the descendants of the immigrants grew up and prospered, the resultant ethnic communities – Irish-Americans, German-Americans, Italian-Americans and so on – organized themselves into lobbies to influence national policies in favour of their ancestral countries; and whether by exporting dollars to their relations (like the Italians and Slavs) or guns (like the Irish) they profoundly affected the history of those countries. Then, prosperous Americans liked to travel on the fast, luxurious liners that the development of iron and steam technology made possible; enterprising businessmen sought out new fields for profit; missionaries tried to convert the heathen. Perhaps this last was the most characteristic trait: there was a missionary of some kind in almost every American breast. For this people cherished two somewhat inconsistent beliefs: that they were special, indeed unique, and it was vain for lesser breeds to emulate them; and that nevertheless the American way of life was the only model worth emulating and ought to be exported as widely and rapidly as possible. They were benevolent, whether they were trying to save Europe from itself by making it sign a pledge against war, as if it were strong drink (before 1914), or trying to mitigate war’s cruellest effects (afterwards). But they were dangerously naïve. They did not really understand foreigners and therefore did not understand themselves in relation to foreigners, which was worse still. The dangers of this naivety were reinforced by the political system. The various waves of nativism, imperialism and, after the First World War, isolationism always found politicians democratically ready to co-operate and thus win votes; brought to the fore, also, many politicians who knew no better than their constituents.

  This did not matter much during most of the nineteenth century. The shield of the Royal Navy (maintained by Great Britain, at her own expense and for her own purposes), America’s real remoteness across the oceans and the salutary display of strength and purpose that was the Civil War combined to keep the United States as free from undesirable foreign entanglements as the Founding Fathers wished. But the world was changing. Expanding America, borne on the wings of industrial technology, was beginning to meet similar expansive forces, sustained by the same inventions. The scramble for Africa in the 1880s did not involve the United States, which was occupied in swallowing the last of the American West and was beginning also to take an interest in the Pacific; but the scramble for Asia, which occured in the nineties, concerned it deeply. The American people were as eager as any European nation to bring progress to China in the same way as the British had brought it to India: by trade, by preaching, by teaching, if necessary by gunfire. They took a proprietorial attitude to Japan: had it not been an American sailor, Commodore Matthew Perry, who between 1852 and 1854 had forced that country to open commercial and diplomatic relations with the rest of the world? So the events of the nineties filled them with alarm: the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, the acquisition by the European powers of several key Chinese ports, the extension of extraterritorial rights even in ports which they did not own, what seemed to be the ever-strengthening British hegemony (the Chinese customs were administered by the British), finally the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, which the United States actively helped to crush. Even while the legations in Peking were under siege, John Hay, McKinley’s Secretary of State, circulated a note to the powers stating that in future the United States wanted ‘China’s territorial and administrative entity’ to be preserved and wanted all parts of China to be equally open to all nations for trade. This was the Open Door. In its mixture of high-mindedness, low attention to the main chance (Hay, like many of his contemporaries, thought that the China trade was much more lucrative, and more open to American capture, than was really the case) and total inattention to the actualities of power, it was a characteristic American diplomatic initiative of the pre-Pearl Harbor type. Like the Monroe Doctrine, it had better luck than it deserved. None of the other powers felt itself strong enough to make a grab for sole rule in China (though that too would change in due course); so all were happy to acquiesce in Hay’s suggestion. China would remain formally independent; in reality she would be exposed to simultaneous robbery from all quarters. Only the robbers would not try to swipe each other’s loot.

  Properly understood, these events not only showed that the forces which were carrying America into the imperialist phase of her history were at work in other countries too, which was by itself enough to make the world a more dangerous place for the United States; they also showed that the strength of the British Empire was beginning to decline. Britain’s nineteenth-century pre-eminence had various causes; perhaps the most important was simply that she was the first industrialized nation. Now that other countries were successfully copying her, indeed in many respects surpassing her, it would be more and more difficult – eventually, impossible – for her to hold on to the extraordinary position and possessions that she had won in the world. To begin with she had to admit to herself that she could not annex China, or even keep that country as part of her exclusive informal Empire. She was beginning to wane, by inches. This meant that America could no longer rely on the Royal Navy as an automatic guarantee against alien interference. In 1903, preoccupied with the rising threat from imperial Germany, Britain withdrew her Caribbean squadron, glad to think that the United States would take her place. Yet this development was perhaps the most ominous of all, for it implied that, to protect her interests, America would now have to take a much more leading, active part in diplomacy, and would have to build up her armed forces to a far greater extent, than had been customary for nearly a hundred years. The only alternative was to think and behave like a third-rate power, eventually to be treated like one and in the end, perhaps, to become one. And although two generations of Americans were to agonize over the choice in the first decades of the twentieth century, there could be no doubt, given the country’s proud and energetic temper, which way it would eventually be settled.

  For one thing, the United States, as has been shown, was in the grip of forces, above all galloping industrialism and urbanization, which were making play with all the advanced countries. An upsurge of passionate nationalism marked the last twenty years of the nineteenth century and the first fourteen of the twentieth in all the leading European countries and Japan. As the headlong pace of modern development showed no sign of slackening – rather the reverse – the peoples and their rulers clung to each other for reassurance and cemented their union with hatred, fear and contempt of foreigners. In the deepest sense, none of the great powers took foreign policy any more seriously than the United States: they used it as a weapon in internal politics, never considering seriously that it might fatally wound the hands which wielded it. And so the world went on to disaster.

  It should therefore be clear that the United States was running out of time in the nineties; but the peace could undoubtedly have been preserved for many years more but for a string of secondary causes. To be sure, these secondary causes were themselves products, or perhaps by-products, of the great underlying determinants of the age: nationalism, economic ambition, social tensions, political obsolescence. But they were not in themselves very formidable. Better management could have faced them down quite easily.

  Businessmen were zealous to export, since they feared (prematurely) that the domestic mar
ket was saturated. American farmers were looking for a protected market overseas where they need not fear foreign competition and so could dump the results of what they were told was their propensity to over-produce. Many of the new urban newspapers, struggling to build their circulations ever higher, were quite unscrupulous in their attitudes. There had been trouble in Cuba for years, as the inhabitants carried on a never victorious, never defeated revolt against their Spanish rulers, who were anxious not to give up their country’s last colony in the New World. Cuba, only ninety miles from the coast of Florida, naturally interested American readers, who were regularly regaled with more or less false stories of Spanish tyranny. The rogue newspaper publisher, William Randolph Hearst, sent the artist and reporter Frederic Remington to Havana with instructions to report and draw the atrocities and the war. Remington wired back that there were no atrocities and no war and that he was coming home. Hearst told him to stay where he was: ‘You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war.’ Hearst could not afford to be scrupulous: he had a private war of his own on his hands, a circulation war with another newspaper publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, who was eventually to redeem his name by founding a School of Journalism at Columbia University, New York, and also the Pulitzer prizes – given annually to what is taken to be the best piece of journalism, and to the best specimens of theatrical, historical and fictional writing. Hearst reasoned that he could defeat Pulitzer only if there was a war, for nothing else sells newspapers so well. He got his way. A United States battleship, the Maine, on a courtesy visit to Havana, blew up in harbour on 15 February 1898, killing most of the crew. The explosion was almost certainly an accident, but Hearst thought otherwise. ‘Remember the Maine! screamed his papers, announcing that the episode was the result of a fiendish Spanish plot. Clamour for action mounted appallingly. As usual, there was an election due: President McKinley felt he had no alternative. After much prayerful wrestling he did the weak thing and declared war on Spain.