President McKinley

by Robert W. Merry

  But with the election only eleven months away, McKinley needed to move the Philippines quickly toward a civilian government. In mid-January the Schurman Commission issued a voluminous report recommending a transitional approach that included a colonial governor, appointed by the president and responsible for administering the entire archipelago; an advisory council consisting of both Americans and natives; a legislative assembly, partly appointive and partly elective, whose acts would be subject in certain circumstances to a gubernatorial veto; appointive governors for the provinces; and the division of the islands into small subsections, with Americans or educated natives presiding. The concept was for a governing structure “sufficiently elastic” to allow the substitution of natives for Americans in increasingly significant positions as Filipinos acquired governing talents and skills. “No glittering promises are to be held out to the natives,” explained the Washington Post, “but as they develop under American tuition it is proposed to gradually introduce them into positions of responsibility.”

  Embracing Schurman’s concept, McKinley created a second Philippine Commission to serve as a budding government agency pending congressional action some months or years hence organizing a civilian government structure for the islands. Recognizing that Congress lacked the expertise to craft such a civil authority with any dispatch, lawmakers moved toward enacting legislation, sponsored by Wisconsin senator John Spooner, authorizing the president, in his capacity as commander-in-chief, to supplant military government with civilian rule. McKinley viewed his new commission as a transitional authority charged with crafting the elements of civilian governance and implementing them over time.

  The president knew precisely who he wanted to lead his commission: U.S. Circuit Court Judge William Howard Taft of Cincinnati, forty-two, son of a prominent Ohio lawyer and former U.S. attorney general. Taft, who served as U.S. solicitor general under Harrison and possessed a legal mind of rare capacity, projected a corpulence that dwarfed even Tom Reed’s, but with a largeness of spirit far more enveloping and cordial than the former speaker’s. “One loves him at first sight,” declared his friend Theodore Roosevelt. Journalist William Allen White described him as “America incarnate—sham-hating, hardworking, crackling with jokes upon himself, lacking in pomp but never in dignity . . . a great, boyish, wholesome, dauntless, shrewd, sincere, kindly gentleman.”

  In late January McKinley summoned Taft to Washington for “important business.” Reaching the White House some days later, Taft entered the Cabinet Room to find the president with War Secretary Root and Navy Secretary Long. After pleasantries, the president explained the Philippine job and enjoined Taft to take it. The judge protested that he wasn’t the right man. He had been “strongly opposed to taking the Philippines,” he said, because he thought it had been “contrary to our traditions and at a time when we had quite enough to do at home.”

  McKinley acknowledged Taft’s objection but said it was “beside the question.” The Philippines belonged to America, he said, whether anyone liked it or not, and that required the United States to govern them wisely and compassionately until the people there could learn “the difficult art of governing themselves.” That softened Taft’s objection, and he conceded that the United States had assumed a “sacred duty to give them a good form of government.” But he expressed a reluctance to give up his lifetime judicial perch.

  “Well,” said the president, “all I can say to you is that if you give up this judicial office at my request you shall not suffer. If I last and the opportunity comes, I shall appoint you.” In case Taft didn’t get the president’s full meaning, Long hinted that he was talking about the Supreme Court.

  “Yes,” said McKinley. “If I am here, you’ll be here.”

  Then Root weighed in. “You have had a very fortunate career,” he said to Taft. “You are at the parting of the ways. Will you take the easier course, the way of least resistance . . . or will you take the more courageous course and, risking much, achieve much?”

  When Taft asked for time to ponder the matter, the president assented. But hearing that Judge Day planned a trip to Cincinnati, McKinley asked him to meet with Taft and apply a bit of pressure. “I want you to appreciate, Judge,” wrote McKinley to Day, “that this is a very important matter and I invoke your aid to get the consent of Judge Taft to go.” The president also shared with Day some of his thinking. Given the commission’s large powers and wide jurisdiction, he said, it can “accomplish great good and help me more than I can tell you in the solution of the important problem in the East.” If he could recruit men “of the character of Judge Taft,” it would “give repose and confidence to the country”—in other words, blunt the political influence of the anti-imperialists.

