by H. W. Brands
THE HUMOR SOON wore thin. Dewey’s victory at Manila, and a follow-on landing of marines there, gave American forces possession of the Philippine capital but not much else of the archipelago. Filipino nationalists who had fought against the Spanish before the arrival of the Americans protested the new foreign presence and began to challenge it militarily. Nonetheless American and Spanish negotiators signed a treaty in December 1898 transferring title of the Philippines (and Puerto Rico) from Spain to the United States.
McKinley appreciated that annexation of the Philippines might cause trouble, but he couldn’t discover a preferable alternative. To withdraw from the islands would leave them at the mercy of Germany, Japan, or some other imperialist power at a time when those countries were making short work of the independence of dozens of poorly defended peoples of Asia and Africa. McKinley was no enthusiast of empire. “If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet,” the president told Herman Kohlsaat, “what a lot of trouble he would have saved us.” (When the war began, McKinley had hardly known what ocean the Philippines were in. “I could not have told where those darned islands were within 2,000 miles,” he told Kohlsaat.) But after long and careful consideration, he concluded that since Dewey had stayed, so must the United States. “I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight,” he explained to a visiting group of ministers and missionaries (according to their later recounting).
And I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came: (1) That we could not give them back to Spain—that would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government, and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain’s was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am president!36
The Spanish treaty provoked a vigorous debate when the Senate considered it for ratification. All the senators and the myriad pundits understood that taking the Philippines would make an empire of the American republic. E. L. Godkin, the editor of the Nation and the New York Evening Post, thought his countrymen had troubles enough of their own. “We do not want any more states until we can civilize Kansas,” he said. He listed the evils attendant to annexation:
The sudden departure from our traditions; the absence from our system of any machinery for governing dependencies; the admission of alien, inferior, and mongrel races to our nationality; the opening of fresh fields for carpetbaggers, speculators, and corruptionists; the un-Americanism of governing a large body of people against their will, and by persons not responsible to them; the entrance on a policy of conquest and annexation while our own continent was still unreclaimed, our population unassimilated, and many of our most serious political problems still unsolved; and finally the danger of the endorsement of a gross fraud for the first time by a Christian nation.
Empire would be the end of America as Americans knew it, Godkin said. “This triumph over Spain seals the fate of the American republic.”37
Carl Schurz deplored the embrace of empire as only a refugee from imperial Europe could. “The character and future of the Republic and the welfare of its people now living and yet to be born are in unprecedented jeopardy,” Schurz asserted. Americans didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. “The Filipinos fought against Spain for their freedom and independence.… They will fight against us.”
Andrew Carnegie hadn’t yet retired from steel-making, but after the bloody battle at Homestead he spent less time at the mill and more in politics and philanthropy. He worried aloud that annexing the Philippines would produce collisions between the United States and the other imperial powers. The first wreck would occur in Asia. “It is in that region the thunderbolt is expected,” Carnegie wrote. “It is there the storm is to burst.” McKinley boasted of the uplifting influence American civilization would have upon the Filipinos; Carnegie gravely doubted any such effect. “Has the influence of the superior race upon the inferior ever proved beneficial to either? I know of no case in which it has been or is.… Soldiers in foreign camps, so far from being missionaries for good, require missionaries themselves more than the natives.”
The debate on Capitol Hill revealed similar convictions and prejudices. Lest the United States be accused of stealing the Philippines, the treaty with Spain specified a cash payment to the Spanish government; for this reason the House held hearings on the treaty and let its members weigh in on annexation. Democrat Jehu Baker of Illinois contended that annexation would sully American virtue irretrievably. “The attempt to suddenly sweep us into a colonial policy similar to that of Britain—so suddenly that we scarce have time to note where the leap will carry us—is, in my opinion, the most audacious and reckless performance of jingoism that this or any other country has ever witnessed,” Baker said. Jerry Simpson, the bare-ankled Kansas Populist, detected aggrandizement of the most shocking sort in McKinley’s imperialism. Annexation would furnish an excuse for the creation of a large army, which would be deployed against the ordinary people of America just as federal troops had been deployed to crush the labor strikes of the previous decade. “This is what they want it for,” Simpson asserted, “along with a scheme for colonial empire, and to place on the throne in this country William McKinley, President of the United States, Emperor of the West Indian Islands and of the Philippines.”
