A month later, five days after Cleveland’s second inauguration, on March 4, the Democratic president withdrew the annexation treaty—for “the purpose of reexamination”—before it could even be debated. Cleveland opposed American expansionism generally, and in this particular instance he wanted the government to “stop and look and think,” as he put it to Carl Schurz, a leading anti-imperialist of the day. He didn’t like the reports he was getting about Minister Stevens, and he particularly recoiled at the thought of his country disregarding native Hawaiian sentiment in pursuing annexation. He sent a retired Georgia congressman named James Blount to investigate the situation and pick up the pieces.
Blount filed a report excoriating Stevens and extolling the queen. This killed annexation as a viable congressional option and raised prospects for a restoration initiative, pushed with considerable energy by Cleveland’s secretary of state, Walter Gresham, a preachy moralist outraged by America’s involvement in the Hawaiian coup. But it soon became clear that any such action would be disastrous. The provisional government was by now well entrenched; the queen seemed increasingly erratic; and Cleveland had no stomach for military actions that could spill significant quantities of blood. In frustration, the president shoved the issue back to Congress and washed his hands of it.
But it wouldn’t go away, and Gresham’s pious approach generated partisan emotions on the matter. Republicans now decried the lost opportunity to acquire Hawaii, while Democrats defended the president. The issue took on added intensity with reports that Japan was pursuing claims to the islands based on the growing numbers of Japanese living there. The retired Hawaiian postmaster general, H. G. Whitney, arriving in Seattle on September 4, 1896, reported rising island sentiment for U.S. annexation because of the “growing Japanese trouble,” as the Washington Post described it. Whitney said Hawaii’s Japanese residents now numbered 25,000, about a quarter of the archipelago’s population, and they were arriving at a rate of about 3,000 a year. Meanwhile Germany, building a powerful navy to rival Britain’s and casting about for colonies, was hovering about the islands with obvious imperial designs.
Two months later, following McKinley’s election, former secretary of state John Foster stopped off in Chicago en route from Honolulu to Washington and told reporters that the Hawaiian provisional government would initiate another annexation bid as soon as McKinley was president. He added that “the ultimate fate of the islands, if they are not annexed by the United States, will be annexation by some of the other great powers.” Hawaiians, he said, were too divided by class, race, faction, and national identity to govern themselves. By inauguration day McKinley knew that the issue would soon land on his desk.
He knew also that the question would become intertwined with the powerful strategic advocacy of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who had jolted the American consciousness and world capitals with his daring 1890 treatise, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783. If Frederick Jackson Turner was the analyst of American expansionism, Mahan was its prophet, heralding the dawn of American Empire and celebrating sea power as the agency of U.S. greatness. His book has been called “probably the most influential work on naval strategy ever written,” and throughout the nineteenth century only Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had more immediate political impact on the country than Mahan’s volume.
He was born in 1840, the son of a professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and early on was beguiled by the romance of the sea. Graduating from the Naval Academy at Annapolis, he saw some Civil War action and then pursued a conventional naval career of sea duty interspersed with shore responsibilities. Reaching the rank of captain at midcareer, he found he didn’t much like sea duty. What’s more, he wasn’t very good at it. A number of ships under his command were involved in collisions, and his rebellious nature, often in protest of perceived wrongs that others considered petty, rankled his superiors. His career was sputtering.
Then he got a job as instructor at the navy’s new Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island. Attacking the subject of military history, and particularly naval history, he produced numerous books and scores of magazine articles that cemented his reputation as the greatest military strategist of the day. His intellectual epiphany was the story of Hannibal, the Carthaginian general forced to invade Rome by land—over the Alps, with elephants, cut off from supplies and information, almost guaranteed to fail—because Rome had gained complete dominance over the Mediterranean. From there he crafted his thesis that naval power is requisite to national expansion, and expansion is requisite to national survival.
His thesis took on added force with the advent of ironclad, steam-powered warships that needed coaling stations in order to ply the waters of the world, protect commercial interests, and keep potential enemies far from home shores. That meant that any great power in the coming century would need to command territory in far-flung regions in order to keep its ships fired up. Great-power status required a great navy and an imperial impulse.
A sterling case in point was Hawaii, situated in the middle of the North Pacific, far from any other commanding sites and hence positioned to dominate a vast expanse of the globe, both sea and land. Any hostile nation that wanted to attack the U.S. West Coast would have to launch the assault from Hawaii, the only truly viable coaling station on the attack route. Thus, by annexing Hawaii America could project its defensive perimeter out into the Pacific, far from its continental shores. But without Hawaii America was vulnerable to any power capable of launching an attack from those strategically located islands. The same was true in reverse. With Hawaii, America could project power far into Asia; any nation that got Hawaii could thwart such U.S. power projection. Thus could Hawaii be seen, wrote Mahan, as “a position powerfully influencing the commercial and military control of the Pacific, and especially of the Northern Pacific, in which the United States, geographically, has the strongest right to assert herself.”
