by H. W. Brands
Strong credited Anglo-Saxon military prowess for much of the historic advancement of the race, but he suggested that this talent was being superseded by others. “The world is making progress. We are leaving behind the barbarism of war. As civilization advances, it will learn less of war and concern itself more with the arts of peace.” In this new world the Anglo-Saxon would continue to dominate. He possessed a “genius for colonizing,” among his other gifts. “His unequaled energy, his indomitable perseverance, and his personal independence make him a pioneer. He excels all others in pushing his way into new countries.” He was especially suited to the competition of the capitalist age. “Among the most striking features of the Anglo-Saxon is his money-making power—a power of increasing importance in the widening commerce of the world’s future.” With money, there was little the Anglo-Saxons couldn’t accomplish. “Money is power in the concrete. It commands learning, skill, experience, wisdom, talent, influence, numbers.”
Fiske called Anglo-Saxons, but especially Americans, to embrace their destiny. “I believe it is fully in the hands of the Christians of the United States, during the next ten or fifteen years, to hasten or retard the coming of Christ’s kingdom in the world by hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of years,” he said. “We of this generation and nation occupy the Gibraltar of the ages which commands the world’s future.”11
“MY DEAR CAPTAIN Mahan,” Theodore Roosevelt wrote in May 1890, “During the last two days I have spent half my time, busy as I am, in reading your book, and that I have found it interesting is shown by that fact that having taken it up I have gone straight through and finished it. I can say with perfect sincerity that I think it very much the clearest and most instructive general work of the kind with which I am acquainted.… I am greatly in error if it does not become a naval classic.”12
The book that disrupted Roosevelt’s busy schedule—by day he was a member of the federal Civil Service Commission, charged with implementing the Pendleton Act; by evenings and weekends he was a gentleman scholar, writing a monumental history of the early American West—was Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History. Mahan worked at the recently established Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island; his book, written with the encouragement of the college administration and the navy brass, helped justify the existence of the college and the navy more broadly by contending that naval power had long tipped the balance in the conflict of nations. Though this first book dealt with the fairly distant past—it covered the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Mahan followed it up with books and essays carrying the story to the present. The lesson persisted throughout: who owned the waves won the wars.
For those left cold by the laissez faire determinism of William Sumner or put off by the ethnocentric religiosity of the Manifest Destinarians, Mahan provided a bracingly rationalistic and secular alternative justification for American expansion. There was nothing preordained, by either nature or heaven, Mahan said, about the prowess of certain countries. Their ascendancy reflected conscious choices made by their governments and people to purchase the ships and infrastructure necessary to naval success. Modern navies of steel and steam were expensive and slow to build. Their support systems were even costlier and slower to construct and required a revolution in attitudes toward international affairs. In the naval age of wood and wind, the foreign needs of a navy were modest, hardly more than what its pursers could buy from grocers in foreign ports and its carpenters hew from the forests of distant shores. The shift to steam freed fleets from the vagaries of wind but chained them to the vicissitudes of the market for coal; to safeguard against fuel famine, prudent nations acquired coaling stations strategically located around the world’s oceans. A steamship, besides, was infinitely more complicated than a sailing vessel and far more prone to mechanical mishap; naval bases abroad, for maintenance and repair, were almost as essential as coaling stations.
Mahan’s histories revealed the costs of failure to prepare. The French lost the battle of Trafalgar long before that fateful October day; the dismal performance of the United States in the early phase of the War of 1812 reflected the “deeply mortifying condition” of the U.S. navy at the conflict’s start. The future would be different, but only for those who seized it. Americans, Mahan asserted, must adopt a “Twentieth-Century outlook,” one anchored in the best navy the country could afford and the stations and bases to support it.13
WHETHER THE AMERICAN capitalists who toppled the Hawaiian government of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893 had read anything by Fiske, Strong, or Mahan is unclear. But they did read the sugar clause of the McKinley tariff, which evoked a sudden longing for their homeland. American vessels had called at Hawaii since the eighteenth century; America missionaries arrived in the early nineteenth. The missionaries wrote of the rich volcanic soil and the luscious climate, attracting American entrepreneurs who planted sugar cane and discovered it grew quite well. The sugar men had allies in Washington who in 1875 finagled a deal allowing Hawaiian sugar to enter the American market duty-free. This triggered a boom in Hawaiian production, in land speculation, in Chinese and Japanese immigration to the cane fields, and in Hawaiian sugar imports to America. The surging imports annoyed domestic American sugar interests, who even while tolerating elimination of the tariff on foreign sugar, as part of the McKinley package, slipped in a bounty on domestic production. The Hawaiian producers, having lost their edge over other foreigners and their level field with the Americans, quickly concluded that their fields must become American.