  The four-man entreaty proved persuasive, and on February 6 McKinley announced Taft’s new role. Taft told reporters, “The chances of failure are so many and so great that I have considered the possibility of success worth striving for.” The New York Times wrote, “No nomination . . . made by the President has been received with more general approval here than that of Judge Taft.”

  Determined to ensure the commission’s success, the president produced a twelve-page memorandum for Army Secretary Root, who would preside over both the Philippine military command and Taft’s five-man civilian commission—to ensure, wrote McKinley, “the most perfect cooperation between the civil and military authorities.” The memo explained in elaborate detail just how the president wanted his Philippine policies to be executed. Quoting from his own Annual Message, he said the military arm must remain supreme so long as the insurrection continued, but there was “no reason why steps should not be taken from time to time to inaugurate governments essentially popular in their form as fast as territory is held and controlled by our troops.”

  McKinley’s instructions followed essentially the recommendations of the Schurman Commission—establishing civilian governments in smaller subdivisions first but working up to ever larger governmental entities as circumstances warranted. Whenever the commission concluded island conditions warranted a transfer of power from military to civilian control, said the president, it should report that judgment to Root, along with recommendations on the form of government to be established. In all instances, he instructed, municipal officers were to be selected by the native population, and “wherever officers of more extended jurisdiction are to be selected . . . natives of the islands are to be preferred, and if they can be found competent and willing to perform the duties, they are to receive the offices in preference to any others.”

  McKinley’s letter of instruction reflected his judgment, going back to his earliest struggles over U.S. disposition of the islands, that America must embrace a stewardship role that protected the archipelago from both outside powers and internal chaos while also preparing Filipinos for as much self-government as they could undertake successfully. Though some believed this methodical approach betrayed an arrogance of power and a patronizing and invidious attitude toward Filipinos, McKinley believed his policy reflected fundamental realities of power and peoples. Of course, American naval imperatives and geopolitical interests never slipped from his consciousness, but he embraced the concept that the country could create stability and enhance the lives of Filipinos through a kind of democratic tutelage. As Judge Taft put it at a Cincinnati symposium before departing for Manila, “The high and patriotic purpose of the President . . . is to give the people of the Philippines the best civil government he can provide with the largest measure of self-government consistent with stability.”

  But anti-imperialists, rejecting this view of American benignity, set out to destroy McKinley’s presidency at the November election. At a Philadelphia conference, delegates debated whether their antiwar resolution should invoke the president’s name or merely speak more vaguely of the administration. A Philadelphia delegate named Frank Stephens bared the anger of many by declaring, “That murderer is the man who is chiefly to blame for the shame that rests upon this country
, and his name should not be removed.” The name remained.

  Some anti-imperialist rhetoric in the Senate came close to Stephens’s fevered pitch. South Dakota’s Richard Pettigrew, a silver Republican and leading administration antagonist, unfurled what the New York Times called a “sensational speech” bitterly attacking McKinley. “The trouble with the imperialists,” declared Pettigrew, “is that they have confounded the interest of the people . . . with the political desires and ambitions of their puny President, and regarded him and his success as more important than the rightful treatment of the Filipinos.” Pettigrew and Massachusetts’s Hoar put forth resolutions calling for the release of the administration’s internal documents that they said would reveal McKinley’s mendacity on his Philippine policies. They anticipated a White House refusal, which they could then attack as a demonstration of executive intransigence and disrespect for Congress. “The whole wretched business,” declared Pettigrew, “was one of concealment and duplicity.” But, reported the Times, the wily president “made known” through friendly legislators that he would accept any congressional resolutions calling for inside information and would “gratify nearly every desire on the part of such opponents as Senator Pettigrew” to demand internal documents. The president seemed confident that administration actions, even behind-the-scenes actions, would stand the test of politics.