Other opponents leveled more prosaic complaints against annexation. Henry Johnson of Indiana predicted that the products of the Philippines would enter America tariff-free, doing “immense injury to the American farmer and laborer.” Hernando Money of Mississippi took the trade issue in another direction. The key to American prosperity, Money declared, was not colonies but markets. “Are conquests and subjugation necessary to the spread of American products?” he asked. Not at all, he answered. “The commerce of the United States, fortunately for this great Republic, has been founded more wisely upon the skill of its artisans.… That which carries American commerce abroad is not the protection of this Government; it is not that the flag of the fighting Navy of the United States is found on every sea and in every port; it is the skill of the American workingman.”
Still other objectors took the low road of racism. John Daniel of Virginia asked the Senate if its members understood the intimate consequences of annexation. “Today we are the United States of America. Tomorrow, if a treaty now pending in the Senate is ratified, we will be the United States of America and Asia.” This would be no mere political union. “It is a marriage of nations. This twain will become one flesh. They become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.”
The annexationists countered certain of the objections, ignored others, and generally portrayed the taking of the Philippines as the logical, even inevitable, extension of venerable American traditions. Theodore Roosevelt contended that the United States had won the Philippines as fairly as it had won northern Mexico a half century earlier. “We have hoisted our flag,” he said, “and it is not fashioned of the stuff which can be quickly hauled down.” Henry Cabot Lodge, who seemed to some the evil genius behind Roosevelt—“Lodge is the Mephistopheles whispering poison into his ear,” anti-imperialist Edward Atkinson said—proclaimed that to relinquish the Philippines would be an “act of infamy.”38
But the most impassioned articulation of the argument for
empire came from Albert Beveridge. The Indiana Republican amalgamated Mahanism, Social Darwinism, Manifest Destinarianism, and rampant capitalism in a Senate speech extolling annexation and everything it stood for and promised. “This island empire is the last land left in all the oceans,” Beveridge asserted of the Philippines. Its ports and harbors held the key to the “illimitable markets” of China. In that direction lay America’s future.
Our largest trade henceforth must be with Asia. The Pacific is our ocean. More and more Europe will manufacture the most it needs, secure from its colonies the most it consumes. Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. She is nearer to us than to England, Germany, or Russia, the commercial powers of the present and the future.… The Philippines gives us a base at the door of all the East.… The Philippines command the commercial situation of the entire East.
Beveridge, one of the rare Americans who had actually visited the Philippines, extolled the natural bounty of the islands. “I have cruised more than 2,000 miles through the archipelago, every moment a surprise at its loveliness and wealth. I have ridden hundreds of miles on the islands, every foot of the way a revelation of vegetable and mineral riches.” Rice, coffee, sugar, coconuts, hemp, tobacco, and a dozen other commercial crops grew like weeds in the rich soil of Luzon. Hardwood forests cloaked the mountains, which in turn contained coal enough to fuel all the ships of the world. Precious minerals abounded. “I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. I have gold dust washed out by crude processes of careless natives from the sands of a Philippine stream.”
But material considerations were only part of what called America to the Philippines. “It is elemental,” Beveridge said. “It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration.… He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth.” To take the Philippines, to embrace empire, was to seize America’s destiny. “It holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man.”39
THE SENATE AND the House agreed, in substance if not in every detail. In February 1899 the Senate ratified the treaty in a close vote, and the House approved the money by a more comfortable margin. The Philippines and Puerto Rico became American colonies and the United States an empire.
But it was an empire unlike any the world had known. America’s capitalist economy comported well enough with imperialism; already England’s John A. Hobson was formulating a capitalist explanation of modern imperialism in which he would cite the United States as a prime example. Theodore Roosevelt and his fellow martial enthusiasts might be the public face of American imperialism, Hobson asserted, but they were hardly its driving force. That role went to the big capitalists. “It is Messrs. Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan, Hanna, Schwab, and their associates who need Imperialism and who are fastening it upon the shoulders of the great Republic of the West. They need Imperialism because they desire to use the public resources of their country to find profitable employment for the capital which otherwise would be superfluous.” In Russia, V. I. Lenin would follow Hobson’s lead and declare imperialism the “highest stage of capitalism.”40
One didn’t have to be a Hobsonite or a Leninist to note the expansive spirit of American capitalism. Amid the excitement surrounding the war with Spain, Congress in July 1898 approved the annexation of Hawaii (by joint resolution rather than treaty), to the delight of investors in the plantations there (and to the dismay of Grover Cleveland. “Hawaii is ours,” the former president wrote Richard Olney. “As I look back upon the first steps in this miserable business, I am ashamed of the whole affair”). In 1899 and 1900, McKinley’s secretary of state, John Hay, circulated a pair of notes calling for an “open door” in China, by which Hay meant that Americans’ imperialist competitors must neither partition China nor bar American merchants and investors from equal access to the markets of that country.41
Yet for all its consonance with capitalism, empire accorded ill with American democracy. The premise of democracy is that people ought to govern themselves; the essence of imperialism is that some of them—those in the colonies—don’t. In asserting imperial control over the Philippines and Puerto Rico, Americans denied democracy to Filipinos and Puerto Ricans. The opponents of the Spanish treaty considered this contradiction decisive, but they lost the argument, and the contradiction became embedded in American foreign policy.