This conclusion gained credence from the reaction of the Hawaiian government to the Americans’ outsized influence in the country. In the early 1890s Hawaii’s population comprised perhaps 40,000 Hawaiians, 30,000 Asians, and 2,000 Americans, in addition to several thousand Europeans and other Pacific islanders. But the Americans wielded most of the economic power, which they were converting into political power. They had sponsored a constitution, which limited the power of the Hawaiian monarchy, and they controlled the legislature. But when Queen Liliuokalani inherited the throne from her brother in 1891, she moved to curtail the Americans’ power. She abrogated the constitution and replaced it with one far more favorable to herself and the native Hawaiians.
At this the Americans, led by sugar baron Sanford Dole, staged a coup. In January 1893 they seized government offices and announced the establishment of a provisional government, whose primary objective would be the annexation of Hawaii to the United States. They had reason to expect a favorable response from Washington, for President Harrison, eyeing Pearl Harbor from the navalist perspective of Mahan, had already indicated strong interest in part or all of the islands. Harrison’s representative in Hawaii, American minister John Stevens, was an ardent annexationist, and he immediately recognized the provisional government and ordered U.S. marines from the cruiser Boston to surround the Iolani Palace and forestall a countercoup. No submarine cable had yet reached Hawaii, leaving Stevens to formulate policy unperturbed by instructions from Washington; he proceeded to declare an American protectorate over Hawaii.
Stevens’s stroke was a bit much even for the Harrison administration, which disavowed the protectorate. But the administration accepted the credentials of commissioners sent by the revolutionary regime, and it negotiated a treaty of annexation. With time running out on his presidency, Harrison forwarded the treaty to the Senate in mid-February 1893, stressing the need for swift ratification.
The Senate, however, balked long enough to let Grover Cleveland be inaugurated, and the new president promptly withdrew the treaty. Cleveland claimed a need to investigate the matter more fully, to determine whether Stevens or any other American officials had acted improperly. His claim was sincere enough, but he also wanted to let opposition to the treaty build. With most of his party, Cleveland doubted the wisdom and, especially in this case, the virtue of territorial expansion. It favored particular groups in the United States—the sugar trust, as Cleveland discovered, had cut a deal with the Hawaiian
producers to the effect that in exchange for the trust’s support of annexation, the producers would split their share of the sugar bounty with the trust—and it arrogated to the American government authority that properly rested with the people of the territories involved. The provisional government in Hawaii had little popular support, it refused to submit the question of annexation to a referendum, and those few Hawaiians who had signed petitions in favor of annexation seem to have acted under the duress of their American employers.
Cleveland’s investigation consumed four months, and it confirmed the president’s belief that annexation would be unwise and immoral. Secretary of State Walter Gresham agreed and in fact contended that the United States must undo the mischief done in its name, by restoring Lilioukalani to her throne. Attorney General Olney responded that this would be carrying an admirable principle to an impractical extreme. To oust Dole and the new rulers would require the active use of military force, for which there was no support in the United States. When Lilioukalani promised to behead the plotters in the event of her restoration, this course grew still less attractive. Cleveland dithered till year’s end, when he threw the Hawaii matter to Congress, urging the legislators to be guided by “honor, integrity, and morality.” The Democratic majority interpreted these virtues as Cleveland knew they would, and annexation expired, for the time being.14
LEONARD WOOD KNEW Theodore Roosevelt through mutual friends in Washington. Both enjoyed exercise, and one day in February 1898 they arranged to go for a hike along Rock Creek, not far from Wood’s house. Wood watched through his window while waiting for Roosevelt, and examined the trees in his yard for the first buds of spring.
Suddenly I saw him trotting around the court from Connecticut Avenue to my house at 2000 R Street, with a broad smile on his face. As I met him at the door he said, “Well, I have had my chance, Leonard, and I have taken advantage of it. Yesterday afternoon the Secretary of the Navy left me as acting secretary. He has gone to take a short and much-needed rest, and I have done what I thought needed to be done. I have placed various ships in commission with orders to be ready for sea at once. I have given large orders for the purchase and shipment of coal. I have assembled supplies and forwarded munitions. In other words, I have done everything I can to get the navy ready.… I may not be supported, but I have done what I know to be right. Some day they will understand.”
Wood understood at once, and he supported Roosevelt’s efforts on behalf of war. Wood was an army surgeon, and when he wasn’t hiking with Roosevelt he served as McKinley’s personal physician. He visited his patient regularly, and after one White House examination McKinley joked, “Have you and Theodore declared war yet?” Wood replied, “No, Mr. President, we have not. But I think you will, sir.”15
The war Wood and Roosevelt wanted was against Spain, and by the late winter of 1898 they were hardly alone. For years Roosevelt and others of his generation, men too young to have fought in the Civil War, had grown tired, and at the same time jealous, of the war stories of their elders. Roosevelt’s combat envy was perhaps extreme; two uncles had covered themselves in glory during the war, albeit on the Southern side, while his own father had failed to serve. Roosevelt’s sister suggested that her brother’s obsession with war reflected an unspoken desire to make up for their father’s failing. But many others of Roosevelt’s cohort exhibited a comparable desire to prove their valor.