  But McKinley opponents then seized on Aguinaldo’s oft-repeated declaration that U.S. officials, including Admiral Dewey, had promised Philippine independence in exchange for insurgent help in defeating the Spanish around Manila. Despite Dewey’s characterization of this as “a tissue of falsehoods,” it became an incendiary pivot point of the debate, with anti-imperialists blasting U.S. duplicity in dealing with Aguinaldo and McKinley supporters insisting that Aguinaldo was a liar seeking to manipulate U.S. public opinion. A fiery Republican from New Jersey, William Sewell, assaulted Pettigrew as a “traitor” and suggested his antiwar fulminations had contributed directly to the death of General Lawton. “I deprecate beyond measure,” he said, “the action of the Senator from South Dakota.”

  Henry Cabot Lodge, whose eloquent voice in behalf of American expansion stirred national approval, sought to rise above the petty accusations and counteraccusations by placing into a global perspective the significance of America’s push into the Pacific. “The possession of the Philippines made us an Eastern power,” he said.

  Manila, with its magnificent bay, is the prize and the pearl of the East. In our hands it will become one of the greatest distributing points, one of the richest emporiums of the world’s commerce. Rich in itself, with all its fertile islands behind it, it will keep open to us the markets of China and enable American enterprise and intelligence to take a master share in all the trade of the Orient. . . . I do not believe that this Nation was raised up for nothing. I do not believe that it is the creation of blind chance. I have faith that it has a great mission in the world—a mission of good, a mission of freedom. . . . I wish to see it master of the Pacific. . . . I know well that in the past we have committed grievous mistakes, and paid for them; done wrong, and made heavy compensation for it, stumbled and fallen and suffered. But we have always risen, bruised and grimed sometimes, yet still we have risen stronger and more erect than ever, and the march has always been forward and onward.

  Thus did the debate continue into the spring, propelled in part by developments in the Philippines, where military officials received increasing reports of looming new hostilities from Aguinaldo’s troops. On March 4, the New York Times reported that the insurgents had abandoned main force opposition in favor of greater and more sustained hit-and-run tactics. The headline: “Insurrection Not Dead; Filipinos Plan Guerrilla Warfare on a Larger Scale.” Two weeks later the paper reported that Aguinaldo wanted to heighten congressional frustrations and induce lawmakers to force upon the administration an end to the war.

  Responding to the more intense guerrilla tactics, Otis’s killing machine exacted heavy losses upon Aguinaldo’s ill-armed Filipinos. Newspaper dispatches told of actions in late April that killed 378 insurgents in a single week, 333 the next week, and 300 at another location. On May 4, Otis reported that enemy losses in killed, wounded, and captured numbered 1,721 in April. Typically he reported that locals believed “the war has terminated.” Also typically his optimism was premature.

  * * *

  THE PHILIPPINE ENTANGLEMENT wasn’t the only war-related challenge to rise up in early 1900. Pursuing his desire to help the people of Puerto Rico through the transition to U.S. sovereignty, McKinley stumbled into a treacherous patch of political brambles—and didn’t escape unwounded.

  With the transfer of Puerto Rico to the United States, the little island lost its longtime Spanish and Cuban markets for cattle, tobacco, coffee, and sugar. The result was a financial crisis as crops and products piled up on docks and in warehouses. McKinley sought to address this island predicament with a liberal trade policy. “Our plain duty,” he said in his Annual Message, “is to abolish all customs tariffs between the United States and Puerto Rico and give her products free access to our markets.” To McKinley, this policy represented nothing less than colonial obligation—mixed with a desire to avoid civic unrest on the island.

  But U.S. tobacco and sugar growers fought the policy. It would devastate home producers, they said, and violate the Republicans’ sacred protectionist doctrine, written into the GOP platform and reflected in the long career of President McKinley himself. Beyond these political pressures lurked a more troubling question: the status of Puerto Rico (and other U.S. possessions) within the context of the U.S. Constitution. Were these possessions U.S. territories and thus subject to constitutional protection? Or were they mere colonies, to be administered outside the framework of the Constitution? And if the former, did that put the inhabitants of these possessions on an equal footing with U.S. citizens? The fundamental question was this: Does the Constitution follow the flag?