To those already inclined to view the American political economy as a battleground between capitalism and democracy, the decision for empire seemed simply one more illustration of capitalism’s currently dominant position. This may have overread the result. As the debate over the Spanish treaty demonstrated, capitalists were hardly of one mind regarding empire. Albert Beveridge spoke for those who coveted the resources of the Philippines and the markets of China, yet Andrew Carnegie, whose capitalist credentials none could gainsay, adamantly opposed the imperialist project as productive of future conflict. Capitalism required markets, Carnegie and his like-thinkers acknowledged, but markets might be had without acquiring colonies. Meanwhile some democrats, conspicuously Theodore Roosevelt, were no less enthusiastic for empire than the most imperially ardent investors and market-struck merchants.
Even so, the doubts regarding empire came mostly from the democratic side of the American public mind. If empire could be shown to pay, the capitalists would swallow such qualms as some of them had and pocket their profits. Empire, however, would always nag at the democractic conscience.42
Chapter 21
THE APOTHEOSIS OF PIERPONT MORGAN
For all the attention devoted to empire, the American market remained the preoccupation of the vast majority of American entrepreneurs, especially as the economy revived from the depression of the mid-1890s. Ironically, the McKinley revival revealed that there was something to be said for the monetary theories of the Populists and the Bryan Democrats. The campaign for silver had been, at bottom, a call for a weaker dollar. The dollar did weaken under McKinley, although silver remained unmonetized. New gold strikes in South Africa, Australia, and the Yukon expanded gold production dramatically, as did innovations in refining, particularly the employment of cyanide to separate the precious metal from its base matrix. As the world supply of gold expanded, much of the increment found its way to the United States via trade and investment, allowing the American money supply to grow without resort to silver. By the end of the century the currency question had become almost academic. Not quite four years after the Republicans had hesitated even to mention gold in their party platform, Congress enshrined the yellow metal by means of the Gold Standard Act of 1900, and the country yawned—while the economy boomed.
If the triumph of gold reflected fortunate geology and clever chemistry (albeit chemistry that wreaked environmental havoc on the gold districts), other developments of the period, no less happy for capital, were rooted in the more familiar soil of political economy. The return of prosperity predictably corroded agrarian and labor radicalism. The Populists disappeared, with most being reabsorbed into the Democrats, and labor strikes diminished in frequency and extent. Complaints against the railroads and the trusts didn’t end, but with corporate America again manufacturing profits, the capitalists’ need to squeeze the workers and small farmers diminished.
The court system, moreover, proved friendlier to capital than at any time since John Marshall in the century’s first quarter had sanctified contracts and blessed the Bank of the United States. The bellwether commercial case of the era involved an effort to punish the sugar trust for anticompetitive practices. American sugar refiners had lobbied hard for the McKinley tariff of 1890 and its freeing of imported sugar; their success encouraged them to think bigger, in terms of a monopoly. In 1892 t
he American Sugar Refining Company, the market leader, acquired four Pennsylvania firms, with the result being a combination that refined 98 percent of America’s sugar. Henry Havemeyer, the president of the trust, frankly credited the McKinley tariff with giving him and his collaborators the courage to combine. “Without the tariff I doubt if we should have dared to take the risk of forming the trust,” Havemeyer said. “It could have been done, but I certainly should not have risked all I had, which was embarked in the sugar business, in a trust unless the business had been protected as it was by the tariff.”1
Had the Republicans remained in power, the sugar trust might have continued to receive the undivided protection of government. But after the election of Grover Cleveland, the Justice Department brought suit against the refiners under the Sherman Antitrust Act. The government’s case appeared irrefutable; not even John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil wielded the market power the sugar trust’s 98 percent share afforded it. But the Supreme Court determined in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. that a monopoly of manufacturing, which it conceded the sugar trust possessed, did not constitute a monopoly of commerce as defined by the Sherman Act and the Constitution. Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller, writing for the eight-man majority, explained:
Contracts, combinations, or conspiracies to control domestic enterprise in manufacture, agriculture, mining, production in all its forms, or to raise or lower prices or wages, might unquestionably tend to restrain external as well as domestic trade, but the restraint would be an indirect result, however inevitable, and whatever its extent, and such result would not necessarily determine the object of the contract, combination, or conspiracy.