Most would have been happy for any war; the one on offer was against Spain. Decades after nearly all the rest of Spanish America had broken free from the mother country, Cuba remained the “ever faithful isle.” But modernity tested the faith of the Cuban people, and during the latter part of the nineteenth century insurgents raised the banner of Cuban independence. One ten years’ war for independence ended in failure in 1878, but a generation later a new crop of insurgents joined some of the old ones, and in 1895 another war of liberation began. The nationalists’ grievances included corruption, lack of political participation for the masses, racism on the part of the Spanish-descended criollos against the blacks who constituted the largest part of the Cuban population, and a devastating depression in the sugar industry brought on by the 1894 Wilson-Gorman tariff of the United States, which laid fresh duties on Cuban sugar.
Because the insurgents lacked the numbers of troops and quantities of arms to challenge Spanish rule directly, they resorted to guerrilla warfare: sabotage, ambushes, sporadic raids, destruction of private property. The Spanish army responded by imposing harsh policies on the populace at large in regions affected by the insurgency; of these policies the most notorious was reconcentrado, which forced peasants into armed camps, the better to monitor their comings and goings. The mere fact of relocation entailed hardship; the appalling conditions in the camps magnified the suffering immensely. Thousands—mostly women and children—sickened and died. Before long the situation in Cuba assumed the proportions of a humanitarian disaster.
The nightmare would have made headlines in American newspapers on its own, but it received crucial help. The insurgents established a junta, or propaganda bureau, in New York, which fed stories to the American press. These naturally cast the insurgents in the most flattering light and the Spanish government in the most lurid. The aims of the junta dovetailed with the interests of certain American newspapers, especially the “penny press” of New York, where Joseph Pulitzer’s Journal battled William Randolph Hearst’s World. At substantial expense Pulitzer and Hearst had installed new printing equipment that allowed them to produce papers for the masses; now, to attract those masses, they required stories with an emotional immediacy ordinary news often lacked. Atrocity tales from Cuba—whether reported honestly, embellished, or fabricated—served perfectly.16
American politicians had reason to get into the act as well. American investors in Cuba—in the sugar industry, most conspicuously—lobbied Congress for protection for their assets. More broadly, the depression in the United States caused incumbents to welcome distraction. While Cleveland remained president, the Republicans who controlled Congress could excoriate the administration for not taking stronger measures on behalf of the suffering Cubans, and hope voters wouldn’t notice how little they were doing for suffering Americans. After the 1896 election gave the Republicans control of the White House as well as Congress, the party’s strategists saw Cuba as an antidote to the issues that continued to divide the country at home. “If we should have war,” Henry Cabot Lodge explained, “we will not hear much of the currency question in the elections.”17
Yet even if American leaders had wanted to stay out of the Cuban affair, they would have had difficulty doing so. The junta in New York was simply the most visible insurgent presence in the United States; rebels based in Florida and other Atlantic and Gulf states launched numerous raids and supply operations against Cuba from American shores. The U.S. navy interdicted many such ventures as violations of American neutrality laws, but others got through, prompting complaints from Spain that the United States was already intervening in the Cuban war.
By the time McKinley inherited the problem it was nearing full boil. The Republican platform of 1896 had endorsed independence for Cuba without committing McKinley to any means toward that end. He initially resisted intervention. The economy was finally pulling out of the depression, and war might spook investors and abort the recovery. McKinley’s own experiences in the Civil War still haunted him. “I shall never get into a war until I am sure that God and man approve,” he told Leonard Wood. “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.” Yet the advocates of war grew stronger every day. Hearst and Pulitzer brayed loudly for intervention. Whitelaw Reid of the soberer New York Tribune implored the president to act. Leonard Wood and Theodore Roosevelt hissed warlike thoughts in McKinley’s ear. Senators of both parties argued vehemently and at length for Cuban freedom. Members of the House would have done the same had Tom Reed let them. But Reed opposed intervention and suppressed debate. “Mr. Re
ed has the members of that body bottled up so tight they cannot breathe without his consent,” one congressman declared. Yet neither Reed nor McKinley expected to hold the line forever. Mark Hanna thought the slightest accident could make Congress uncontrollable. “A spark might drop in there at any time and precipitate action,” he said. The French ambassador declared in wonder, “A sort of bellicose fury has seized the American nation.”18
McKinley stood against the fury as long as he could. He bought time with a fact-finding mission to Cuba. William Calhoun, an Illinois friend, spent a month on the island in the spring of 1897 but on his return filed a report that gave McKinley no comfort, characterizing the country as “wrapped in the stillness of death and the silence of desolation.” McKinley dispatched a protest to the Spanish government declaring that the United States had “a right to demand that a war, conducted almost within sight of our shores and grievously affecting American citizens and their interests throughout the length and breadth of the land, shall at least be conducted according to the military codes of civilization.”19