That location would be even more vital, wrote Mahan, if the United States built a canal across the Central American isthmus, which he strongly advocated. It would have to be protected on both sides of the isthmus, and Hawaii would be crucial in protecting the Pacific side. But it couldn’t be done without big battleships capable of going up against hostile battleships on the high seas. America was building such a deep-water navy, partly spurred by Mahan’s earnest advocacy. Underlying the project was a growing awareness in Washington that America was emerging as a global power almost by default, positioning itself inexorably to contend with the world’s most powerful nations. That beguiling Central American canal idea was raising questions also, for example, about how it would be protected on the Atlantic side, particularly with Spain’s mismanagement of Cuba raising prospects that other European powers could move in to exploit the chaos and seize the strategically located island. The Mahan vision was getting increasingly difficult to resist.
McKinley hadn’t given much thought to such matters by the time of his inauguration on the sunny March day that unfolded so smoothly and seemed such an augury of good times. But geopolitical forces were gathering even as he stood on that East Capitol platform and uttered his conviction that “peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency.” Nobody could foresee just what contingencies might emerge to test the limits of that thesis.
— 12 —
Taking Charge
THE LEADERSHIP OF ATTRITION
Throughout his career, McKinley nurtured a reputation for holding no grudges and seeking no political revenge. “Never keep books in politics,” he advised his friend, Indiana senator Charles W. Fairbanks, meaning don’t catalogue the slings and arrows of civic life with the aim of getting even. Better to let it slide and keep foes in mind for future alliances when interests might converge. Still, being human he was susceptible at times to ignoring his own counsel. As Charles Emory Smith, who became a Cabinet member under McKinley, saw it, the president, “with all his equanimity of temper and . . . beauty of disposition, was
keenly sensitive to deceptive pretense and justly indignant at malign hostility.”
So it was natural that the new president developed a pique toward Illinois senator Shelby Cullom, who had questioned McKinley’s integrity in selecting administration officials. “He is hunting for men who are utterly and entirely subservient to him,” wrote the Republican senator to a friend, “and a man who has any independence of character has not much show if [the president] knows him to be such.” The letter’s recipient passed the senator’s words on to McKinley, who displayed a certain frostiness when Cullom arrived at the White House one day to press for patronage favors. Sensing the hostility, the senator turned a bit aggressive himself, dismissing one office seeker favored by McKinley as a “jackass.”
Without a word, McKinley rummaged through some papers on his desk, pulled out the offending letter, and handed it to Cullom. There ensued a “general overhauling” between the two men, with Cullom complaining about the president’s longtime aloofness toward him.
The president softened his tone. “What do you want?” he asked.
When Cullom listed his desired patronage positions, the president granted them all. “The quarrel ended in a love feast,” wrote a McKinley biographer. But having granted the favors and patched up the feud, McKinley never thereafter seemed inclined to grant Cullom’s wishes on anything. “I always yielded,” recalled Cullom later; “in fact, it was impossible to resist him.”
Cullom’s experience reflected a reality of the McKinley persona: behind his famous magnanimity and bonhomie lurked a resolve to get what he wanted. Many McKinley adversaries missed this powerful trait. They cleaved to a deprecatory notion that the president was a leaf in the wind, blown hither and thither by random gusts of political sentiment or by the latest entreaty from any persistent friend, most notably Mark Hanna. The nation’s citizenry meanwhile viewed him as a uniformly kind and thoughtful figure, full of dignity and sympathy for his fellow human beings; always with a carnation in his lapel, which he would remove in an instant whenever he encountered a small child who might like to have it.
Neither of these versions captured the fullness of the man. His closest associates knew he seldom gave as much as he got in any friendship or political alliance. The convivial demeanor masked a calculating political operative who could casually discard people when they no longer had value (while maintaining a florid cordiality toward them) and who sent out subtle signals about lines of intimacy that shouldn’t be crossed. “I don’t think that McKinley ever let anything stand in the way of his own advancement,” his good friend Charles Dick once said, speculating that the Major’s sense of personal destiny could be attributed to the acclaim and attentions he had enjoyed since his Civil War days. “He had been petted and flattered until he felt that all the fruit on the tree was his,” said Dick, no doubt recalling a previous observation by Benjamin Butterworth, an Ohio congressman who revered Hanna but harbored a wariness toward McKinley. “Why, if McKinley and I were walking through an orchard which had only one bearing tree,” Butterworth told a newspaperman, “and that tree had but two apples, he would pick both, put one in his pocket, take a bite out of the other, and then calmly turn to me and ask: ‘Ben, do you like apples?’ ”
These contradictions suggest that McKinley was more complex than many, both friends and foes, perceived. It was Julia Foraker, wife of the Ohio senator and a shrewd political analyst, who wrote in her memoir of “the masks that he wore” in building and projecting his public image. The masks weren’t necessarily phony; he was kind, patient, dignified, thoughtful, and congenial. But they concealed other traits: his occasional ruthlessness; his desire for distance from people; his unbending resolve; his penchant for operating by attrition, patiently nudging events incrementally to the desired goal, whatever the opposition. Few McKinley intimates understood the man in all of his dimensions.