  By proposing free trade with Puerto Rico, McKinley appeared to be saying that the Constitution did indeed follow the U.S. flag, since the Constitution required uniform tax policies throughout U.S. territory. No such territory could be subject to tariffs that didn’t apply to everyone else. Congressional Democrats seized upon this to argue that a tariff was unconstitutional because the acquisition of Puerto Rico had extended the Constitution ipso facto to the island.

  McKinley had placed himself in a box. Wanting to bolster quickly the Puerto Rican economy, he hadn’t considered the implications of his free-trade advocacy. If the Constitution followed the flag, he would be restricted in how he could administer those possessions—to the point, he now understood, that his ability to succeed could be seriously impaired. As Dawes wrote in his diary following a conversation with the president, “The constitutional question . . . became paramount—for upon the proposition that Congress had the right to govern the Islands by legislation with a ‘free hand,’ depends the success of our colonial policy—especially in the Philippines.”

  The president’s blunder stirred Connecticut’s Republican senator Orville H. Platt (no relation to the New York Platt) to argue, “We must not admit that any of our new possessions are a part of the United States in the sense that the Constitution extends itself over them, or that we must have free trade with them.” Platt also feared domestic sugar and tobacco growers would savage the president’s free-trade legislation. “I already hear the mutterings of the coming storm,” he said.

  In late January, House Ways and Means Committee chairman Sereno Payne crafted compromise legislation to levy tariffs amounting to only 25 percent of the duties imposed by the 1897 Dingley law. When the Senate Committee on Puerto Rico quickly embraced that concept, the New York Times editorialized, “This is not exactly free trade, but it is a near approach to it.”

  All eyes now fixed upon the president. Would he stand firm behind free trade for Puerto Rico? Or would he bend and weave under pressure from lobbyists and Republican legislators? After
much pondering, he decided he must oppose any suggestion that the Constitution followed the flag. The stakes were too high. Therefore he would bend and weave—and take the political heat from those who would attack him as weak and vacillating. “I could ride a white horse in this situation and pass the original bill,” he told a reporter privately, referring to his initial free-trade advocacy, “[but] the vital thing is to keep as many votes as possible in Congress back of the whole programme of the Administration.”

  But the president couldn’t bring himself to state his new position boldly. When prominent House members visited him at the White House, he said he still adhered to his original free-trade view but would acquiesce should Congress enact a small tariff. “The President added,” said the Washington Post, “that he should not be at all sorry if the [Payne] substitute was defeated.” The president’s pride got in the way of his political judgment. A rebellion by dissident Republicans—motivated by the free-trade principle in this instance as well as the idea that the Constitution should follow the flag—threatened to kill prospects for any legislation at all. On the very day that McKinley issued his ambiguous position, Illinois Representative William Lorimer told reporters he knew of at least seven Republicans who would join the solid Democratic opposition and vote against the Payne compromise.

  The president compounded the problem in an interview with freelance journalist Henry Loomis Nelson, who described his conversation in the New York World. Nelson reported that McKinley didn’t believe the Constitution applied to the new possessions and that “free trade with Porto Rico is right because our protected interest will not be injured thereby.” The president added that Congress possessed “plenary power” over the new islands and could impose whatever tariffs it wanted upon any of them, or none, and he would accept the outcome. As a House floor vote neared, it became clear that Republican opponents, aligned with free-trade Democrats, could defeat the bill by corralling just eight GOP votes, but between twelve and fifteen Republicans seemed ready to defy the party leadership on the issue. Many blamed McKinley for the mess. “Mr. McKinley,” said The Nation, “is as meek as he is good. . . . His own attitude on this question confirms the worst that has been said about his moral cowardice.”