One who did was Elihu Root, another later McKinley Cabinet member, who perceived that the president’s stoic demeanor, his skill as a listener, his reluctance to project any force of personality were tools employed in getting people to do his bidding without quite realizing it. “He had a way of handling men so that they thought his ideas were their own,” said Root. “He cared nothing about the credit, but McKinley always had his way.”
These traits were all on display at Cabinet meetings in the new administration. The Cabinet met Tuesdays and Fridays at eleven in the rundown White House Cabinet Room. The president usually opened these sessions with an anecdote or story to bring some mirth to the proceedings and loosen up the discussion. No one doubted that McKinley was in charge. “His pre-eminence in the council was unchallenged,” wrote Smith. But often the president would withhold his own judgment as he elicited the thoughts of others in order to secure their unvarnished views. And he proved adept at summing up the attitudes of his counselors so the discussion could proceed without misunderstanding. Once he arrived at a decision, he announced it with finality and never looked back, though his pace of decision making struck many as slow and often roundabout.
McKinley early established a resolve to end the congressional supremacy that had marked the government since Reconstruction. That searing episode had clipped presidential power, and since the Grant administration some twenty years earlier no president had managed to serve two successive terms. McKinley knew that presidential success required presidential force, and he worked quietly to reverse the power differential he had inherited from Cleveland, whose agenda was modest and who had accepted the prevailing congressional preeminence.
Foremost among his methods was an effort to maintain consistently cordial relations with influential members of Congress who could thwart or boost his initiatives. Neither Harrison nor Cleveland had devoted much effort toward congressional relations. “This is the first time in eight years,” reported the Washington Post, “that a President has deliberately sought to treat the Senate with respect.”
Never too busy to meet with members who wished to see him, he often called them to the White House for extended conversations on major legislation. Throughout his fourteen years in Congress he had forged harmonious friendships with most key legislators, and he leveraged those connections assiduously in behalf of his agenda. Most often, though, he eschewed strong tactics of cajolery or pressure, relying instead on his time-tested technique of asking questions and listening patiently as his visitors mused aloud about the dynamics of an issue—and as he subtly nudged their thinking to the desired result. But he never hesitated to introduce patronage matters as a sly inducement to getting votes in Congress. And though he seldom employed his veto pen (he vetoed only fourteen bills throughout his presidency), he found that the mere threat of a veto, if used sparingly and deftly, could tip the scales in delicate circumstances and help propel legislation. The result of McKinley’s focus on Congress and his approach to congressional dealings was a significant sway over that branch of government. “We have never had a president,” conceded Senator Cullom, “who had more influence with Congress than Mr. McKinley.”
The new president moved quickly to establish cordial relations with the press, which Cleveland had kept at arm’s length. One reporter suggested that newsgathering during the Cleveland years had been akin to “the fashion in which highwaymen rob a stage coach.” McKinley sought to eliminate any feeling among reporters that they must pilfer White House information in order to keep readers informed about presidential policymaking. Though he granted few formal interviews and didn’t meet with reporters en masse, his top White House staffers, J. Addison Porter and George B. Cortelyou, briefed reporters daily on events and developments. He set aside part of the White House reception room as a journalistic work area, quickly dubbed “Newspaper Row,” and insisted that reporters should receive quickly any new presidential speech, message, or communication, along with briefings on inside developments. The aim was to ensure that the American people received a steady flow of White House news—and a strong sense of the president’s governmental command. O
ne newsman from the McKinley era later wrote, “While apparently not courting publicity, [he] contrived to put out, by various shrewd processes of indirection, whatever news would best serve the . . . administration.” Thus did he enhance his political standing with voters—and his ability to sway Congress.
McKinley also stepped up presidential travel and gave far more public speeches than his predecessors. The aim, as a British diplomat explained after discussing the matter with him, was “to carry out what he considered an important function of his office, viz: that the President and the people should be brought closely together.” This burnished his public image and further bolstered his influence with Congress. After his March 4 inauguration in 1897, he delivered thirty-seven public addresses or short remarks during the remainder of that year, seventy-four in 1898, and 108 in 1899. He went on forty speaking tours during his presidency, prompting one academic to write, “No President . . . ever did half as much traveling through the United States.” Much of this travel was carefully calculated to sway public opinion on looming congressional initiatives or political deadlocks.
Finally, the president created an unprecedented number of volunteer commissions to study pending issues and report back to the White House with analysis and recommendations. This helped him set the terms of debate and build momentum for action. Further, he displayed a penchant for naming prominent members of Congress to these commissions to demonstrate his regard for that branch of government and gain leverage in subsequent legislative debates. He also liked to place prominent academics on his commissions to highlight expertise and establish commission authority.
President McKinley Page 21
